hello

Well, we just had a really nice weekend. Saturday was Tyler's Undoukai, or sports festival. It's an anual event for Kindergartens in Japan, and a really big thing for a lot of parents. Every family was represented by at least one video and one still camera, many accompanied by a variety of accessories like tripods, lenses etc. Lots of fun.

Saturday night we went to a special function we were invited to by our family doctor. Turns out he's the president of the Sanda Rugby League Football Club and is in some way affilliated with the Wahroonga Tigers. Saturday night was a special welcoming ceremony for the Tigers under 13's who had just arrived in Japan for a 10 day stay, right here in Sanda. So we went along, met a few people, had some food and drinks and heard the Australian national anthem and Waltzing Matilda being sung in Sanda for the first time. Very cool.

Since the Autumn equinox the weather's cooled down and dried out a lot. It's very pleasant now, about 25 and low humidity. We spent yesterday in the park enjoying a bento lunch and letting Tyler run around. He's able to recognise colours now, and can repeat anything we say, in a fashion, once at least. But I sense the terrible two's coming. He's very determined and persistant and doesn't take well to being made to do something he doesn't particularly feel like at the time. He's usually very good, and not a problem at all, but sometimes he might decide he wants a couple of toys he's picked up in a shop, one in each hand, and will protest bitterly if we suggest he parts with even just one of them. But he's a lot of fun to play with now - he loves hide and seek and chasing each other around the house. He's learnt the names of a lot of the Thomas the Tank Engine characters too.

email probs

On firday night my company's email server started returning 5.7.1 relaying denied error messages whenever I tried to send mails to foreign domains. Possibly they've set up some anti spam filtering or something in light of the recent virus activity Microsoft has blessed us with. Anyway, I've hijacked misaki's mail server temporarily to stay in touch.

29...

Hi! I'm 29! As of today actually. Misaki made a nice cake for me last night, and at work they brought out a cake and stuff and gave me a really nice card. I missed a call from Dad this morning, Nan sometime later, but managed to catch up with Phil and Masako when I got home from work. Nice to talk to you guys. Misaki's crashed, and here I am, one year away from 30, celebrating with my tall can of Kirin Ichiban. I'm a bit shocked actually - it's all happened so fast, but It's all good.
At least I'm not a 9-5er, technically speaking anyway. It's not much compensation for the wierd schedule I have, but it's all better than normality. I guess. If I didn't have to wear a suit everyday I'd have no complaints. So that's another year in the life of Mark Beattie...

been a while...

about a week actually. Well, since last week the most interesting thing we did was go out last saturday night to an all-you-can-eat/all-you-can-drink beer garden with misaki's work friends. Fun. Sunday, Misaki took Tyler to meet some of her friends and their daughters, who loved Tyler to pieces. I was left at home to my own devices and so was forced to spend money on the car stereo. Just an adaptor so I can use my MD walkman. The desktop pc died, bringing an end to my efforts to burn cd's to listen to. It's funny, Misaki complains about not being able to check her emails, but then hassles me when I mention upgrading it. The thing wont event POST anymore! It's so old and smelly that to justify spending any money on it at all I'd have to completely replace most of the core components. Fine with me, but Misaki's smart enough to know that once the upgrade process begins it's a never ending vicious cycle. Again, fine with me, but she's the one thinking about where the money comes from.

music

Beet likes to listen to Groove Salad while blogging. He also enjoys Flaresound Jazzybeats. You can listen to them too!
Groove Salad - Soma FM
Jazzmusique - Netmusique

coffee coloured

I dug up my style sheets from the international coffee club (ICC) and replaced the site's green-pea colour scheme with my coffee colour scheme.
It's good.
Enjoy it.

W3C