I’ve spent the past 2 months reflecting on what my part in all of this mess was. I have sought forgiveness from myself and from Laura for my less than perfect ways. Laura has yet to even admit that anything she is doing is wrong, so after two months of trying to save the marriage, I am done.

I am moving on with my life. For the past two months I had been bending over backwards for Laura trying to save the marriage. Giving in on everything and not really pushing back on anything. This year will be different. I am focusing on me, and if certain things about that statement make her angry or upset, then I’m sorry, but me and the kids are most important and I will do everything and anything to make sure that the kids first, and then myself second are taken care of and in the best possible situation.

I’m no longer letting her take advantage of me and am starting to expand my life to exclude to her. I’ve started making new friends to go out with and they are keeping me quite busy. Most of them have been through what I have am going through.

But basically, I am doing well, just not posting much.

Since doing this I have started to have a couple of good days. Many true friends have come out of hiding to support me. These are the same friends that I always show up for when they need me.

What’s funny is my wife kept telling me I should go out and spend time with my friends. But me and my friends are always busy. We have full lives with out trying to make time for each other. But I really learned and understood that “Going out with friends” isn’t what is important. That’s just keeping busy. Having friends from all over the world reaching out when you are in need, that is where the true friendship lies. And I guess that has been why I have always been content with not going out all the time. I always knew I had true friends and always felt supported by them, even when we were not in constant contact.

So, thank you to everyone out there for reminding me that true friendship goes way beyond just hanging out, but is actually about being there for each other.

I just wanted to send hugs and thanks to everyone.

Its not that I go looking for these fluffy things. But for some reason when I drive in the wee morning hours, they pick my car to jump out in front of. It usually ends up being about 1 a month when I work 3rd shift.

Tonight, my first night on 3rd shift, marked the first murder in a while.. A little possum thought it could cross the road in front of me.. Instead he learned the gross vehicle weight of my car and how that pressure feels when applied through the tread pattern of my michellen tires.

Lets hope this is the only casulty.. But knowing my luck, there will be at least 2 or 3 more before I get off third shift.

But seriosly, people here see typhoon and they think nothing of it. I have a strange feeling that the way typhoons spin backwards from hurricanes make them much weaker than hurricanes. I describe a few of the hurricanes I’ve been through to people in tokyo and they can’t believe it… They have no concept of a real tropical storm…

I just hope the typhoon doesn’t ruin my chance to to go to sumo this weekend..

Last night I went to a hanabi festival with a friend from work, the one in the photo from ninja akasak, aye-san. While there we met up with alot of her friends and they all brought homemade food and drinks and it was very nice.

Today though I just stayed home and watched Lost, bought it on itunes so I can watch it here.. Around dinner time cho-san called me and we went to get yakiniku, bbq where they sit a bbq on your table and you cook your food. He could see I’ve been kind of down lately and finally I said, lets go to pachinko. He hates pachinko but I just wanted to do something instead of going home. This time though, I knew what I was doing.. I put my 2000 yen in the machine and played.. The bells and whistles sounded and I kept playing… Then after another 30 minutes the bells and whistles again and such.. I ended up filling up three buckets with balls.. I figured each bucket was about 2000 yen each so I was up and decided to quit.. We exchanged the balls for a card, then took the card upstairs and exchanged it for some chocolate and some “Plastic”.. I took the plastic downstairs and around the back of the place and there was a door with a small whole in it. The opening was barely enough to slide a hand through. I slid my “Plastic” through the whole and the guy gave e back 16,000 yen.. I hadn’t doubled or tripled my money.. I had gotten 8x my money.. w00t… I love pachinko now ;).. Especially evangelion pachinko…

That is all.. Still homesick, but at last got to have some fun…

After ninja akasaka me and cho-san went for a walk to roppongi where we had some drinks for the rest of the night and caught the first train home in the morning. It was all in all a good night even though I was sick from all the vodka for 2 days later…

Two weeks ago or so I went to Kamakura(Big bronze buddha place), and enoshima(Sufer town).. It was alot of fun, you could even climb in buddha’s ass. We walked around and saw a few of the temples there, I think there are 60 temples in total so we didn’t see anywhere near all of them. Afterwards we caught a train to enoshhima and watched the pretty girls on the beach, and hiked to another temple and lighthouse. All in all it was alot of fun and to finish the night off we ended up going to see a live performance by a coworker in fujisawa area.

Check out the photos… Video of band will come shortly..

Second thing that makes me a looser.. I installed Hardy Heron — Ubuntu, in a virtual machine.. But get this.. The japanese archive servers for ubuntu are sooooo bad that 50 percent of the time I get 404 errors when running apt-get update.. And you know, installing SDL libraries? Impossible.. How can Ubuntu not keep the japanese mirrors in sync with the US mirrors?

Secondly we went to Edo wonderland.. Which is home to many ninjas and samurais.. This was alot of fun as they had alot of shows and it was like a festival atmosphere alot of places. Again I will let the pictures and videos do the talking for this one also:

And now the ninja video: