So Shines a Good Deed Upon a Weary World

Aimee decided to go for her Bronze Award with the Girl Scouts this year. For her project she decided collect food donations for the Chandler Food Bank for the homeless. To get the award she was required to come up with an idea and to work 17 hours of community service. She organized her idea, wrote letters and created a flier and went door to door to 108 houses in the community. My initial thought that we’d get 5 donations from neighbors that we knew. I turned out to be way wrong.



We got donations from about 60 houses and filled the back of the Honda Pilot with bags and bags of food.

I estimate that we got about 300 pounds of food in one day. An amazing feat by an 11 year-old.

It was great to see the outpouring of support from our neighbors. It was great to hear from them in the notes that they left Aimee saying what a great thing she was doing. It was amazing to see that my daughter has managed to make a small, positive impact on the world.

That’s “Fu-Ro-Re-Tzu” to You

One of the things that one is required to do in Kendo is to get an identifying panel that is attached to the middle of the waist protector or “tare” on the armor section of the Bogu.
The Zekken is like a nametag of sorts in that it identifies the practitionier seeing as they are not easily identifiable once the headpiece or “men” is worn.
The Zekken usually lists the school or dojo that the person is from, their last name in English and in Japanese. Seeing as many westerners are practicing kendo they must have their names translated into a pronouncable form of Japanese. In Katakana each character represents a consonant and a vowel. Using this type of format just about any word or name can be utilized by Japanese speakers so that it could be more easily used.
Some examples of this are:
Hot Dog = ho tu do gu
California = ca ri fo ni an nu
Ice Cream = Aei su ku re mu
Maruice White (the lead singer of Earth Wind and Fire) = Morisu Howaito
In our case, since we have the infamous “L” in our name and with no “L” in the Japanese language we had to have our names spelled out the long way ‘round.
Four characters, Fu, Ro, Re & Tzu

Pocket Dump

“What’s in your pockets?”

Capturing An Essence

I saw this commercial and had to laugh out loud. It was a combination of the characters of Charleton Heston and the legend of Chuck Norris in a Latin format to create this new spokesperson for Dos Exquis. I too shall drink the elixir of the two X’s and perhaps become more interesting.

Aimee Gets Armor

It was a pretty big deal for her, but on Sunday our instructors brought over a set of bogu for Aimee to borrow. It was like Christmas day for her. It was a wonderful sight.