Saifu Oni wa Soto!

Yes, I know, I haven't been updating on a very regular schedule. I apologize for this. But sometimes I am having so much fun that the blogs gets put off a little bit. The down side of not updating regularly is that I soon forget the stories behind the photos I take, which brings us to our first picture. Me as a walrus.When mom isn't here to tell you not to play with your food, it is easy to cut your vegetables to make them look like tusks. By the way, these tusks also make good ears. I think that this was 2 weeks ago on Saturday, because the next picture is me flying a kite with Go after the Beginning of the year International Party.
Then on Monday I went and met Keiko in Isesaki, where she took me to a batting cage and I learned that Keiko, while her form looks silly in this picture, is great at baseball. She hit 17 of 20 balls, and hit them with quite a bit of force.
Quite good compared to me, who hit 2 of 20 balls, and didn't even look cool while sucking.
A ride on a Kabuto Mushi cheered me up.
By the way, all of these pictures come from a Game Center, a mix between an Arcade and a Casino. Here you can bet on virtual horse racing. These little horses are robots that actually run around the track, by the way! They look very life like!
I got my revenge on Keiko by playing air hockey.
This Kanji is read "Gunma", and is the name of the prefecture where I live. Gunma is the coolest prefecture in Japan, by the way.
Here are Yuri and Jeff playing a shooting game at another Game Center after our failed attempt to go to a maid cafe. Yuri really wanted to go, but it turns out that the maid cafe in Takasaki has gone out of business. Anyway, Jeff shocked us with his skills at DDR, and Yuri shocked us with her skills at this shooting game.
Now to tell you the story of Yuri's wallet. Yuri has had some really bad luck recently. And by bad luck I don't mean little things, but rather medium sized bad stuff. Well, on Friday night she lost her wallet. Now her wallet contained all her credit cards, her student ID "replica" that she bought in Thailand, pictures of her family and friends, drivers licence and over $800 in cash. A good portion of her life. So, when she lost her wallet, she was very depressed. She came over to my place so that I could cheer her up, but all weekend she was really down. She wasn't really going to have enough money to get through the month, it seemed like. On Saturday night we stopped by her house, and she promised to give me something I really wanted if I could find her wallet. I looked in the car, because I knew that it had to be in her car. No luck. Well. It just so happens that this weekend was Setsubun (the holiday where people in Japan throw beans at their demons to give themselves good luck). Well, on Sunday I decided to put on the Oni mask that Yuri just happened to have in her car and told her to throw pieces of gum at me. Since she is as silly as me, she obliged and threw gum at me while we were sitting in her car. I reached down to pick up the gum that had been dropped, and there, in a spot where I had already looked, was Yuri's wallet. Yuri successfully cast out a demon, and I got the thing that I really wanted. And so did Yuri.
So, as you can see, things are good, despite the rough parts.