Ain't Nobody Else

I was just thinking that I would write the first word that came to my head, and the word was "sofa," followed closely by "sopaipilla." Mmm, sopaipillas. W/ honey.
Speaking of honey, mine is now in the Topeka area. Too bad for me. She's been gone now for 54 hours or so and it's funny how lonely I feel. Ironic that when you spend so much time w/ someone, even your wife, you sometimes find yourself thinking that it might be nice to have a small break. But then you get that break and you think, "Man, this stinks!" But never fear - I have some honey-dos. Mercifully, very few were issued forth by Aubrey fiat. They are, rather, self-imposed.
I'm supposed to try to clean the walls and ceiling of the entry hall, which have some mold on them. I am also supposed to get the Board of Ed to send someone to fix some of the screen doors on our house. It would be very nice to have those fixed, I must admit. Good call Aubrey!
As for my self-imposed Things To Do, they include:
-drinking coffee
-oh wait, I do that most every day anyway regardless of whether Aub is here
-it's b/c I really like it
-anyway, bike around the island on the main road (that's probably an investment of 2 hours)
-spend at least one evening alone on some beach by a driftwood fire
-compose hippie "I'm a vagabond on the road" songs on my acoustic guitar while sitting by said fire
-write a review of "Silence," a famous novel by famous Japanese novelist Shuusaku Endo
-just kidding about the hippie songs
-email some people
-study Japanese more intensively than usual

So far, so good. Coffee, check. Bike around the island, prolly Monday. Night out on the beach, prolly Tues, Wed, or Thurs. I was kidding about the guitar. The book review is maybe 1/4 done right now - I've sunk 6 hours into it and am halfway thru the book in my "read again and take notes" phase. It's a really interesting book and I told Shay that I'd review it. I'm betting, however, that if I get to stay in Japan for another 2-3 yrs or more, any review of such a book would be much fuller by the time I'm closer to leaving than now. I don't understand a whole lot at this point about the state of the Japanese church, but I'm able to critique the theological issues in the book, so I'm a-gonna do that.
Anyway, email, check. Study Japanese, check. Just gotta keep up w/ that.
Random notes:
I'm listening to the new Radial Angel tracks a whole bunch. They're just pretty dang catchy.
A couple of old friends I've found on myspace. They used to claim they were Christians, and one of them claims still to be, but you'd never know it from their myspace pages or one friend's blog. So I sent a msg to both of them asking them whether they still claimed Christ and why, if they did, they had written x, y, and z on their webpages. I tried to be as friendly, serious, and loving as I could. One responded by dropping me from her friends list on myspace, and another refuses to contact me by email or whatever and has apparently deleted the blog to which I called her attention. Sad. Goes to show how rare and valuable is the intellectually honest person.
Speaking of which, God put another old friend (this one still a close friend) on my heart about 3 weeks ago and called me to pray for him that he would be "active in sharing (his) faith, that (he) may have a full knowledge of every good thing we have in Christ" (Philemon 6). So I was praying for him and then was about to initiate a convo about it, when all of a sudden we were talking today and he asked for a bit of advice on witnessing to some Mormon friends and later mentioned that God had been spurring him to evangelise people actively and he'd been following the call. Man, that's cool! Makes me so thankful for the love of the brethren in Christ's church.
Invited a friend over to eat tenpura tonight along w/ fruit smoothies. Asked him to bring half a Kikai radish (aka "daikon"), 1/4 of a Kikai pumpkin/squash thing, and "2 bananas." Radish and pumpquash, no prob. "2 bananas" became "2 bunches," though. Guess I'll get enough potassium these next few days. Fortunately, I dig bananas to a dangerous extent. But I was heartened to review what I had said: "banana futatsu", which means "2 bananas." Strictly speaking, I shoulda said "banana nihon," but anyway, I was being a little colloquial. He agreed that I had said it right, but he had made the mistake. Cool. Getting more confident in Japanese these days. Also showed him my sentence translation worksheets I've been working on, and he said they were almost perfect. Excellent!
A few example sentences:
-When I was a high school student, I studied math, science, and things like that.
-I called this morning, but there was no answer so I'll try calling again later.
-You leave the station and turn right. Then walk up to the traffic light and wait there.
-It looks like it's going to rain. Thus, I think it's best to take an umbrella.

Etcetera. I've found that I usually have to get a word/phrase into my head thru a flash card or sthg before I can hear it said in a normal face-to-face conversation. Not always, but that's the best for me.

OK, I think I'm done writing now. Peace out from the only whitey on Kikai Island!