Who Cut the Cheese?

...me, of course...i finally sliced into the small mountain of delicious cabot cheddar that my wonderful mother recently sent me (thanks momma!)...and it's niiiiice...



...and just in case you thought i was exaggerating with my literarily vivid description of what i termed the 'season of poo' a few weeks ago, take a gander at kanazawa's weather for the next week...and cease to ever doubt me AGAIN!!



...i just realized that's it's been quite a few days since i last posted here...it isn't that i've been terribly busy, just that nothing terribly interesting has been going on here...
...last weekend was the weekend in which chieko and i actually acted on some of the things that we've been talking about doing, or being pressured to do, for quite some time...chieko has finally succumbed to my constantly pestering her that we need to move into a house, so we went looking for a place to rent...we looked at a few houses and found some really nice ones...we'll see what happens on that front though...
...and we have finally succumbed to chieko's parents contantly pestering us to have an actual wedding, so on sunday we went to a place that does weddings...it's a little different here in japan, because traditionally japanese people don't get married in churches, but in temples or something, i don't really know actually but i know it isn't churches...the bigger point here is that japanese women have begun to appreciate and lust after the western style wedding, in particular the western style wedding dress...my lovely wife is no exception...
...so, western style weddings are big business here, and EXPENSIVE...so you have a 'chapel' and an 'altar' with a meaningless cross on it, and you are married by some white western dude who is probably an english teacher who does weddings on the side...
...the places that cater to this type of wedding offer packages where you have a marriage ceremony, then they shuffle you off to another building where you have a reception...3 hours and $20K later you're a married couple...
...so the weekend passed and we had committed to neither a housing nor a marriage contract...we'll see what happens next weekend, though i can't imagine we'll stay this motivated for very long ;-)...but you'll probably hear from me again before then...