– My father survived a bone marrow transplant that kept him in the hospital for five months. He is about six weeks or so out of the hospital.

– I suffered a setback with my own foot problems, aggravated by the chaos surrounding my father’s return from the hospital, but I am doing VERY well at the moment. I get some antibiotics by IV, give my left foot a ton of rest every day, and I have relatively new, badly needed “offloading” footwear to keep the pressure off the parts that need to heal.

So, I’m doing a lot less “running around” so to speak. I’m fortunate my treatment doesn’t need to be more intensive and that I’m back on track and, thanks to the footwear, making big strides forward so I can put all my recent health problems behind me.

I just didn’t want to blog with too much negativity in the air. My father’s tests say he’s cancer-free, but it’s just taking a good long while for him to get his strength back. The rest is… not worth griping about. I’ve annoyed my closer friends with rants about this or that in the world over time, but I want to be more positive for the wider world.

Also, I’ve been doing a LOT more video gaming than anime watching of late so I haven’t had as much to say about Japan stuff for a while. Also some subjects are too depressing and controversial to contribute much about… and those are the ones that pop up in the Western media, usually.

Mostly it’s just a matter of time and energy. I’ll see what I can do as inspiration strikes.

Take care everyone.

Mainly, my father lost both his lower legs and nearly died.

It wasn’t diabetes, which is by far the leading cause of such things. For reasons that have not, in spite of a large and well qualified medical staff searching over weeks and months, been fully ascertained, my father’s platelets reached a point where he had blood clots all over the place. A large one in the aorta seems to have let go, disintegrated, clogged up his legs, and denied circulation to his lower extremities. Eventually both had to be removed, one above the knee and then later the other below the knee. After the second, he was in very serious danger from stress having bodyslammed his kidneys and so forth.

From this position, he made as big a recovery as you could hope for, and has been at home for two months.

For three months, I was ‘stranded’ with my father’s newer computer, without access to my old one and without easy access to things like cookies and passwords for certain things, and besides that, I was busy, distracted and stressed. It is only now that a great deal of the issues that were coming up – mind you, issues relating to his having survived, which was not always a certainty – like insurance paperwork, property taxes, and so forth. With help from the community and from family, it has been a little less painful, and as the insurance picture clears up, we’re getting on a long term path.

On Tuesday (6th of Nov), both my father and I were visiting our surgeons, though in wildly different locations four hours apart. He’s finally been cleared for rehab; it seems there was some miscommunication involved, but that hardly matters since he wasn’t healed up enough to do it until relatively recently anyway. He did have minor rehab for coming home (and it’s better to heal at home than not, mind you), but he’s a prosthesis candidate so that’ll be the star attraction. I hope for the best. Beyond that, it’s finally time to push his tool invention forward to the finish line… and in the midst of all this, he WILL get his patent. It’ll be on half the original claims. That’s not bad at all.

For my part, my healing process was drawn out by some tissue infection that has now been completely beaten down. The final issues are extremely small compared and the emphasis now is simply on making sure there is no backsliding. My surgeon is very happy and hey, so am I. But, I’ll still have very little time for blogging; one way or another my family needs me to do things in “real life”, so I’m approaching the day when I have my full driver’s license back after a long hiatus so that I can be my father’s proper errand boy, something he does need. At present he can’t drive; his newer, better car is a standard, a dying breed to be sure. I can drive standard, but with no lower legs, he can’t; automatics can be modified however. So, I’ll be doing a lot in the interim. Until now a cousin of mine has stepped up to be a gigantic help, but his availability is time limited by “life” and I need this and my family needs this, so that’s how it is. No complaints.

So that’s how it happened. The fact of the matter is, my legs are “better than new” due to a long-term imbalance being solved. A little conservatism won’t kill me. However, the fact is, even for the blogging and for my Facebook effort, English Idioms, I’ve plucked the low-hanging fruit already. There are many things in culture which are better explained holistically; I’ve done what I can for drive-by reading, but hey, there’s a lot I’m still appreciating freshly. There’s parts of Japanese culture and language that are inspired, and others that are just crazy, like most things in this world. It seems I am destined to live it more than talk about it for a while. Best wishes to everyone, thank you, and hey, if I actually have the time to comment on something current, I’ll make the effort. Thank you, and see you later – more “mata ne” than “sayonara”.

Teaching has helped, since even if I could read well, I had to learn how to explain grammatical issues to beginners, things that many textbooks don’t handle right. That meant I researched certain things with much finer detail than before. Anyway, that’s all for now. More soon I hope. – J

I don’t know what the best plugin is for this, but if anyone has an idea, I’m all ears. For now I’ve fixed the problem, and for a long time I shied away from using spoiler tags because I knew it ran the risk of catastrophic failure, but this is getting just ridiculous. And unworkable. I can’t write about anime without dealing with spoilers at some point…

Also, I discover that the more formulaic what I try to do, the less well it gets done. I’ll try to do things more free-form and keep it flowing.. when I’m up to it. Thanks, carry on…

And So, The Fall 2010 Season Begins

Tamayura is a tale about a girl in what in the West we might call “10th grade,” the first year of “high school,” who loves photography and has moved to a school in the town where her father grew up. The “tamayura” themselves are light balls that appear as an effect in photographs, as shown in some of her father’s photos. Our main character, Fu, is rather shy with self-introductions and is working on making new friends, approaching the ordinary world with a sense of wonder.

So, it’s basically an anime about adorable young girls, photography, and appreciation of life. It comes courtesy of Junichi Sato.

Based on “episode 1,” which is in essence a promotional video for a direct-to-DVD release later this fall, the visuals are top-notch, the opening and ending themes are appropriate to the material, and it is altogether pleasant and charming, and indeed, adorable.

Those who can read Japanese can check out this site for more info. Those who can’t, well, just stare at the nice imagery, I guess?

show

WARNING: Spoiler Tags MUST Be Closed In Order To Work.

Thanks and enjoy.

ちょっと前に初めのバイリンガルなブログポストを実行しました。「A Bold Experiment」と呼ばれた。どうぞ！

お楽しみ。