Sake festival

Yet again, at the end of October, we made the short train trip over to the Hana-no-mai sake brewery for its new sake, which they freely pour for six hours. We saw Christine there with some friends that she brought along:
And we brought a few people along with us from Four Seasons and Aichi University including Mike:
Sian with friends Sachiko and Miho:
Eric & Rachel with Ayako:
Me with a friendly obasan: Ayako with Carrie and Sachiko:
Sian was given some oranges and an empty box of chocolates from a stranger:
We enjoyed doing karaoke with a cloth on some chopsticks:
We met up with our sake buddies who we see once a year at this event:
We enjoyed watching some taiko drumming:

One great guy I met was Kenji, who cooks at a restaurant and made lots of the food we ate on that day:
He was very good at getting rounds of sake for us at regular intervals:
He also had a funny T-shirt on. You can see him here giving care to two of the guys who had passed out:
I did one of yearly traditions of taking a photo with someone who had passed out:
And finally, at the end of the event, Ayako spotted our local representative for the national government who was recently voted in, so I can say that I met somebody semi-famous that day:
Again, another fun day at the sake festival

Our first niece

Ayako's sister, Sumiko, gave birth to a girl on Friday, October 16 at 3:06 pm. She is healthy and weighs 3.13 kg. Today, Ayako and I went to visit Sumiko and her daughter (no name yet):

Sumiko was quite tired and so wasn't feeling up to having her photo taken. She had said that the day before the birth, she was craving macaroons. Because of this, we thought Macaroon or Mako (common Japanese name) would be good name for the baby, but we'll have to wait and see.

Canadian Thanksgiving Weekend

On Saturday, we had some friends over for lunch (sushi). You can see me with Yoshiko and her granddaughter, Hiromi:
Yoshioko is the woman who straightens my back from time to time. Reiko (a secretary at Four Seasons with Ayako) also came but is camera-shy. We enjoyed lots to eat and chatted during the afternoon. We were also able to go for a short walk to watch the sun set.

On Sunday, Ayako was busy again preparing lots of food for Canada's Thanksgiving Day. We invited Christine over to have Thanksgiving dinner with us. We started eating just before four o'clock:

Ayako did careful planning for when to make all the food and how to do it all from scratch. Here's a close-up of what we ate:
Ayako also made some cute cupcakes for Christine's birthday, which was last week:
Here we are after singing 'Happy Birthday' to Christine:
We had another wonderful day relaxing and talking and going to watch a beautiful sunset. Ayako outdid herself this year by serving even more delicious food at Thanksgiving than last year.

Typhoon day

Similar to having a a day off school since its a 'snow day' in Canada, I had a 'typhoon day' today and so I stayed home from work. This is typhoon season in Japan, but today's typhoon is the first to hit the mainland hard for two years. Our area was hit hardest during the night (with winds up to 198 km/h), which kept me awake for parts of it.
It had died down a lot by the time the sun rose, but it was still pretty windy. I heard that the was some damage to trees and roofs of houses in some areas as well as two people dying, but overall, the storm wasn't as bad as they were predicting.

So I was able to enjoy a quiet day at home today and tried to do some work for school (but never work that well from home). The storm definitely made the air much cooler and clearer. This evening, I was able to see Mt. Fuji from my living room window (rising up behind a school and forests). I can usually only see it in the winter so I was surprised to see it so soon:
Sorry, no pictures from the actually storm, but I will show you a photo Ayako took last week. It's a nice shot from our house just before the sun came up:
She's been getting better at taking photos than I am these days.

Gathering of uni co-workers

On Sunday, a group of teachers from work along with their families/partners came over for some lunch and and time to catch up after the summer. Here are some photos:




The kids were especially busy gathering shellfish from the lake:
It was good that they could stay to watch the sunset, although some of us passed up watching the sunset to watch the final day of sumo. Everyone left full and with smiles on their faces so I think it was a success.

Take me out to the ball game.

There was a small group of us that took the train to Nagoya to catch a professional baseball game:

We were pretty high up in the bleachers but still had a good view of the field:
And we could always see a replay on the big screen. It was also fun cheering along with the fans who had chants for each player on the home team:
Since the home team is called the Chunichi Dragons, they had a cute pink dragon as a mascot (although the official mascot is a koala bear...not sure why). They also had cheerleaders who came out 4 times during the game:
Although the home team had good chances to win the game, they only scored runs in one inning and thus lost the game 4-3. For us though, we were mainly there for the atmosphere and to watch some good baseball, so we weren't dissappointed:

Reunion parties

I had a couple of reunions over the weekend. On Friday night, I met up with my former Photonics students. It was good to hear what they had been up to over the summer and to hear that a few of them had improved their TOEIC scores even more:
On Saturday night, I met up with the current teachers at Four Seasons school for a farewell party for Rachel (second from the left). Luckily she'll still be in Japan so I'm sure we'll still see her around:
Here's another table at the farewell party:

Relaxing on Atago River

On Sunday, we went up to Atago River with Sumiko's family and some teachers that Ayako invited from work. We met up in the town of Tenryu where Rio and Neo enjoyed playing on an old train for awhile:

At the river, we had lunch and enjoyed playing games in the river like skipping stones:
and playing frisbee:
as well as just relaxing by the river:


I'm glad that the super hot weather has finished and so hopefully the weather will stay pleasant like it was on this day.