resolutions

You know I'm all about taking pictures...I've done a few 365 projects (take a picture every day for a year). This year I'm going to participate in mcp's Project 12. Basically there is a monthly theme and you take a photo to match the theme. With the 365, it was more about a daily account of activities to go through a year of the life. This time, I'll try to focus more on capturing those moments, but I'll be more cognisant of style rather than just snapping a picture for each day.

The first month's category was "Resolution." My big resolution this year is to explore. We live in an amazing new place, but it's often easy to get caught up in life and not take the time to find new adventures to go on. I want to take advantage of living here and, while we certainly won't do "everything there is to do" around here this year, I want to make the most of our experiences.

I also want to make sure I'm continually seeking to learn more about the Japanese language and culture while I'm here. We are learning new words and phrases every day, and I would love to be able to go a temple or museum and be able to read the history of how it came to be.

My photo this month capture both of these goals. On New Year's Day, we had enjoyed a nice, relaxing winter break and decided we wanted to go explore. We found a beautiful park near an onsen, and spent quite a while walking around in the snow and taking pictures. It was a great way to start off the new year.

The park had some amazing statues, gates, and a whole bunch of other Japanese touches that set it apart from a typical American park.

I've always admired what Asian culture does with water - so my photo for the month is this:

just great

This night was a complete and total disaster. Which was unfortunate, because the day started out very nicely. So my friend Marcie and I went to this Bible study thing all the way in the far end of Sparks. For those of you not quite familiar with the Reno area, this is about a half hour from my house. Since it's fairly far away, we decided to take my car, rather than both driving separately. We left around 10-ish and decided to go to Jeannine's house. She's one of the youth workers in our church and has been kind of a surrogate "mom" for Marcie lately. She lives about 5 minutes from the church we had gone to earlier, so it wasn't really out of the way to stop by again. While we were there, we went out for a while (in Jeannine's car). While we were gone, her kids (they're in jr. high and high school) decided it'd be funny to toilet paper my car. Now under normal circumstances, I would have found this amusing. The circumstances under which this happened, though, were not very amusing at all. They decided that toilet paper was not quite enough, so they poured water on it to make it stick. Again, if this were it, the whole thing would have been funny. But, it was below freezing outside so the paper froze to the car. It took about an hour to strip the car of enough toilet paper to drive home. To make matters worse, the car wouldn't start. Now, I know people whose cars sometimes decide not to start when it gets extremely cold outside, and mine has never been one of them, but we decided to jump it just in case. Of course, nothing happened. So we are sure that all the freezing water probably did something to it and it just wouldn't start because of that. I tried calling home to let my parents know..since I told them I'd be home by midnight. (My parents tend to freak out when I'm not home at the time I arranged to be home. Yes, I'm 20. Oh well.) They were already asleep. So Jeannine had the lovely task of taking us home at 1 in the morning, and I'm positive I'm going to be under scrutiny tomorrow for getting home late..and for the car being messed up. I'm still hoping that the car will start in the morning, because work calls whether it starts or not.