Thursday, October 17, 2002

we're gonna meet at 12 at hachiko ppl! Gomen Zoom and I went and decided things... lol. We can eat lunch together and then go shopping ^^

I went to Hiroo /by myself/ today... cuz no one could go. I found the place alright, went in... they took all the stuff off my teeth and sent me home. lol! Went back to Ebisu and met Dad and went to supper :) A cute little pasta place and we had /really/ good pasta... Went back to school got my math book and came home. Posted on RR ^^

I probably should be going to bed! tyredness.

posted by lisa on 10/17/2002 05:53:00 AM

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Wednesday, October 16, 2002

the PSAT day! I hardly saw you Erin! Talk to you for two seconds before someone else comes up "ERIN! sashiburi!! *kyaaa!*" lol!!! hontoni I hardly saw you. See you on Saturday tho. See all you on Saturday! Yay! Hoodies ^^
I have a dentist appointment today, and I have to go there by myself. Most likely. Seeing if someone can go with me. gr. But its in Hiroo and I've never been to the office there, only the one in Shinjuku! Dad can't go with me cuz he's really busy. *whimper* I'm only going cuz the stuff they put on my teeth at the end of the braces treatment is cracking and falling off and my teeth are moving because of that. Not cool. And I don't want my teeth to move! My retainers dont fit right either. Well, the bottom one does. Top doesn't, cuz I got it first when my teeth weren't capped and then they didn't want to make a new one when they were, so now it doesn't fit right and doesn't keep my teeth straight. ARG! stupid teeth. So hopefully they'll do something. Yada yo!

been writing to Kels lots these past few days ^^ Its so nice to be close again. We always fought before, got annoyed with each other. But that week with her in the summer just clinched it :) Tell each other so much... =D

hehe i should be doing hw, its study hall.

posted by lisa on 10/16/2002 08:54:00 PM

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I still haven't found time to read your entry lisa! ah! I will read it at some point tho... hehe^^

this week is crazy... I was at CAJ yesterday. PSAT! ok the test sucks... but it was great seeing everyone! escpecially lisa and jas!! hehe^^ tiring... tomorrow I'm going to Kashiwa Hi-ba... the friday is thrift shop... then there's the rally on saturday... way too busy yo. *sigh* I wanna go to Nojiri! like when people are actually there. :P i'll write some more tomorrow. maybe.

posted by nori on 10/16/2002 07:11:00 AM

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Tuesday, October 15, 2002

yah stress camp was awesome! wooha.

jaz is in mikey's mission... i told mikey to tell jaz i missed her but he didn't. lol!

all i ever /do/ is skymail... never call anyone. ever... but my phone reached 1000 received mails! woohoo! i sent like hundreds of mails over break... twas fun. (is laughing....)

you guys gotta come to nojiri! and if Jaz is there at the same time... =D that'd be so fun! That'd be /awesome/... if we were all there together! Ah I love Nojiri.

Mom sent newspaper clippings about the kidnapping things to Bryan cuz he's gonna learn Korean, and the abduction thing probably didn't make huge news over there, and he never reads the newspaper anyway. So yeah...

i have to go post on rr now! hehe.

posted by lisa on 10/15/2002 04:41:00 AM

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Here's the whole thing about stress camp! Have fun reading ;) it originally started as an email to kels, but then I realized I didn't want to write it over again for lj/dj/blog, so I emailed basically the same thing to kels. So it may read kinda weird. And I put my team's inside jokes in where they applied. Muahaha.

Stress camp! woo. it was fun. Hontoni, it was fun! My group was: Hannah Schmidt, Karen Dickey, Naoko Sato, Lisa Benson, Brent Potter, Phil Hicks, and Luke Cummings. They were fun :)

First day!

