Gardening

Woke up to some beautiful blue skies and sun peaking through, hopefully we are done with all of the rain for awhile, but this is the mountains and the weather is always volatile. We all were up at normal times today, and ate breakfast while Yasuko and Koby went to school.

Koby and the school kids are outside practicing for their sports festival that is coming up in a little over a week. They have been practicing running, throwing balls into a basket, dancing and playing songs on their flute recorders. Koby is really enjoying going to school here.

After breakfast I went outside to plant a row of soy beans that Kitayama grandma had given me, I will probably have enough soybeans to supply the whole town with, after that I weeded both of my potato beds of all the grass that had started growing on them, there are potato plants starting to poke their heads through the dirt, so I was pretty excited when I saw that.

After weeding the potato beds, I planted the rest of the corn seeds that I had, so far I have a 100% germination rate, so if that keeps up I should have about 30 corn plants. I plan on doing several small rows of corn in hopes of getting good pollination rates, and if I have seedlings left over I will just give them to someone else. All of the other plants are looking good so far.

Koby came home from school and said that he had been invited to Fujita-sans house and that they planned on making chewing gum. I am not sure how that is done, but he was instructed to bring some honey with him. Evan is outside playing with the remaining kids that stayed behind.

My friend Ben stopped by today to show me the motorcycle he just bought, it is a Honda and is a 50cc bike, here in Japan Motorbikes under 50cc can be driven with a regular car drivers license, but anything over 50cc needs a motorcycle license. The bike was made in 1997 an is modeled after a 1960's style bike, I think it looks cool, in a retro sort of way. A motorcycle here in the summer would be nice to have, but 6 months of the year, it would be sitting in a garage somewhere, because of snow.

It is getting dusk now and the boys are at the playground getting the last playtime in before it gets dark, Yu is outside riding her unicycle and Yasuko is in the kitchen getting dinner ready. I didn't hear from the school I interviewed with, but they said 2-3 days so hopefully tomorrow I will get some good news.