Fuji! Sake! Nippon Ichi!!!!

Happy Belated New Year!! It's been an eventful couple of weeks. We went down to Florida to visit family between Christmas and New Years'. It was pretty cool down there, though not as cold as it has been up here.

I've recently discovered anime on the net. I used to watch this stuff all the time when I was a kid. My favorite was the Macross Series. I've watched some of the other Macross installments that I had never before seen. They were in Japanese with English subtitles, but still good. I get a kick out of watching them in Japanese. It's a cool language. I took one semester of it many years ago, but I don't remember a whole lot. I think I can recall some important phrases, such as "Good Morning", "Hello", "Good Bye", "One more time, please", and "Which way is the bathroom". It's always fun to watch the battle scenes in these shows, because the characters just sound like they could kill their enemies with the pronunciation. I mean, expressions of anger in Japanese sound so much more lethal than they do in English.

Dogfight scenes from "Macross Zero".

I think that some of these cartoons would make great live- action movies, since the plots are so serious. Okay, they always tend to have some hokey parts in which someone is able to bring peace through the power of song, but other than that they're pretty intense. It involves mechanized warfare with giant robotlike war machines, but wouldn't that be awesome on the big screen?

We had a little more snow the other night. I am amazed that some of it is still on the ground. The remnants of Lake Eduard are frozen solid. I can actually walk on the ice. I haven't seen that much ice in years. If the Global Warming situation gets any worse we might all freeze to death. I'm not going down that road. Let's just say that we have about as much chance of controlling climate change as we do of stopping a hurricane or a volcanic eruption. Someone's getting very rich off that little fantasy.

Abbie the Aussie is doing pretty well, amazingly enough. She is no longer in the crate, and we let her sleep in our room at night. So far she has not left any unwanted gifts anywhere in the house. Let's hope our luck holds on that one. She does, however, still like to chew on things. We try to anticipate what might be chewed upon and move it out of her reach. I was trying to get one of those harnesses on her when we went to Florida. She pulls too hard when we take her for walks and we didn't want her passing out. I'm fighting to get this thing over her head and then around her body, all the while she is wriggling all over and biting my hands. It was like an episode of the "Crocodile Hunter" (or more appropriately, The Aussiedile Hunter).

"Ere I am in the rural wilderness of Virginia, hunting the elusive Austrahlian Shepherd. I'm jes' goin' ta sneak in over theyah and slip this hahness over 'er head. Carefully now, I'm---Crikey! Me 'ands!!!!"

Yeah...it was a real experience. Might have a future as a Japanimated series.