A French restaurant and saving a life for a little while

 On my wife's birthday, Ian (he's the one who shared the Ohenro Pilgrimage with me) and his family took us to a very nice French restaurant for supper. The building is about half way up the hill that has that huge statue of Kannon at the top. This was the view from the parking lot, looking out toward Izumi Chuo.

 Looking in through the windows you can just make out some of the tables. The food was delicious, by the way, and the company even better.

 This is the view toward the east. I think my condo may be the blob near the left edge almost on the horizon.

My wife and I went to the doctor's to get the results of our physicals. We are both in good shape. We decided to walk to Green Mart to buy coffee. As we passed through a little park, Masayo noticed a red dragonfly struggling on the ground. It was obviously close to dying because of the cold. She picked it up and covered it with her hands. Then blew through her fingers to warm it. After about five minutes it had revived enough to start flapping its wings to generate some heat by itself. When we reached Green Mart, she brought it inside with us and left it on a surface where it could enjoy the heat from the building's air conditioning. We knew that it would not really save the poor thing, but it made us happy to give it a little more life in a comfortable environment.

Scenes from one of my days

 Still looking into the part at Asahigaoka, I found grade school kids and there teachers cleaning up the park. The teachers teach the kids about various things that can be seen in the park, but the kids also bring plastic bags with them and pick up the trash that the adults have thrown around. This is a great idea. Maybewhen the kids are adults, they will not just toss stuff on the ground when they are finished with it.

 Here some of the kids (left and front) are picking up stuff and another (center back) is writing some kind of report.

 I reached Miyagi Gakuin U a half hour later and stopped in the men's room. One nice thing about working at a women's university is the things are clean and the janitorial staff put decorations in the toilets.

 The view out the window of the teachers' lounge. The white squarish area on the mountain side is a ski slope that is covered with snow, not much yet but enough so that we can see it.

 It was dark by the time I finished classes. This is the bus stop in front of the school, where the students wait in line for buses. There are three routes that stop here. The one I take goes to Asahigaoka and the other two both go to Sendai Station, but by different routes. There are also stops on the other side of the street and about a five minute walk away.

 The structure in the foreground is the soccer stadium and the mountain in the background is called Izumigadake.

 There may be some snow in the nearby mountains but along our levee the flowers are still blooming.

Back at Miyagi Gakuin U the next day, I looked out of the teachers' lounge window and discovered workmen putting up the Christmas lights on the chapel.

On my way to work

I was very surprised to see the black and white sign on the bus. It is an add for Amazon.com Japan, the place where I now buy most of my books. Actually most of the book I get are for my Kindle so I must buy them from the US site, but this was an ad for the Japanese site, which has lots of books in Japanese as well as English.

Another crane looking for breakfast. This time of year we see many of them along the river.

This was taken from the balcony next to our living room. It was very foggy as you can see.

On the hill nearest the Tohoku Gakuin U Izumi campus, this hill collapsed during the quakes. The road is one of the access routes to the high school run by the university and it is again open to traffic.

On this morning gardeners were cutting back the trees and bushes around our condo. I had to walk through the cuttings on the ground to get out to the path along the top of the levee.

I stopped in the middle of the bridge to take this picture. The structure on the right is the soccer stadium. Although it was cloudy, the mountains to the west were quite clear.

At the intersection nearest the Yaotome subway station, I found a large work crew putting scaffolding around an apartment building. They will repair damage from the quakes.

Since I was a little early, when I reached the Asahigaoka subway station, instead of going straight up and waiting in the bus depot, I went out to look at the park. I found a group of elderly (actually many of them looked younger than me) people warming up for a walk using ski poles. This is the latest fad here. The poles allow you to walk faster, because you can push with your arms. Also it gives your whole body a better workout than just walk. There is a potential problem, however. Many people who try this with out instruction manage to severely hurt themselves.

Birds and other stuff

 This is my Thursday night class at Tohoku Gakuin U. There are actually five students but one was absent. This semester I am spending the first thirty minutes talking about the evening's subject and then the students talk among themselves about the same subject. They are not limited to that subject and often wander off into areas that are of interest to them. The idea is that a language student learns to talk by talking, speaking about their own ideas using the language that is already in their head.

 This ad was in the subway. It shows why there will be jobs for native speaking English teachers for a long, long time in Japan. Look at the left end of the ad. The text says, "Let's!". Most Japanese, in spite of six or more years of studying English, think that "let's" is a verb, so you hear and see things like "Let's sports". This ad by the way is trying to get new students for the Tohoku Seikatsu Bunka University's high school.

 The view as I walk along the level on my way home at night.

 Here you can see the reflections in the river. My new camera is amazing. I have never been able to get a decent night scene before. Now I can get this quality picture, hand-held.

 Early on Thursday morning, I was on my way to school and this crane was fishing for its breakfast.

 A little further down the river, this crane was resting. Presumably it had finished breakfast. I was happy for the cranes but a bit sad for the fish that became the meals.

This is the same crane as above, but with this wider view you can see the crow that is sitting on the rocks at the left.