Home sweet Yamanashi-shi

This is a little cellphone photo from the balcony of my apartment overlooking the station building. I've been in Yamanashi-shi about 3 weeks now, and am finally getting settled into my new apartment and into being back in Japan. I still don't have the internet, but hopefuly it will get installed sometime this week or next week at the latest.

Yamanashi-shi is in the Kofu basin area, surrounded almost 360 degrees by mountains. It is a bit strange, but it's a bit unnerving to me to be living in essentially a large mountain spiked bowl . It's the first time I've lived somewhere not bordered at least on one side by a beach of some sort.

More pictures to come soon, once internet permits :)

where did the time go??

This is the state of my room. Note the knitting on top of my carry on luggage.
The reason?

Oh dear.

Asian Blepharoplasty

While I was studying at Waseda University, I wrote a paper and did a presentation on Asian Blepharoplasty, or the surgery used to create a double eyelid, and the social commentary surrounding body image. I created the above image thanks to the help of my classmates in a language class I was taking to illustrate the diversity of eye shapes and eye color and how the double eyelid, or lack there of, was perceived in an Asian society.

When I presented this image to my mostly Japanese classmates, I also asked for descriptive words that they could associate with the images of eyes. The most common descriptor for the eyes possessing a double eyelid was "awake", which is also one of the top reasons patients who elect for the double eyelid surgery give for wanting the procedure. For more information about plastic surgery in Asia, take a look at this article in Time Magazine, Changing Faces.

Social commentary aside, I found this image while organizing my files, thought it was interesting, and wanted to share.

Knitting is postponed until I finish packing up for my move back home tomorrow.

one cup Harry Potter, one cup Japan, a pinch of Ravelry and a dash of knitting

So I've been keeping a bit of a secret from you all (well, most of you already know ) but I was accepted into the JET Programme in April, and I'll be living and teaching in Yamanashi prefecture come the beginning of August.

I am very excited and not at all done packing yet! It's been a hectic past couple weeks, and I can only expect things to get a little crazier as my departure date gets closer. I've been working almost full time at a summer conference job at my university, and while things have been fun, it hasn't left me with a lot of time for packing and preparing to move to Japan.

On the knitting front, I've been working on my Earth Squared Blanket

I finished my first brown square, and started right into the next white (beige? tan? toasted pine nut?) square. I had to order more yarn for this blanket, because I mistakenly thought 6 balls of Patons Classic Merino would be enough. Only after I finished one square and realized I had used almost half of one ball, did I finally come out of my delusional state.
I think I would have progressed much faster on the blanket if I had not received an invite to Ravelry a couple days ago and spent the better part of my online time looking at other people's projects. Feel free to add me as a friend. (just search for my blog)

With this :
Hopefully arriving in my mail box tomorrow, I don't see my knitting getting any faster, since I haven't quite figured out how to knit and read at the same time. Though I might try and learn :)

Warm weather = decreased knitting impetus

I finally cracked open a ball of the Chestnut Brown!

I do like how the blanket is going so far...but it is slow going!
I haven't had much desire to knit lately, and my free time has been spent watching episodes of the new Doctor Who and sleeping.

The entirety of April was spent furiously job hunting and resume writing, and eating far too much dessert. Apparently when stressed, I turn to sweets. ^_^;; This has led to a rather embarrassing amount of weight gain in only a month! Time to get back to gym, and use those sugar craving to fuel unprecedented knitting speeds! (I'm only half joking ^_^）