Towada Art Center

Ian and I actually got out and about this weekend! wahoo! The weather wasn't crumby and snowing but rather raining on the foot and a half of snow that's laying around. So it was wet slogging around on foot exploring down town Towada City. We got some decent internet directions off a blog about how to get to the arts center and ended up getting a little lost finding it. More from my lack of reading the directions than anything else. But we ended up coming upon it from the back and looking at a sculpture covered in snow thinking, "Is that a sculpture or is that a pile of snow?" "Wait a second, there's a giant ant, I think we found it". There is some really awesome public sculpture all around the museum and the building is beautiful by itself. Here's the English link: http://www.city.towada.lg.jp/artstowada/eng/index.html. It hadn't been updated since 2011 so we were a little worried about it being open.

We saw some work by some pretty famous artists that I remember seeing in the Duncan collection in Lincoln. Our favorite exhibition had to be this white room with a white table and a white chair on top of it. Above the table was a hole in the ceiling. Also attached to the ceiling was the body of a white baby seal with the head disappearing into the ceiling. The attendant lady told us to take off our shoes and climb on the table/chair and look through the hole on the ceiling. When you got up there you were surrounded by water and plants and some how they had like a fog machine set up and it was like some primordial swamp thing. It was pretty darn amazing because you would never think that was up there. The entire permanent collection of this museum was all a bunch of large sculpture or installation art, I swear to you there wasn't a single painting in the entire building. I am going to have to make little day trips over there and hang out in there library and look at the books, drink tea and surf the wifi.

After the Museum we wondered around looking for a restaurant but all we kept running into was french pastry shops. We finally went in one and got a cute little cupcake with a chocolate raccoon face on it, which eventually got smooched on the adventure to Hard Off. After we got cold and wet walking around we made our way back to the car and then started looking for Hard Off. Which is the craziest store name on the planet. It's a huge thrift store. The problem with Japanese thrift stores is they just don't have any good deals. You go in and look at stuff that's in near pristine condition and you pay store prices for it pretty much. They did have an amazing array of electric guitars, plastic anime figurines and tiny mismatched china.

After all that walking around in the cold and wet I was totally craving some Indian food so we drove back to Misawa to try out the other Indian restaurant that we hadn't had yet. After feasting on all the naan and dahl the baby started kicking like a soccer star. I think we've found her favorite food. 

Speaking of which, we found out that the baby is a girl. At least it looked like that on the ultra sound. I could say this and she'll come out a he, but in the mean time she is Beatrix to us. We are having lots of fun batting around crazy middle names for her. She'll probably never forgive us. Other than that she seems like a perfectly normal, 14 oz baby, so no worries there.

Which means that I'm now plugging away at her baby quilt. I'm doing some traditional Japanese embroidery called Sashiko on the front and the back. It's all done in running stitch and I'm doing pretty well considering it's my first time working at keeping all my stitches regular and following the pattern. Ian wanted the Cart Wheel pattern on the front block and I chose a Hemp Leaf design for the back. The Hemp Leaf pattern was traditionally used on baby kimonos in hopes that they would grow as hardy and as resilient as the hemp plant. I'm also knitting up a whole slew of cute baby stuff.

The other interesting news is that we have another foster dog staying with us. Buddy, our last foster puppy was only with us for ten days and even that was looking like forever because of the constant accidents and hard bites. But Ginger our new foster dog is a much better house guest. We are actually considering adopting her because she gets along so well with Ian. I call her his girl friend.

She's an adult Shiba Inu that is unfixed, potentially pregnant and has heart worms. She's already had two litters that we know of but I'm not looking forward to finding room for a litter of puppies in our tiny kitchen. Hopefully, by the end of this week we'll have more information on her medical condition because it would be really great to get her heart worms under control so we could get her fixed...etc. She's pretty spunky and keeps me active with all the walks I have to take her on. Lots of fresh air at the crack of dawn every morning.

In other news, Ian has started taking pretests to be able to level up his job skills. The only problem is that you have to get three 90+ to be able to take the actually test and practically nobody has been able to do it. Thank goodness he's a better test taker than I am and actually has a shot at it. Keep your fingers crossed that he gets this because it would be really nice for him to have another achievement. They've also switched him to working support which means that he is managing tools, making inspections and tasking jobs. He's sort of a go between for the sergeants and the airman. He's liking this job much better and he's getting home at a reasonable hour most of the time.

That's all there is to report at the moment. Maybe we'll get another fun adventure soon, there's another art museum in Aomori that I've been dying to see.