We started off from CAJ, got in our groups, met our leaders, took off for the station. Got on the train, other groups were with us, but each group got off at different stations. No one went as far as we did tho: we went to the end of the line and then five more stops on a different line. So we went /really/ far...
When we got off the train, we filled up our water bottles and started hiking... on the road. Walked on the road for a while... Saw a blind snake (look it up!) eat a worm, and that was really cool! Saw a frog, Luke wanted to eat it... so eventually we found a trail (apparently the wrong one, but it saved us hours of hiking!) to go up, and it was so freaking steep! Not like we could go straight up the mountain, so it zigzagged, but oh my goodness if you fell that was it... not like you’d die, but you’d get hurt... considerably. Well, I guess you could die... Anyway. Some of the girls in my group were like, “ah! I can’t carry my pack! Can you carry it for me Luke/Brent?” and scrambled up without their packs. Not me tho! I ended up carrying my pack the whole way! Only girl from my group to do that. woohoo!
We ate lunch along the way, some people were acting desparate for food and put mayonaise on /everything/... carrots, chips, etc... kept on hiking... Our leader, Mr. K, told us our goal was a Holiday Inn. Not really of course, but it was a small building with mountain water running next to it. With a toilet. So it was the Holiday Inn of stress camp! We didn’t reach it that day tho. We ended up hiking well into the night, and we were tired, hungry, frustrated, and cold. Some ppl were truly freaked out of hiking in the night, and not everyone had flashlights either. So we camped out on the mountain, quite a ways away from the Holiday Inn we found out later. It was so butt freezing cold up there! Set up our flysheets and groundsheets, some of us got out our sleeping bags, and Mr K. comes over from the guys’ camp with food. Even though it was night and time for supper, we didn’t want to make a fire so we ate lunch food. Lead bread and canned peaches. So after I helped set up the food some of the other girls didn’t want to get out of bed to eat, but I refused to bring them their food so they had to get up. I wanted to kill them all. All of them I tell you! That’s why I was so adamant not to bring them their food. I was so tired and frustrated... yes anyway, better stop before I say something I’ll regret. So after food I changed, got out my sleeping bag and put down a groundsheet on the sloping side of the the fly sheets and I couldn’t move otherwise I would have smushed Lisa. Gr.

Second Day!

Ok that next morning Mr K. comes over and starts to sing to us to wake us up, and it worked... We took so long to clean stuff up and get ready. Hiked over to where the guys were, had a snack, and then went on our way...
yah. A lot of boring hikingness. Bamboo... that was annoying. The path was pretty much overgrown with it. Well, there was a path, but the bamboo on the sides leaned over into the space above it. Do you know how strong bamboo is?? Walking down steep paths we needed stuff to hold onto, and bamboo thingys really held our weight well! And when we were going up too. Very nice.
We ate breakfast at some high point when we were trying to find the trail down the mountain. After eating, Mr K found it, and we hiked down, then hiked back up the next mountainish part. But that mountainish part was the actual summit! I was the first girl to reach it ^^ and I carried my pack that whole way. It would have been a gorgeous view up there had it been a clear day, but it was still breathtaking with the fog below the tips of the mountains there. 1718 m up in the sky!
Walked down again... and got to the Holiday Inn by lunch time, and *sigh* that was nice. We made a fire and had the first night’s supper food. I must say, that was the best food the whole trip. Noodles in a vanillaey yogurt sauce with carrots and onions and meat. yum... We had devotions there and a little rest, then got back on the trail and hiked for quite a bit longer.
It was starting to rain when we left, and so that whole walk after Holiday Inn was kinda wet and icky. The trail was boring, and I hardly thought at all if I wasn’t talking to someone, which wasn’t often. That was the first time I’d ever not thought... you know? my feet were hurting and I’d noticed the weight of my pack more clearly and stuff, it was dark and my flashlight was dead... So we finally get to this building after what seemed like hours and hours of hiking, and its where Mr K intended for us to stay, but there was already one guy in there, sleepingish... So the guy agreeded to let us be in there, and we agreeded to be super quiet. Which is amazing cuz we actually did stay quiet! Btw, the building was meant to be for people hiking the trail to sleep in cuz its really not humanly possible to hike that whole trail in one day. So we ate lunch food for supper /again/, (more lead bread and then canned pineapples. Then we went to sleep. Sweeet sleeep... Thing is, this building, we all had to sleep in the same room. Normally we were supposed to use the fly sheets and the guys camp a ways away from the girls so there’s no possibility of “problems”. But we all slept in the same room... muahaha.

Third Day!

