Thursday, June 30, 2011

Hot! Too Hot!

Oh yay, it got into the 90's, touching 100 early this year. On the news they said it reached 96F in Nagoya yesterday, the hottest its been at this time of year in 20 years. There are also 5 times as many cases of heat stroke compared to last year as well. The good news however, is that we got through an incredibly hot day yesterday w/out cutting power. That said, they did reach 93.3% capacity, which is the highest energy usage post-quake. Let's hope we can keep it that way...

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Der Twains Ist Back?

A paragraph at the end of this article really does a good job of summing up exactly why the twins have struggled so much his season...

Gardenhire put out his 64th different batting order Friday due to all of the Twins' injuries. He has not used any one batting order more than twice this season, and the Opening Day lineup has not taken the field at home yet this season. But getting Mauer and Nishioka back should begin to make things easier on his filling out the lineup card.

"It's not easy, but you just have to kind of ad lib a little bit," Gardenhire said. "Kind of break the lineup up a bit and see what happens."

Yes, a different batting order ever game. In other words, the Twins haven't been the Twins since opening day. Just a tad bit of 'ad libbing' going on when you practically replace the team with the minor roster. Every year is the same story of battling injuries but this year has just seemed ridiculous.

But things are finally turning around! The Twins are 14 of their last 16! Finally nice to see Gardy pull some good ol Minnesota magic out of his hat again. It's also been really fun to see Nishioka back too.

Go Twins!

Saturday, June 18, 2011

International Pentecost

Once again, far too long between posts, bleh.

Anyways, last week was pentecost, and my church decided to do an international theme for the service. We had readings and prayers in a wide variety of languages including Spanish, French, Malgasay, Korean, Chinese, etc, representing alot of the different nationalities we have at the church. Oh there was English and Japanese too, particularly for the English/Japanese bilingual sermon (that was way cool Takashi!). I contributed by singing Lobe den Herron (Praise to the Lord) in German! :D



Unfortunately the position of the camera and piano kind of drown out my voice a bit, but you get the idea. I've sung German in college before, and taken german in high school, so I think it worked out ok. I still don't get why 'den' is prnounced deen and 'der' is pronounced dehr, but whatever. It was fun, I look forward to my next chance to sing there again.

I hear its been quite hot over there, but we're still lucky to be in the 60s and 70s, more than likely thanks to the clouds and rain from the rainy season. Which means we're able to avoid planned outtages for now, so I'm counting my blessings. Also, I've only felt one significant earthquake since I returned from the US a month or so ago, so nice to feel a bit more stable. There's still talk of a huge after shock still on the way, but we'll deal with that when it comes I suppose. For now at least I'm well prepared with some of my furniture anchored down.