Day 29

One of two dressed-up fox statues guarding an Inari shrine just outside of Misawa. Inari is the Shinto god/goddess of agriculture. Corey and I drove out to see the shrine/park today (and it was freeeezing).

Day 28

Today was all about playing with my camera! Since I don't have any cute pets or kids to be my models, this monkey served as my test subject for playing with my aperture settings.

Day 27

Oh, happy day!! Lookie what I got!!!

Day 26

My meal-planning organization needs updating. Every week I sit down to a stack of papers, lists of my favorite recipes, lists of new things I want to try, and my blog reader for new inspiration. It's all over the place and it's annoying. But it works, so I'll probably keep doing it the way I have been...

Day 25

Snowboarding has made me painfully (literally) aware of how badly I need to get in shape and gain some muscles! So I'm working on it...

Day 24

Poor Corey is sporting a seriously bruised tailbone from a snowboarding spill yesterday. I played nurse/servant to my nearly immobile husband today.

Day 22 and 23

Uhh, so I maaay have forgotten to take a picture yesterday. Oops. I guess I was too absorbed in reading about photography to actually do any myself.

So I'll even it out with 2 pictures from today- one of each of us while snowboarding at Appi (I'm concealing a pile of books under my jacket, not a giant pregnant belly or gut, just so there's no confusion).

Day 21

This is our friends' snowman. He's much better than ours, even half-way melted.

Day 20

This is me just before bed, realizing I forgot to take a real picture today. Oops.

Day 19

The books I've been pouring over in between internet research about cameras, lenses, photography in general. I feel a big hobby coming on (which is saying a lot for me, since I'm not generally much of a "hobby" person)...

Day 18

Corey's first day of school! His new batch of classes starts tonight. It's almost 10:30pm and he's still not home. Who wants to be doing math at 10pm? Sadistic class schedulers...

Day 17

Our neighborhood is overflowing with snow. People shovel and plows have come through several times, but there's just no where to put it all. So we have nearly rooftop-high mountains of snow between each house (which the kids in the neighborhood had fun sledding down all day).

Day 16

The weather is NUTS today! I went to the library to get some books about photography (I'm getting sooo excited about the subject and I want to learn all I can so I can justify getting a fancy camera one of these days).

Day 15

Corey at the Mokuteki waiting for our pizza

Day 14

Sorry for the most boring picture in the history of time, but it was the only one I ended up taking today. It's our garage door stuck to the ground at 5:30am when Corey was trying to leave for work. Ten minutes of chipping away ice with a screwdriver and a pot of boiling water later, we got it to open.

Day 13

We built a snowman today after finally getting some heavy snow last night. About time! Glad we still had our dried out Christmas tree in the garage so we could give him some arms...

Day 12

What "The Island" would look like in winter (see Smokey there on the right?)

Day 11

My mom and sis can see the (tiny bit of) progress I've made on the puzzle we started when they were here. It's coming along... very sloooowly. This thing has been taking up our dining table for like 3 weeks now.

Day 10

Game nigh at Ed and Chessa's tonight! We played a new one (Agricola) that was really fun!

Day 9

Some kids playing/having some kind of field trip in the middle of the field behind our house during my walk today. Where is all the snow?!

Day 8

The streets of Misawa at dusk

Day 7

My homemade chicken gyros were a rousing success for dinner tonight. Rousing, I say! I want to bathe in that tzatziki sauce!

Day 6

Today I made cookies to send to my cousin Liz, a kick-booty Navy pilot working looong days away from family and friends. I hope she'll like them!

Day 5

Today was a sushi day. Kappa Sushi is our go-to place!

Day 4

Our friends Ed and Chessa stopped by tonight to give us a belated Christmas gift- the BSG board game! We're stoked (and completely nerdy, but don't care)!

Day 3

Sorry for the boring picture, but this sums up my day completely. As we can barely move thanks to snowboarding yesterday, we spent the whole day on the couch watching the better part of an entire season of Stargate Atlantis.

Day 2

A pic from our day of snowboarding in Towadako (written about here)

Day 1

A self-portrait of Corey and I on the first day of 2010, preparing for our snowboarding adventure tomorrow (first time for both of us)!

My Project 365

Welcome to my Project 365 blog (yes, yet another blog)!

I know these have been around for a while now, but I'm starting my year-long photo documentary blog after being inspired by the examples of several of my friends who have been doing their own over the past few months with great success (namely Stefanie at Stefanie's Project 365 Stories, who's been at it for almost a year and who's "blogumentary" has been so fun to keep up with).

I figure this is as good a year as any to do one of these, what with being in Japan and having lots of beautiful and interesting subjects to take pictures of. In the end I hope to have a visual record of a full year of my life- the big, the small, the exciting, the mundane, the good and the ugly. This time we have in Japan is something I really cherish, and I want to have as much photographic evidence of it as possible to look back on someday.

I also hope this will help me improve my picture-taking abilities since it will force me to use my camera every day. I could use a dose of creative energy in my life, and I'm sure that will be become necessary as I run out of things to take pictures of. Corey and I want to buy a fancy camera at some point, but not before we know what to do with it; hopefully this will be good preparation!

So here we go- a picture every day! I can't promise I'll actually POST the pictures I take daily, but I'll at least catch up every few days so I don't get too far behind.

Should be interesting!