I kept waking up in the night/middle of the morning, and I saw the guy leave while Mr K. was cleaning up stuff before waking us up. Then we got up, changed in our sleeping bags, and went outside to eat last night’s supper food (rice with carrots and onions and pork). A lot of us warmed up our gloves by the fire; Brent warmed up his pink hat (lol) and Luke burned his shoes...
Then we kept hiking. Semi boring trails, a little interesting stuff here and there. Nothing worthy of writing, it’d just add to the longness of this entry. But we started bushwhacking down the mountain cuz Luke led us off, and eventually we got to this river! “yay! a river! and look!! Its the ROAD!” so as it was getting dark we crossed the river (some ppl got wet, poor things.) and climbed up to the road. We sat there for quite awhile, changing socks, kissing the road and taking pictures, talking and resting. We figured that we weren’t too far from Mr K’s special 10-min-away-from-OBC camping spot, and if we walked along the road a few hours we’d get there. At one place where we took a rest Mr K and the leaders for the day looked at the map and figured out that we were considerably closer than we thought we were, which means less walking for us. And then he gave us beef jerky and chocolate.
Demo the whole time from the river on, my right ear felt weird. You know when you’re in a plane and your ears pop? it was like that, but my ear never popped. The left one did, but the right one didn’t, so everything I said and did, all my footsteps, were magnified in my head. Then, the really weird thing, was the ear that was blocked up was really hot and red, and the other ear was cold and normal looking. So we walked for a long time and my ear wouldn’t unpop, and I was getting /really/ frustrated with that. Eventually the loud steps got so annoying I was looking for ways to make it less, and if I turned my head to the right while I walked it was better. Not gone, but less. So I walked that way for a long time... And it was so annoying I was almost crying, and I was in the back of everyone cuz I couldn’t walk fast and if I tried to catch up I couldn’t turn my head to the right. It was awful. So Lisa, who was so kind, told the leaders that we needed a break. We stopped there on the road, taking up a whole lane... (any cars that went by had to drive around us, hehe) and when I tried to lay down the sudden change of position made this sharp pain shoot through my ear, so I just held/pressed my ear and laid there crying... But after a bit it felt better, and it seemed... unblocked, so I sat up and had some juice and then they pulled out mini oreos for snack, and I seemed fine and genki, so the rest of the way I was happier :) Thank goodness for that rest. Tis what I needed.
So we walked for a long time after that, passing by tumble down old shacks/houses and through little parts of towns and stuff, and eventually came to a little bit more civiliazation. Came to a station which was really close to the camping spot, sat there for awhile, resting cuz all our feet were sore, and Mr K bought us drinks from the vending machines there... Phil called home, and let Lisa talk to Neal ^^ twas cute. “yes mom, i love you too...” (aww!) then we got firewood from his wife (we cheated, ahahahaha) and then went to our camping spot. It was under a big roof, and there were toilets that flushed. So even though it didn’t rain we slept under a roof! And didn’t have to use the flysheets. Yes! But the cement was hard. :P oh well.
We had a campfire on the rocks next to the river, and that was nice. We had hot cocoa!! Yay!! The supper: Hobo dinners. Potatos, carrots, onions cooked in the cans, then the water drained out and then the stuff dished up onto aluminum foil, we add spam (ick. It really /is/ disgusting!!) and mushrooms (canned, icky. but i ate both the mushrooms and spam, wow...) and add butter to it, wrap it up, and stick it on the glowing coals for 15 minutes. Told a few stories (phil: and hes like woah...) and then ate. But i wasn’t very hungry and the spam was making me lose what little appetite I had. I was just feeling /so/ crappy, so Karen and I went up and went to sleep.

Fourth and Final Day!

