March Madness!

Sorry blog-readers... but March has been insane. It started really at the end of February with my midterms, which went "okay" considering I haven't been in school in almost 5 years, plus I was taking two classes without relinquishing any of my previous responsibilities. Needless to say, the phase out starts NOW with my last day of classes for at the Japanese school I've been working at being tomorrow. Two years spent at one of the local junior high school's around town has been a great experience and one I am grateful for and will never forget, but I'm ready to be done and able to focus on my own school right now! That just leaves my afternoon math tutor sessions and the occasional private English class with my two families. Much more manageable while being a full time Masters student!

The 2nd thing to make this month CrAzY was our vacation! From March 3rd-11th we were in Vietnam and Cambodia. I will try to write a blog (with photos) to that trip but in brief, it was fantastic. We went to Hanoi, Halong Bay, Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon), and ended in Siem Reap, Cambodia. We ate food, drank beer, saw natural and man-made wonders, and enjoyed some new culture. It was a great trip but we were non-stop the whole time and came back needing a vacation from vacation! It took a while to get back into a routine but we are starting to get there.

Dereck has a big week with some yearly tests that pilots need to do, on top of his marathon training. Less than a month to go til his debut at the Nagano Marathon on April 15th! How exciting! Somehow he'll have to fit in those training runs while his family is here...

Yup! We have visitors! From March 28th-April 11th we will be hosting Dereck's Mom and Dad, as well as his sister who is coming down from the mountains of Gunma prefecture to spend time with us. We are so excited to show our home and new country to Mom and Dad. We hope they love Japan like we do, and that the Cherry Blossoms bloom for them!

So, just another MANIC MARCH :-) I'll try to blog about vacation soon and get back to my Words of the Week as well.

~Jane

Word of the Week 3: Assiduous

	assiduous  adjective   Definition: hard-working Try as I might, I only managed 3 blog posts in January... but hey, it's better than nothing. So now here was are into the 8th day (so I guess, 2nd week!) of February and I thesaurusized  (<-can that be a word?) the word busy. I liked the sound of "assiduous" and though it leans more towards being hard working than just busy, it still applies.  Last week my grad classes really picked up speed and I had two assignments (one for each class) due the same day. Then, I had one due just one week after, so since Jan 31st its been school, school, school. Why Jan 31st? Well, because I took 4 days off to go to Kyoto and Hiroshima with Dereck at the end of January! That was a blast, but doesn't fall under the adjective of assiduous, so I'll save that for another post.  So far the classes are going well (vehicle dynamics is going much better than my composite mechanics class, but I'm surviving). Midterms are the last week of Feb/1st week of March so the semester is really going fast so far! In addition to school, I also have been working with my community theater group on base on our dinner theater production. We are performing on Friday and Saturday to a sold out audience. Its very exciting but not only am I acting in the production, but I'm also running the private organization which means constant emails, contracts, coordinating, and just seems nonstop. Not only are we doing the show in 2 DAYS! (gasp!) but we also are starting pre-production on our BIGGEST show ever planned for the fall, doing a new teenage cast show this spring, and the improv group got a contract to perform at a festival on base in April- our first gig! As soon as the show ends on Saturday night, there is no break. Its time for pre-production meetings, helping to plan and organize the teen show logistics with the director, and get our improv group ready to perform. Did I mention Midterms in less than a month already? Man! I better be assiduous about this! Luckily, both my midterms are take home exams are are due March 2nd. I leave March 3rd for a week long vacation during spring break, so I am so excited for that break! This past week my good friend Jenn and I have started a daily workout session together. She was motivated to make some healthy life changes and I wanted to help, plus thought I'd be much more likely to stick to a workout with a motivated friend. It's been great! You'd think that adding a daily workout to an already jam packed schedule would be insane, but it's been really nice. I feel like I have a bit to just think of nothing but working out and even getting some social time as I do it. I feel good and energized when I'm done, and I need that for the day!  I'm not the only one who's been assiduous lately. Much of my motivation comes from Dereck. He's been working long hours, doing his masters homework, and training for a marathon. I don't know how he does it sometimes, but just like with my crazy love of theater, there is something about running that makes Dereck happy and energized, even though it takes up so much time. Honestly, I feel really happy. I'm busy, I'm tired, but I'm doing things that I love. Theater and performing is so much fun... there is a strange addiction that many thespians share and you know you suffer from this addiction when you plan another show before your current one is done! And I currently have two pending shows and an improv performance! I'm insane, but luckily it's not a one-woman group and I have a great group of people who share my passion and are a huge help. I've met some wonderful friends who I never would have known here if not for my theater group, and I'm so thankful for that! As for starting my masters, I feel like "me" again, which might sound kinda strange but for the last 2+ years I've felt a lot like "Dereck's wife" and "a spouse" and "a dependent", which are not bad things... but sometimes I felt like I was missing the part of me I've worked so hard for. Having a goal and getting back into the world of engineering, where I feel I belong, feels really invigorating. I'm excited for the future! So, while it was nice to write this all out and update my friends and family on the craziness... its after my "no computer" time and I must go decompress and get to sleep! Lets see if I can find the time to post more this month, but if not, I'll have a few good excuses!

