A California girl met a New England boy. She had no choice but to fall in love- now she's married and living on the other side of the world. These are her stories.
I thought my last Eve 6 experience was amazing, well this past week month has blown that out of the water. With the whole first-album-release-in-9-years dream come true aspect of this Speak In Code tour, I was determined to get my fill of my most favoritist favorite band in all the land. And, uh, I did. (To those who would chastise me for excessiveness- lalala, I can't hear you!)
Between Sacramento, two trips to L.A., Poughkeepsie NY, Sayreville NJ, Towson MD, and Nashville TN, I saw my boys for 6 tour shows including VIP soundchecks and meet and greets, one Grammy Museum album-release event, and a couple random acoustic mini performances. Ok, fine, it was excessive. I don't care. I'm going to more next month too. I had so much fun and met some amazing, AMAZING new friends that I'll love forever and ever.
And thanks to all this Eve 6 stalkingsupporting, the band and I are pretty much BFFs now. There were SO MANY completely cool moments with them, but my little fan heart was filled to the brink on Monday night in Nashville when I got the chance to sing their song "Everything" them on stage during a soundcheck. Talk about a once in a lifetime opportunity, right?! So you can't really hear me sing at all (which is for the best, trust me) and I bounce around like a goober, but this video is still my favorite thing... pretty much ever:
Stick a fork in me, I'm done. Whenever I croak, it will be as a happy lady.
Thank you Max, Jon and Tony for getting your ish back together "just enough" to give us fans another magical, wonderful album and many fantastic new memories! It was SO worth the wait. You've made one girl very happy. Until next time!
As I write this, I am in CA! I planned this covert little jaunt across the Pacific to make my sister's eyes bug out of her head in confusion and then to whisk her away for a surprise bachelorette weekend (as she is getting married in June). It was a highly successful plan, and we spent last weekend at an adorable rental house in Sonoma having a blast with a great group of girls.
In addition to drinking wine (so very much wine), the weekend consisted of limo winery tours, dance parties at the house, picnics, eating cupcakes and decadent meals, playing home-made male genetalia themed card games (classy), hot tubbing under the stars, and tons of bonding moments (awwww).
It was truly one of the funnest weekends I've ever had. For reals. I loved spending this time with my sis and my (old and new) friends, and will love the memories we made forever [and apparently will also enjoy the Celine Dion concert in Las Vegas we all (in our drunken states) made plans to go see...].
(Also, siiiiiince I just so happen to be back in the states and siiiiiince Corey is busy in Okinawa with work, I may have been indulging in a great many Eve6-related adventures. And I may have a great many still planned. I may be going a tad overboard. But that can be a post for another day.)
Spring? What's spring? Misawa's April Fools' joke was to dump a bucketload of snow on top of us. Hilarious, Misawa, absolutely hilarious...
While I read Facebook statuses of my friends back in CA who are hanging out at home with the windows open, running along the beach in Santa Cruz, and "enjoying all the sunshine" (I hate you all, by the way), THIS was the activity Corey and I filled our time with yesterday:
We went to look at some snow! Always a favorite Tohoku pastime from the months of November- March April (apparently), looking at snow is a fantastic way to get out of the house and really see the world... well, ok so you can't really see the world, but you can imagine what it might look like. Sure, you might get a headache from the stark white glare if you look at it too much, but until that happens, you can enjoy all the colorless, textureless, lifeless views your eyes can take in. It's also a wonderful opportunity to hone your driving skills as your car's tires are put to the test on icy roads. Really, if you get bored of sitting inside during the long winter, a trip to look at snow (different snow, that is... you can imagine how tiring it gets to stare at the same snow out your window day in and day out) is the only best way to kill some time until spring arrives.
This particular location for looking at snow was along the 8km "Golden Line" of Rt. 103 on Mt. Hakkoda. This section of the road is closed during winter every year because, as you can see, it gets covered by approximately 20 feet of snow. It was plowed and opened to traffic on April 1st this year, so we joined lots of other starved-for-entertainment, look-at-snow excitement chasers to... look at this snow.
In all seriousness, it was a cool sight to see. Plus, now I can say I've driven through an 8km-long, 20ft-high snow corridor, so... there's that? In the end, it was a morning I got to spend with my hubby and my camera, so who am I kidding- it was an awesome day!
