I Hear It's Snowing In Indiana (笑)

A lot of my friends have asked what exactly I do at work or what exactly it is that my company does.

Here's another attempted picture of the cliff I imagine driving over every day.  This view catches me MORE off guard on the way there in the morning than on the way home.  That's because I realized today there are two different cliffs, one right after the other, but the one you can see well on your way up is bigger and doesn't have a guard rail.  At any rate, this looks way less threatening in this photo than in real life.  Some day I'll just set my camera on timer mode and throw it over the cliff so we can all see that view.




I discovered today that my bank transfer went through just fine.  Well, that is, it made it out of Japan just fine.  It hasn't hit my home account yet, so we'll see what happens in the next day or so.  If all goes well, then the next time I go to the bank, it shouldn't be so difficult.

Here's a photo from my back veranda at night.  The bright light near the center of the photo is the closest one of the five vending machines on the block between my house and the convenience store.  The smaller bright light to the right is a nuclear explosion, for comparison.

Just so you know, not all of the vending machines on my block are this bright.  Ok, actually only one of them is less bright--it's not lit up at night.  But it's on the other side of a building, so you can't tell anyway.














Now here's the interactive part of my blog for the day: I'm going to get some safety shoes for work (like steel-toed).  They come in lots and lots of styles here, from the very fashionable to the very-obviously-ordered-from-a-work-supply-store.  Here are three styles I'm considering.  Any votes?  Should I find more styles, or is one of these three good enough?

Now then, do you remember when I showed a picture of the police station, shrouded in gauze and looming all mummy-like?  They finally unveiled it.  Here's a picture taken while I was unwittingly stopped at a green light.  It might be difficult to tell from this photo, but to me the finished product looks like a police building out of a comic book.  It's pretty fancy.  I'll try to get a better picture this weekend.

In other police news, today I found out the hard way that texting and driving is illegal in Japan.  By "the hard way" of course I mean I had to hear a coworker tell a story about it.  I was like "gee whiz, wrap it up already, I'm gonna be late for work" (even though I was already at work).  

In conclusion, the weather here has been really great lately.  Sunny, warm, calm, and sometimes it just rains money and candy.  I really feel for my friends back in Indiana, in that way that you "feel for" someone who is slowly getting run over by a steam roller, like "gosh, that must be really tough but there's not much I can do about it and I guess I wouldn't want to be you right now."