Word of the Week 2: Anisotropic (Material)

This WotW isn't an adjective to describe my week but it is an adjective that I have learned and used a lot this week. It was my second full week of graduate classes and I am starting to get into the "meat" (or should I use veggies hehe) of the classes and out of the introductions and general lectures. I'm taking two classes and anisotropic and isotropic are used in my Mechanics of Composite Materials course. When referring to a material, anisotropic means that the material properties at any point vary with the direction or depend on the orientation of reference axes. This is the opposite of isotropic materials which means that the properties are the same in all directions or are independent of the orientation of the axes.

Hmmmm... confused? I kinda was too. I mean, I understood isotropic previously as being basically "the same" when used in things like chemistry. This seems to hold true for a material as well- basically it acts "the same" no matter what direction load are applied. This is why I chose anisotropic as my WotW, since I have never used it before.

Composites are extremely dependent on the direction of the material for their material properties. I will explain this using the simplest natural composite material I know: wood. Imagine say, a 2 x 4. We can crack this 2 x 4 and look into it and see that the wood fibers are long and go from one end to another.This material has different strength properties depending on how I load up that 2 x 4 beam (across the long fibers or directly on the ends of the fibers). This is an anisotropic material. Now take a piece of metal, say aluminum. Its doesn't matter what way I load that aluminum, it will deform the same. Aluminum would be considered isotropic. Since most composite structures are designed to take a load in one direction over another (thus optimizing the design to cut weight when it isn't needed to carry a load), most are anisotropic which is why its important that I learned that word!

See, aren't you glad you visited my blog today?

Other fun things this week: more rehearsals for our dinner theater show, Hubby won some cool awards at work for being an awesome pilot, and on Saturday we got to go to a Sumo match in Tokyo. I wrote a huge post on that last year so go check it out if you want to learn more about Sumo!

Word of the Week 1: Tarry

Definition of TARRY verb \ˈter-ē, ˈta-rē\

1        a : to delay or be tardy in acting or doing

b : to linger in expectation : wait

The word I chose this week was “Tarry”, which I chose for definition b. I was lingering in expectation for a few things. First, my husband was sent off to Seattle for a routine training on January 2^nd, which means I was tarrying for his return that weekend. This in and of itself isn’t that exciting or even anything varying from our routine lifestyle. However, it came right after the holidays where we were able to spend so much time together, so I feel like I really as just waiting for his return this time. I also felt slightly more down during his absence because I felt like it was setting a presence for the rest of the year. Dereck was gone 175 of 365 days in 2011, and so far in 2012 he’s been gone 6 out of 10. I felt like him taking off so soon in the year really was an eye opener – the alarm clock waking us up after the happy snooze button doze we were enjoying during Christmas and New Years. 

Also, the first week of the year is full of some Japanese holidays as well, so my work schedule was very light, and I was tarrying for the next week’s busy schedule (or for the rest of the month as it looks!). I have two or three more months of classes at the Japanese school before their school year ends in March. I will then be passing on my students to a friend of mine to take over, since I will be focusing on school. I am eager to get to the point where I can focus more on school and less on work, but I also am sad to be leaving my students and the Japanese teachers I’ve work with for the last two years behind. 

Lastly, I was tarrying for my graduate classes to start. Today I watched my first lecture and tomorrow my 2^nd class should have its first lecture posted as well. I am excited to finally be starting since I feel like it’s been such a long process to get to this point! I am taking two courses in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department: Mechanics of Composite Materials and Advanced Vehicle Dynamics.  Both are a bit of review since I’ve had a vehicle dynamics course before and am familiar with the basics of composites. I hope this will be a good semester to ease me back into the academic world.

So that was my week, and my word: Tarry!