A year ago today at 2:45, I was sitting on my sofa in the living room fooling around on Facebook on my laptop. At 2:46, the ground began to shake. Thirty seconds later, the shaking got bad enough that I got up to go stand in a doorway. At 2:48, my heart started pounding. At 2:50, I was clenching the doorway with white knuckles watching the contents of the bookshelf fall and the TV sway precariously while doors banged open and shut and dishes in the kitchen rattled. At 2:52 I was STILL staring at the clock in disbelief wondering when in the world it would end.
A couple of minutes later, it did (briefly). Knowing this was huge and was going to make news back home, I quickly posted to my open Facebook page that I was ok (or maybe I did this during the earthquake? I can't remember.). I tried calling Corey. No service. The shaking started again. The power went out. I went back to my doorway. Tried calling Corey again. And again. And again. No service.
(Around ~1:40 is where things get crazy. I don't exaggerate when I say the ground shook almost constantly for weeks.)
Then the sirens went off- big, loud, end-of-the-world type sirens- and I started to get really scared. I couldn't understand anything that was being announced over the loudspeaker... except one word: tsunami. I knew our house was ~2.5 miles from the coast, and not knowing anything about tsunamis, I had no clue if I was in danger. I decided I'd try to go to base (which is further inland, and has a big hill)... only the garage door wouldn't open and I couldn't get my car out. The aftershocks were coming almost constantly. No people were around. Every now and then a car would pass along our street zooming away. After ten or fifteen minutes of back-and-forth between inside/outside/look-for-neighbors/try-calling-Corey/work/friends/thestates-again rising panic, I decided to just hunker down in my doorway. And I did. For the next 2 hours, I sat there, floor shaking, heart racing, waiting for Corey.
He eventually made it home, and we began our 2 days of cluelessness. We had no power. Very little news. The first night, three young dudes Corey works with came over for some food and talked about being disappointed that they hadn't driven down to the beach "to see the tsunami." They had no clue. None of us had any clue.
When the power came back on, the news started to flood in. I'm sure you know it all, you've seen the videos, so I'll not rehash it. Needless to say, it was horrific. I sat glued to the computer for days, trying to comprehend it. It was truly heartbreaking, in a way nothing else has ever been.We got unfathomably lucky. Lucky isn't even the right word... but I don't know what is. Misawa ended up with only 2 deaths, a destroyed port, some decimated livestock farms, and a few damaged beach parks.
Japan's Children of the Tsunami- a long documentary by BBC, but worth watching.
There had been at least one nuclear explosion down in Fukushima by the time we were plugged back into the country, and suddenly EVERYONE was afraid. For good reason- I was too. I sat watching NHK by the minute, waiting to see if the worst was going to happen (not even knowing what that "worst" would be). American families stationed here wanted to leave. Power was intermittent, we had no heat for weeks even though it was still snowing, there was a gas shortage, and our base was suddenly solely being used as a hub for foreign aid in Operation Tomodachi. The base issued a voluntary evacuation for family members who wanted to leave, and many (most?) did. It was a quiet month of trying to help where we could, not get in the way, and putting up with earthquake after earthquake.
Things slowly got back to normal (for us). My heart still stops whenever there's an earthquake, I do feel physically sick watching the earthquake visual posted above, and it will always be difficult to think about last March, but otherwise everything really is back to normal. Things will never again be "back to normal" for hundreds of thousands of people who lost their loved ones or their livelihoods last year. But hopefully there can be a new normal. Today (and everyday) I have them in my thoughts, and am thankful for the spirit of recovery and renewal the Tohoku region has been able to embrace.
(Foreign involvement is obviously a sliver of the story of this disaster, but this is a nice video, particularly the last half, in relation to that aspect.)
Dealing with garbage in Japan is a more complex ordeal than it is in the states. Once upon a time, I saw the world through a black and white lens of "garbage" vs. "recycling." It was a simpler time... *sigh*
Since living in Japan (with detailed trash-sorting guidelines), every object that passes through our front door sends me into a refuse-induced panic: is it burnable? Non-burnable? Glass? Aluminum? PET plastic? Other kind of plastic? Cardboard? Corrugated cardboard? A mixture?? How am I going to get rid of this?? Why do we need all this stuff?? How did we become such gross over-consumers??
