Randomness

These are all a bunch of things I did recently that either weren't long enough, or had enough pictures taken of them, to warrant their own separate post. So let's enjoy them now!
The banner picture up there is from the first weekend Aaron was here. There's a local couple here in town that own a dentistry business, and I teach their son. The mother also takes private English lessons from Jade, who is from Hong Kong, but was born and raised in the UK and is married to one of the local barbers here. In any case, they are a lovely couple, and once a month they hold a sort of pot-luck dinner party, and the mother, Mieko, always invites all the local English teachers. I was told to bring Aaron to this one too, so he got to see the craziness. As it was also the weekend before Halloween, we were asked to dress up. Joe, one of the other ALTs here, dressed up as Wolverine. Somehow through the course of the evening, my student stole his hand-made claws, and used them to kill his Dad. :) It was most fun, and there is always good food and great conversation to be had at Mieko's parties. And pictures of patricide. That too. :)

These two rather blurry pictures are from Laura's (one of the other ALTs here in town) birthday party. Unfortunately for her, she happened to be born on Halloween, which really wasn't an issue, being an Aussie, until she joined JET and ran into tons of Americans who go out and party on her birthday for entirely different reasons. So, she had her birthday party the night before Halloween at a really neat restaurant up in Hachinohe. There were a lot of other JETs there that I don't usually get to see, and the food was yummy, so it was a lot of fun. :) The best part was that Laura's birthday cake had actual strawberries on it, and it was absolutely delicious (you can only get fruit in Japan in the season it actually grows usually, so there won't be many strawberries anywhere until spring). That, and the fact that Laura really enjoyed her birthday and had lots of fun. That's more important than the cake..... but the cake was really good though. ^-^

And finally, Aaron and I found a Silent Hill arcade machine in a near-by town. Aaron dragged me bodily towards the stupid thing to make me play it with him, and at first it really wasn't that bad. In fact it really wasn't scary at all, and was kind of lame for a bit. Notice both the phrases 'at first' and 'for a bit' employed in those previous sentences, as they are important. About 5 minutes into the stupid game, sirens went off, dark fell, and the creepy faceless stumbling nurses came out of the woodwork to try and cut my face off. This was when I started freaking out a bit..... Then, just because the world hates me, pyramid head comes and starts chasing us through the halls, traps us in an elevator, which we barely escape from, tries to skin some other character in the game alive, and then decides that he'd rather come after us again instead. And then Aaron died, and I was fighting the stupid thing alone. And I practically ran away from the machine. I do NOT care for the Silent Hill games, the monsters are freaky, and the one time I tried to play one on the PS2 I started crying about 30 minutes into it. Aaron gets to play this game by himself next time. Or maybe whenever my mom and dad come out here he can play it with my dad. Either way, I'm never stepping within 10 feet of it again. Stupid Aaron....