Date day

I figured our fun date on Monday would qualify for some bragging and a new blog post. :-) We don't get out very often. We usually stay in our quiet home in quiet, little Hagi. However, Jeremy decided to try and out-do Brendan's recent gifts to his lovely wife, Tiffany. He went shopping for and made a picnic lunch: "anti-pasta" salad (from Josiah's restaurant), potato salad, some giant juicy grapes, and of course chips. It was a delicious surprise! We decided to go to Senjoujiki (Jesse, remember climbing the rubber rope pyramid?). The weather was cloudy, but the temperature was perfect for an afternoon picnic. Everything was perfect until we discovered the lettuce used in the salad was covered in bugs - NOT very appeitizing! Luckily, we had already eaten our fill of it... After we finished gagging, we played some board games - what's a picnic with board games?! - and played some frisbee. I started out as my usual horrible-frisbee-playing self, but ended up tossing the disc around pretty good after a few minutes giving Jeremy some intense exercise. We also took a walk - but half way down realized the path had been taken over by some bugs. There was a huge, beautiful spider web spanning the entire width of the path, with a not so beautiful spider directly in the middle. We watched him catch and eat a quick snack. On the way home we passed by a pond with dozens of cranes sitting up in the trees. It was too gorgeous not to take a picture!

Our picnic spot:


The village of Heki. It's rice harvesting time - you can see the yellow fields and the smoke from the burning waste.

It's us!

Bugs. We didn't go any further...


Jeremy playing frisbee. Look at that form!

I wasn't so sure about this play equipment! The logs, though chained, rocked back and forth as you tried to walk across them.

Some of the terraced rice fields ready for harvest:

Aren't they gorgeous?

While we were watching the cranes we noticed the ground looked a little funny... it was moving! Hundreds of caterpillars everywhere! Here are some of them:

After our picnic, we drove back into Nagato where we stopped at a local grocery store to pick up some half-price bentos (Japanese meal boxes). We had a yearning for some fried shrimp maki rolls. Unfortunately, we were an hour too early for the discount, so we hung around a music store until the appointed sticker-giving time. We arrived back at the bento area just in time (the poor clerk had a crowd of at least a dozen cheapskates hovering around him). As we were eying our shrimp rolls, we noticed an old man was eying them as well... as the clerk approached the rolls with his half-price stickers in hand, the man dove in to grab one, then two... I wasn't about to let him take all four packages - we had been waiting for them for almost an hour! Jeremy quickly grabbed one, then hesitated, and after pushing him some more he finally took the last one just as the old man was reaching out for it. Success!! Why did he want three of them anyway? So we each had fried shrimp maki rolls for dinner that night, and they were sooo good! Haha!

And on a completely random note... WE ATE BEEF!!! It had been ages since we had beef, but we noticed a bunch of packages marked half-off at our favorite local discount grocery store (you can tell how cheap we are), so we bought three packs. We had beef three days in a row! It was divine. :-)