Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
Miscellaneous
I can’t believe it has been exactly 20 years since the Great Storm hit the south-east of England in the early hours of October 16th, 1987. I’ve been through plenty of typhoons in Japan, but none of them come close to the “hurricane” that knocked out our electricity and water, blew over the trees in our garden and completely obliterated our greenhouse. During the hours of darkness the storm swept across southern England. The […]
For six months of this year, I was blogging on another site of mine, Nice4Rice, but eventually gave it up for various reasons. Before I closed the site, I had promised my readers that I would write a post for Blog Action Day, but since I wrapped that blog up, it’s only appropriate that I make that post here instead. What is Blog Action Day? On October 15th, over 8,000 bloggers across the globe will, […]
I promise one of these days I’ll post a video of me dancing the Rumba or the Waltz. Yes, if you haven’t read about my ballroom dancing antics before on this blog, let me tell you that every Friday night I take dancing lessons. I started learning with Mami, but since she became pregnant, I’ve been taking private lessons with my teacher, Mr. M. That’s right, two guys arm in […]
Choosing a name for a baby can be a difficult task. I wrote about how we decided to call our son Rikuto before, but I was surfing the web and found BabyNamer.com, an interesting look into the background of names you might be considering. There are currently 23,000 names, mostly English, in their database, and the front page lists some of the more popular ones. Naturally, I typed in my […]
A year ago, I used a free service at FutureMe.org to send an email to myself in the future. I had completely forgotten about it until it came through the other day. Here it is, with obscenities and personal info removed. Dear Nick, It’s Sept. 24th, 2006. Hopefully when you read this you will have achieved the goals that I’m setting today! 1) Be earning (deleted) 2) Have saved (deleted) […]
Today marks the first anniversary of starting this blog. Can you believe it’s been a year already? The first year saw Mami and I buy a house and have a baby, and while that will be hard to top, the next year should make for very interesting reading, particularly if you’re following the progress of our son, Rikuto. There have been exactly 153 posts and 300 comments so far. I’d […]
Regular LongCountdown reader, Michael McKinlay, was interviewed by CTV (Canadian TV) recently. I asked him why he was on TV and this was his response: CTV News called me because my name was listed on the University of Calgary’s Student Union Housing Registry. They asked if they could come over and interview myself as well as my roommate as they were doing a story on student housing in Calgary. Mike also […]
It’s amazing how despite being in Japan for over ten years, I’ve never had a decent camera. This summer however, I bought two digital cameras in the space of two months! If you remember, I upgraded my mobile phone to a WIN W52H by Hitachi. The built-in 2.0 Megapixel camera can take great photos, giving you the choice of twilight, night view, sports, person, and all the usually Scene options. […]