One fun thing I did to break up the waiting... snowboarding! I'll end with the Picture of the Week: 

View from the Mountain at Nozawa Onsen Ski Resort in Nagano, Japan

a CONVIVIAL new years eve

So its been a long and crazy year, and I realized that my sporadic blogs jumping from topic to topic with a few long winded life recaps in between probably isn't very interesting... and also doesn't really give me the writing outlet that I'd like to have, nor allows my family and friends around the globe to get a very good feel of normal life for me. So my 2012 "digital age" resolution is to do a bit less on Facebook, and a bit more on my blog. I'd been trying to think about a weekly topic or idea to focus my attention on and I've come up a Word of the Week. My hopes is that with each Word of the Week post, I can grow my vocabulary a bit (something I feel I lack and are sometimes self conscious of), and then also explain the happenings of the week that prompted that word to have been chosen. Unlike the Word of the Week/Day desktop calendars that urge you to USE the word throughout that week/day, this will be a retroactive approach. Since it is only January 2nd, I do not have a full week to think back upon but I will try a mini-post and focus solely on my New Years Eve celebration, therefor being called my Word of the Night instead :-)

W.o.t.N.

con·viv·ial  adj \kən-ˈviv-yəl, -ˈvi-vē-əl\

Definition of CONVIVIAL

: relating to, occupied with, or fond of feasting, drinking, and good company

convivial host> convivial gathering>

My New Years Eve was indeed convivial, so much so that I think the definition should be changed to as follows

Convival :relating to, occupied with, or fond of having a kick-ass time in Tokyo on New Years Eve with a bunch of friends while partaking in many memorable activities around the city that could never be replicated in its entirety even if you died trying.

 

I was happily convinced by my husband that a NYE (as New Years Eve will now be called throughout the rest of this post) in downtown Tokyo would be worth adjusting our sleep schedule in order to stay out all night and eating microwavable ramen until our next paycheck, since as our life seems to be as a military family, we never know where we may be or what we will be doing next year. My wonderful “live in the now” husband is good for me in that way … anyways, we decided to get a group of friends together and make a night of it! 

We had 13 people head down to Tokyo Station where I managed to make reservations for us all to eat at a Mexican restaurant in Marunouchi. It was called Mucho! and was a festive place, perfect for a NYE dinner- complete with bright lights, festive drinks, a band with a trilingual singer (Japanese, English, and Spanish!), and Arabian belly dancing… yup. Leave it to Japan to get it just about right then ad their own random international flair to it. Needless to say, dinner was fantastic and everybody left full and much less sober than when we arrived. 

Us at Zojoji Temple

From there it was less than a 10 minute cab ride (where we “dragged raced” in our own cabbie version of Tokyo Drift our friend’s cab… we lost… boohoo) to Zojoji Temple and Tokyo Tower. This is the “Times Square” of Japanese NYE events. In fact, the Japanese Tradition for the new year is to visit a temple at midnight to give prayers for the new year and to watch the first sunrise. We at least got the temple part right as we joined the huge crowd holding balloons with their wishes for the new year tied to the string. Tokyo Tower was lit up in the background and TV cameras were all around, mainly focused on the announcers and the giant bell that will be rang at midnight. We remember watching it last year from a friend’s house party so it was really fun to be there in person! Japan doesn’t have open container laws outside so people there were enjoying their drinks and mingling until the countdown.

View of Tokyo Tower from below!

After the cheers, the NYE kisses, the releasing of the balloons, and drunken Americans singing their terrible rendition of Aude Lang Syne…  we decided to head past Tokyo tower into the party district of Roppongi.   

Our group at the Temple! Complete with Champagne :-)

Our group ended up splitting as one half decided to wait in line at a club and our half chose to find our favorite shot bar. Sadly, it was closed for the holiday (another boohoo) so we ended up at a different club. After some initial anxiety and annoyance at the overly crowded, loud, dark and smokey venue, we made it to the top floor where we got to stand in the open air and enjoy a much less crowded bar. The club experience is not one that I have often, nor do I particularly crave, but it was actually a really fun time.  We also ran into a few friends there which in a city of millions of people is always a random experience. It was after 4am when we left the club, but we had about an hour until our train was running back to our suburb, so what else can you do but enjoy the 24hr McDonalds.  Finally we took the first train of the morning back to our city, but sadly the rapid trains don’t run that early and it took forever. Despite thinking I lost my husband in Shinjuku station without his cell phone, we all boarded a train and headed home. Luckily it was pretty empty and we got to have a seat the whole time. It was from the train where I watched the first sunrise of 2012. 

We finally arrived home at 7:30am, a full 12 hours from when we departed… our wallets were lighter, as were our heads, but we had smiles on our faces and were happy. And THAT, dear friends, is why my NYE was CONVIVIAL!

Happy 2012 Everybody!