An Eventful Weekend

September 28th

And so we begin to mark the end of September, an act which for some reason has seemed extremely slow in coming. I nearly dissmissed a writing competition a week ago because the stories were due on the 30th.

Not only have I found time to write the story, but I feel like I've had more time than I can fill. Even with procrastination, video games, and sleeping, I find myself always thinking things are happening today when they are really happening tommarrow.



The old adage has proved opposite, time does not seem to fly while I'm having fun. Because I certainly have not been lacking in merryment. This weekend we performed our circus performance for a commercial advertising the event. It went very well, and there will be videos to follow. For the performance we made costumes in rough approximations of my sketches.

We met our host families, and they seem very nice. The host program will be a very rewarding endevour. Additionally, we visted the Namahage museum, I will have to spend a great deal more time explaining what namahage are later, but we were treated to quite a performance, which I got on video, and Jessi got on video.

But Mack, one might say, does this mean you've bought a new video camera of ultimate sparkliness. No actually, the video's were recorded on the old Zi6. After a week of laying dormant, the Zi6 seems to have regained some of it's composer. I decided to test it for a while to see how reliable the footage would be. A 3 minute clip is most often all I will need, so I decided to see how often it would record a 3 minute clip in a day. After 10 instances, it did not freeze up once. This is after I couldn't get it to record more than a minute of tape before the whole thing freezing and flipping out.

It would appear that the Zi6 requires a certain amount of rest, though I would be lying if I forgot to mention that it managed to fall from it's resting place onto the floor, on accident, and that my tests were prompted by this fall. So far it works better than ever, so I'm not one to criticize blessings.

The plan remains to have Kodak look at the thing when I return, and that I will buy my parents a spiffy nice japanese video camera. But now I can take video while I search for such a device, and thus make a slower, better informed decision on choices.

I also need to make a list of souvenir's I've bought thusfar. There are a few things I've yet to mention, but I have found many inexpensive trinkets that are especially shiny.

It's a good thing time is doing me this favor while in Japan, because I have many many things to do.

-Mack