Tuesday, August 29, 2006

What's Bin Did And What's Bin Hid

So, it's been too hot here to do anything except wag my tongue and wish it was winter. That and play online games when things cool off towards evening. This one's a no-brainer but very addicting. Don't let the Japanese writing put you off. Simply click the top line to start and after that, just choose where you want to start the explosions. The goal is to keep the explosions going for as long as you can.

"Chaos Theory" (My pitiful high score is 142)


During cooler, more cerebral times, I used to play thinking-games like these:

"3D Logic" (I beat all the levels, ha!)

"Blueprint" (I beat all but 2)

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Bug Photo

We found this little guy on a walk the other morning just before 7 a.m. He turned colors when I used a flash on him (sort of a translucent opal kind of look) but then he was nice enough to pose for this shot.



The coolest part is I didn't have to do any tweaking--the photo just turned out really good (IMHO).

Monday, August 07, 2006

Fireworks in Chiba 千葉みなと公園の花火

We decided to try going to the fireworks this year. First we stopped in Chiba City and bought our yukata at Uniqlo. The people were nice enough to help Christine and Laurie with tying the obi and making sure they were wearing everything right.



Then we bought some food to take with us and took the monorail to Chiba Minato. Once there, we walked towards the park and found ourselves a spot to watch fireworks from. It was really nice to see so many people dressed festively and enjoying the day.





The fireworks went from 7:30 until 8:45. The brochure said there were 4 themes (flowers, sports, international-something, and I forget what else), but for the most part I couldn't tell the difference. Except some of the fireworks really did look like flowers, and during the sports part there was a baseball one. I forget when, but there was also a smiley face firework that I hadn't seen before.



We caught a few minutes on film too.



When it was all over and everyone started for home, we began to realize the number of people who showed up was really high. From Chiba Minato all the way to Chiba Station, the streets were packed with people. We guessed tens or hundreds of thousands, if not a million people were there, but truthfully we couldn't tell.