Five classes into my reintroduction to Japanese, I’m learning some interesting things. Some of these things have very little to with the language, but rather the process of learning. I’d been out of the learning game that I’d forgotten that the subject matter isn’t the… Read full post »

On the first day of class, I was one of the few people who openly copped to having even the slightest familiarity with Japanese.

We sat in the classroom, tables arranged in a U shape, regarding each other and the books and papers in front of us. The teacher… Read full post »

[Part II about the decision my wife and I made to start taking Japanese language classes.] 

A few days before our first class we bought our books at a local bookstore. It was when it dawned on me that I was going to pay $80 for textbooks I realized… Read full post »

This month, for the third time in as many decades, I'll be trying to learn Japanese again.

Last Spring my wife and I spent a week in Tokyo as part of our honeymoon. I picked Japan as place abroad that was reasonably friendly to Americans, politically stable (my brother… Read full post »

The other day, puttering around in the project room with my wife, I bent down to pick up the contents of a small plastic organizer I had knocked over. A number of small wargame counters from the game "Port Stanley: Battle for the Falklands" had spilled out of the organizer all over the… Read full post »

Lately my wife has become a fan of a paranormal, mostly ghost-related cable TV show. This is an odd relationship that I have yet to fully understand.

My wife is one of the most down-to-earth people I know. I don't think she would say that she believes in ghosts… Read full post »

Recently I started playing  Valve Software's new zombie fighting game, Left 4 Dead. I had my eye on this one for months and was interested playing it, because I like fighting zombies. (I also call this "research".) This was the fifth zombie fighting game that had come out in as many ye/… Read full post »

I was seated in a Boeing 777 on the tarmac at Narita International Airport, waiting for the airplane to pull away from the terminal and begin our flight to Honolulu. My wife and I had just wrapped up the first half of our honeymoon, a week in Tokyo. We were presently… Read full post »

I’m sitting on the dusty, dirty floor of an abandoned building, my back to the wall. An awful draft blows into the room through broken windows. The sun went down half an hour ago, and  construction lighting makes the place bright enough for a séance, but not much else. The entire… Read full post »