Update ... ?

I'm feeling a bit of pressure to update this Blog, but I don't have a lot of news to report. The one thing that did happen recently is that I passed my 5th-dan in Jodo on Saturday. Is 5th-dan a lot? Well, it's supposed to take you about 11 years or so to get to 5th dan, and it's taken me about 17 ... a lot of that delay is due to the fact that when we started doing Jodo in Guelph, there were almost no other people doing it in Canada, and so there were no gradings for the first few years. And the other problem is that I was always moving when I was in Japan, and missed grading opportunites time after time. Oh well. I passed, and everyone said we did really well.

Otherwise, no news. The weather is getting cool, which I love. The leaves are starting to turn. Halloween decorations are everywhere, which is a new thing in Japan in the last few years. A woman I work with said that 10 years ago, there were no Halloween decorations to be found, even in Tokyo. (I wouldn't know because I was out in the sticks 10 years ago, and it's probably still like that now!)

I have a week's vacation coming up after next week, and so I'll probably go to Kyushu, if I can get myself organized. I'll post pictures if I go.

I don't know whether you are still getting "disaster news" over there, but radioactive hot spots have turned up near Tokyo. I had long been predicting that places where rainwater accumulates would end up being radioactive, and that seems to be what is happening. But it's still no cause for alarm ... the levels aren't high enough to be really dangerous ... but it does show that people are still checking these things and the clean-up continues.

I'm just doing my thing ... swimming from time to time, working a lot. Business as usual!