It all came to a head over the past couple of weeks when (after each of us living away from home and all our "stuff" for months on end came back to feel smothered by piles of useless crap) we decided to clean out our whole house and get rid of all the junk bogging us down. So we cleaned. As we purged our way through years worth of randomness stored in the house, we accumulated a large pile of non-donatable trash that we weren't sure how to get rid of. By the end of the week, the guest room temporarily and necessarily became "the garbage room." Then we moved it all to the garage and could barely fit our car next to the giant pile. This was garbage of a magnitude above and beyond the garbage threshold of our twice-weekly $30/month pickup service.
There was a simple solution in the end (although it required calling our mean crazy landlord which is quite possibly my most dreaded thing to do in all of life). We booked a special garbage appointment. Our garbage was examined, we were given a quote (7000¥, roughly $93 today), and once we paid, we were free from our detritus burden.
Back home, we would have shoved everything in a dumpster and called it a day. It would have been easier. And cheaper. And goodness knows I wouldn't have minded not stressing out about GARBAGE REMOVAL for several days. However, next year around this time I'd probably be going through this whole thing again, dumping loads of junk I'd accumulate over the coming year. That definitely won't be happening here. We're very set on not piling up on stuff we don't need. So there's the whole life lesson, change of perspective, thinking about your actions affecting the planet side effect. Maybe this will help us learn to lead organized, less "stuff"-driven lives. It's definitely for the best in the end.
But... garbage, you are annoying. And that's what I have to say about that.
The Sapporo Snow Festival was one of those checkmarks we wanted to be able to cross off our list of big things to do in Japan before leaving. Check! We put together this little trip at the very last minute, and with train tickets in hand, we set off for the 7 hour ride (from Honshu to Hokkaido via the undersea Seikan Tunnel) to Sapporo.
This is what everything between Misawa and Sapporo looks like in February.
So being in Sapporo and all, dinner upon arrival was naturally at the Sapporo Beer Factory's Bier Garten. We traipsed ourselves through an insane blizzard following malfunctioning phone gps directions back and forth between random streets until we finally found the place, essentially in human-icicle form. Our 100 minutes of all you can eat and drink grilled meat, veggies and beer were very well earned that night. I will say that the grounds were gorgeous, and the snow added some very lovely ambiance. I guess that stuff is good for something...
On to the festival:
It was cool! It was really, really cool. As in -5˚c at the warmest time of day. It sort of hurt after a few hours. Yet we saw what we wanted to see in between trips back to the hotel to defrost. There were several LARGE snow sculptures and countless medium and small-sized ones. There was an international competition with teams from cities all over the world. There were snowboard daredevils. There was ice skating. There were pretty lights and cute characters and happy smiling people.
And then there was food. Oh, there was food. And hot mulled wine. I guarantee you nothing has ever or will ever taste as good as that wine did that particular day.
Fun little trip! There's a bajillion more pictures (click on any of the ones here to get to the album) if you want to see all the other sculptures. Corey's headed back to Hokkaido in a couple weeks for a snowboarding trip, but this was probably it for me this time around in Japan. Glad I got to see a little slice of Sapporo!
Corey and I have both been back in Misawa for a couple of weeks now and are very happily settling into our normal lives here once again! It feels gooooood to be home!
What have we been up to, you might ask?
First of all, Corey came home from his deployment in Djibouti (arriving a few days after me). YAY!!!! We've been soaking up together time. A lot. Actually I can't think of anytime we've been apart in the past 2.5 weeks... except like, in the bathroom and stuff.
We've been snowboarding (in silly facemasks... well, one of us at least).
We've been playing games.
We've played in a blizzard.
We've been catching up on our shows on our new TV (Our old one's picture turned neon green while we were away. Go figure.)
We've taken a train trip to Sapporo (more to come on that later).
We've been HAPPY!!!!
We've also found out that we are definitely for sure going to have to leave Misawa at the beginning of next year. INSERT BIG GIANT SAD FACE. Corey had been trying to find a way to stay for a while longer yet, but it just aint happening. I don't even want to think about leaving AT ALL... but since we have to, this year will be all about soaking up as much as we can before we have to say goodbye. Stay tuned!
