I was up in Imaichi (which is now part of Nikko City) this morning. I stopped off at the waterwheel park and had a wander along the famous cypress road - just a section of it, of course. The water level of this stream is actually higher than the road surface.
I went to visit the education office in my new town of work this morning. There are now only three schools - two of them recently built, almalgamting several smaller schools. The town is quite rich, due to the Honda factory and the Canon factory. On the way home, I stopped off at a little shrine to take some photos with my new camera - a 35mm PINHOLE camera - which was included in a magazine kit. It even has an interchangeable lens ... and when I was changing to the lens from the pinhole, the shutter component came off (exposing the film) and I lost the little bit of plastic that has the pinhole in it. I still have to finish the film off before getting it process, though.
I renewed my Japanese driver's licence this morning, which entails going to the licencing centre and attending a two-hour lecture. Well, the first half hour is a video talking about near-misses. Then an old guy talks for the rest of the time, spouting statistics and warnings, and how Tochigi Prefecture has taken over the number one ranking for traffic accidents (bad drivers here..). I spent most of the time reading a book. Lengua9
Last day of working, if you could call it that, in the town I've worked in for two years. It was an office day, but in the morning, I went to one of my schools as they had invited me for a farewell assembly. Very nice of them.
I went up to the plum orchard at the castle ruins site and took some pics of the blossoms. They're not all out yet, and seem to be much later than last year's by about a month. Last year I took photos of plum blossom in snow.
That's the accumulative total of bows during the sixth graders' graduation ceremony, for everyone in the hall. Even to get their certificate, each one of the 66 students had to bow seven times between standing up and returning to their chairs.
Here's a pic from last year of the school I've spent most time at in the past two years. I was there two day and asked if it was all right to come to the graduation ceremony on Friday (figuring this would be a good way to get out of an office day. Peter is doing the same for one of his schools so he won't have an office day.) They were really happy I asked, and made sure I understood that I should look as formal as possible, with a jacket at least.
Here's a shot from the other day. Gosh, I hope I didn't post it already. Anyway, it's just a towel drying, hanging from the apple tree.
Today was an office day and Peter was there. He did the other elementary schools in the town (city, really). We went out for a walk after lunch. It was partly cloudy, but snowing in the mountains, and there was a fiercesome cold wind blowing. I took a couple of shots of the mountain but the wind was so cold and strong my eyes watered. There was a hawk flying around, and he seemed to be enjoying it.
Office days are pretty useless; we just have to be there for some unfathomable reason. I take my laptop in and edit photos. One of the guys apologised to us because they hired a different (cheaper) company for their native English teachers next April.
This little fellow was out on the front lawn (which is still dried-out grass for the winter). He didn't seem to be a very good jumper, or maybe it was just the grass that caused him the trouble. Hey, that's kind of ironic, given his name. He'd make a short jump and end up in a funny position, like upside down, or head buried in the grass.
It's not my frog photo, of course. It's on a poster about an exhibition showing the importance of rice paddy life - of which frogs are just one aspect. I've seen snakes in rice padies, too.
I had lunch with the first graders today (I've only taught their class six times over the year at this school) and they actually asked me if I was going to take my camera out at play time. So I did. I did the line drawing editing technique in PSE.
Yesterday was Wednesday, so no time for editing photos. I took some good ones of the kids at school, but here's a bucket of gardening trowels. 
Katakana is one of the syllabary "alphabets" in Japanese. There are about 48 of them. I thought I might make a slow project of photographing a 3-D version of each one, in the order that they're written in a matrix. Thus starts the vowel series, あ "A"as in "father", い "I" as in "pig", う "U" as in "put", え "E" as in "bed" and お "O" as in "cot".
The mop handles are green, the wall is pale green, the kid got into the photo as I took it - I think it's kind of funny.
It just goes to show how my big my knowledge gap of flowers is on occasions. These flowers have been grown by the fourth graders, so I went along to take some photos of these scenty gems. I asked them what it's called and they said, "hianshinsu". It didn't ring a bell with me, so when I googled it, it comes up as Hyacinth. Now I know what a hyacinth looks like up close.
As I will be working in a different town from April, today was the last time to have lunch with this class. So I took my camera in, which I don't usually do. It was actually snowing at the time, though it didn't last long.
One of the blue fish. They had put five into the tank, but there are only two left. Very difficult lighting conditions.
A photo from the other day, one of the bird-shaped taps in the new drinking fountain place at one of my schools; I didn't take my camera with me atodays it was raining. I will tomorrow, because the school has some new tropical fish in the skunk shrimp's tank (the yellow striped angelfish wasn't there).
