brp.japanlingo.comBeyond Reason Productions

beyond reason productions Recent News About BRP Translation Services Photo Galleries Private Photo Gallery Media Projects Contact Information Japanese Page Wednesday, October 21, 2009 Note to all visitors: I will be moving to my new house on the 24th and will not have Internet access until the 31st. The web site will be unavailable during that time. Friday, June 27, 2008 As you may have noticed, this web page is no longer hosted at www.beyond-reason.com. There are several reasons for this: I was paying $115 per year for a web page that got very little use; might have seemed like a cool name when I thought it up in high school, but it sounds pretty childish and stupid now; and there is no point in paying for a server when I'm running one at home on a 100mb/s fiber optic Internet connection. So, let me introduce you to my new domain name: www.japanlingo.com . I figure that if I'm going to have a web site, it might as well be about something that is currently relevant to my life. I will leave this web page up for now under a subdomain of my new domain name. I deleted all of the private photo galleries, but the pictures can still be accessed in the separate Private Photo Gallery at rigert.homeserver.com/photo . Saturday, February 2, 2008 Happy (belated) New Year! After nearly five months without any updates, I finally found some time to sit down and write something. I haven't even been able to play video games in nearly three months. My schedule seems to go something like this: Get up, get ready for work, go to work, come home, eat dinner, give Lyn a bath, put Lyn to bed, fall asleep myself. Weekends are usually taken up by shopping for groceries or cleaning the house, with maybe enough time for one movie if we are lucky (and if Lyn falls asleep quickly). Fortunately, Lyn is finally reaching the age where she is pretty good at playing by herself, so we don't have to constantly entertain her. Now if only she would learn to go to bed before 10! We've had quite a bit of snow and cold weather over the past couple weeks. Last week we had a low of -14°C (7°F) and maybe six inches of snow. Lyn likes playing in light and fluffy snow, but she didn't seem too thrilled about playing in the hard and icy snow the other day. Hopefully we'll get some new snowfall in the next few days so she can go sledding again. I decided to add a different private photo gallery. Since I obviously do not have the time to come up with comments for every photo, I set up a photo gallery on my new Windows Home Server using the Whiist add-in . This lets me just drop the photos in a folder and then the server dynamically generates a photo gallery for anyone with the username and password. You can also download a full-resolution copy of the photo by clicking on it. Just click on Private Photo Gallery in the menu. The username and password are the same as the old private photo galleries. Sunday, September 9, 2007 Lyn had two first birthday parties this year: one while my parents were here, and other while Yukino, Lyn, and I were down in Numazu during Obon vacation. You can find pictures of the parties in the private photo gallery . We also took Lyn to Fuji Safari Park, a drive-thru zoo where you get to dodge lions, tigers, giraffes, and various other animals with your car. I took quite a few pictures, but since you aren't allowed to open your car windows (for obvious reasons), the reflections in the glass make it hard to see. I'll upload the pictures when I get a chance (i.e.- don't get your hopes up). We stopped by Yukino's friends' house in Chigasaki on Sunday. They recently bought a 5-year-old 1,300 square foot house on maybe 1000 square feet of land for over $350,000. I assume most of the cost is for location, since it's only a ten-minute walk from the ocean. We ate a nice lunch at a Hawaiian restaurant and took them shopping at Costco before heading to our hotel in Yokohama. The next day, we went to Hiroshima Bank to finally close an account that we hadn't touched for the past two years and then stopped by Costco (again) in Hachioji before heading back to Nagano. Monday, August 5, 2007 After another not-quite-two-month gap, I'm back with another update! The new photo gallery is actually from the end of June, but better late than never. We went on a short hike at a place called Kirigamine. The path was surrounded by fields of red azalea. The weather was great—so great that I got my first sunburn of the year. My parents also paid us a visit for 10 days in the middle of July. Unfortunately, I ended up having to do a huge translation project while my parents were here, so I only had 5 days off in total. We all went to a place called Hirugano in Gifu Prefecture, but the rainy season lived up to its name and it poured rain the entire time. At least the hotel was nice! It's a good thing my parents mostly came just to see Lyn. The other day, we went to a place called Hara Village to look at some property that is for sale. It was in a nice location—surrounded by fields at the end of a private drive—so it was very quiet. You can see the Yatsugatake peaks to the east and a large expanse of fields in front of some distant hills to the west. It's about an eighth of an acre for $80,000, which is quite cheap for this part of Japan (but expensive compared to most other places in the world of equivalent size). Unfortunately, my lack of permanent residency means I can't get a loan to buy land or a house. I plan on applying sometime next year, so if the property is still on the market at that time, maybe we can buy it (and maybe it will be even cheaper!). Monday, June 18, 2007 Well, after a nearly two month hiatus, I finally got around to updating this web page. Quite a bit has happened over the past two months. Lyn is now officially an American citizen and has a passport to prove it, I did my taxes and once again owed nothing (as it should be, since I don't even live in the frigging country), both Mother's Day and Father's Day have come and gone (a first for both Yukino and me), and Lyn finally figured out how to roll over on her own. Lyn is turning out to be quite the stubborn little girl. I wonder where she gets that from? This is the look she gets whenever she wants to go somewhere she's not supposed to. I can tell she's going to be a handful once she's actually able to crawl. And now what you've all really been waiting for: a new photo gallery (password required)! This one has a couple pictures of Lyn at eight months as well as some Mother's Day photos. Lyn made Yukino a nice envelope and card (with daddy's help) for Mother's Day. We then drove to a nice park up in the mountains and let Lyn play on the grass. Wednesday, April 25, 2007 Spring has finally arrived in Nagano. The cherry blossoms are in full bloom and the calla lily I thought had died last winter sprouted up again. I think this is the first time I've ever had a plant survive more than one season in Japan. Back when I lived in Hiroshima, I even managed to kill parsley. Hopefully some day I'll actually have a yard so I can attempt to kill grow plants on an even larger scale. I did some experimentation with nighttime photography the other day. Most of the shots didn't turn out, but a few of them yielded some interesting results. You can find them in the photo gallery . I only have two days of work left before the start of Golden Week. For those of you that don't know, Golden Week is a string of public holidays in Japan that usually lasts for an entire week, minus one or two days in the middle. Most people who don't work in the service sector take the non-holiday days off so they can pay three times the normal price to travel at the same time as everyone else in Japan. I'm planning on heading down to Numazu with the family to see the in-laws for a few days, and then staying one night in Tokyo to apply for Lyn's U.S. citizenship. Unfortunately, she's had a cold for almost the entire week, so unless it gets better by Friday, we might have to g...