Woke up to Mr. K’s singing. Then he gave us “vitamins”. They used to be our antidepressants, but they morphed. M&Ms can do that I guess. ^^ Packed up slowly, had devotions, then we headed out towards camp. Walked for a bit, then I saw the sign hanging from the cement wall: Okutama Bible Chalet. Never been happier to see it! Walked up that slope, and cheered! And we were the first group there ^^ I think it was a little after 9 or 9:30. We had to clean out our bags then, clean up the flysheets and groundsheets, put stuff away, etc. When we were done, people still weren’t coming... Went over to the dining hall and outside they had Costco muffins and apple juice and hot chocolate! Heaven! the muffins were so soft ^^ Then some of our team went to go take ofuro. I wasn’t done with my muffin yet so I was still outside when the next group came. The people who were still outside were all kinda spread out and out of sight of the road that leads into the camp, so the group coming up started cheering “We’re the first group! Yaaaay!” Then I leaned over the rail and shouted “no youre not! aha!” and they all were like, “NOOOO! There’s another group here already! NOOO!” and I just laughed. It was funny. And they thought they went the farthest too... They did go pretty far but not as far as us. Muahaha.
Showers were nice... kept my braided hair in, I put on my shoes... my feet were so happy ^^ and I had my CK shirt and phone and lipgloss. I was happy.
Other groups came, took pictures of them, saw Jaz again (and her poor foot with that awful blister) and yeah... msged April ^^ who was still in Nagasaki! lol! And then we drove home.
At CAJ I saw people and I was losing my voice. Everyone was like, “Lisa that’s not your voice! What happened?” and... yeah... I was sick! oh well.
Then I came home. and rested. and talked to msn people. Happy.
Then I went to Nojiri...

posted by lisa on 10/15/2002 02:49:00 AM

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Monday, October 14, 2002

woo and I'm back too! Nojiri was so nice! great weather and clean air. Natsukashii cabin and a roaring fire :) But my room was cold. Butt freezing cold. The cabin walls were so thin that after the fire was put out it got really cold again. But for the first couple days I didn't do much. Typed up some stuff on Dad's comp. Well, homework for English about Stress Camp and then writing an email to Kels and ended up typing pretty much an lj/dj/blog entry about stress camp. Demo its on his comp and he can't hook up to the net here, so /some/how I'll have to get it onto this comp. But you guys can hear everything about stress camp when I post it, it's /really/ long...
The first full day we were in Nojiri we took a walk as a family to find a drug store in the village cuz Mom had really bad allergies, but we couldn't find one close by so we walked back and while dad got the car mom and brent and I went to the docks... Everything was closed up and taken down. The boathouse had its amado, the benches were all taken in, the rafts and buyos were in, the diving boards were taken down. But it was a gorgeous day, and we just sat on the docks enjoying the "being there".
Our cousins came one day :) they were so cute! My aunt and uncle and their two kids live up in Nojiri, so when we go up we get to see them :) Koharu is five, and Takuma is six. We played in our cabin for awhile, Koharu giving orders and stuff on "lets play this! you be this, and I'll be this, and we do this! k?" but she kept changing her mind so often I didn't have to worry about actually pretending anything. Then around lunch time her mom was like, "ok they have other stuff to do, lets go and we can play at the park ok?" *lisa you want to come?* "oh! I... guess! sure! *smile*" and it turned out to be pretty fun. Aunt Joy took us to Mt. Kurohime, and we took the ski lift (yes, the ski lift) up to the top of a ski slope and looked at the view below. They do the lift for a little while in the summer for people to look at the cosmos flowers, and we saw the tail end of the season. But the view was gorgeous! Then we went to the park and Koharu dragged me around on the slides, hehe, and then we went back to their cabin. Koharu and Takuma had kendo lessons later, but they weren't for another half hour and Koharu still wanted to play with me. So we sat in her tree house for awhile, playing with her toys and barricading the door, then after /that/ her mom comes out and tells her to come in so they can put her kendo clothes on! And her kendo clothes are so cute!! Adorable! her and taku both :) So then I went back home... and took a nap on the couch cuz Koharu demands a lot of energy ^^
I did some hemp up there, made an awesome black necklace with really cool beads on it! yeeha. and I made a bracelet for my bro ^^
Oh! my bracelet fell off *sniff* the one from mikey, so its somewhere out in the mountains near Okutama... all I have left of it is the one broken bead from this summer. arg.
My phone bill is always small! All i ever do is msg. I ended up reaching 1000 recieved msgs today! but over the vacation i msged /tons/... twas fun ^^
I have to go now, I'll find a way to post stress camp stuff. Ooh crap my english thing is still on Dad's computer! must get it later. wait, I just checked and it's due Wednesday, not tomorrow. Yes!
must go.

posted by lisa on 10/14/2002 06:53:00 AM

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Sunday, October 13, 2002

*sigh* my phone bill.... I had been so proud of myself, cuz I had only made about 2000yen worth of calls. but then I got my bill and found out that I had sent over 5000yen worth mails... just great. lol

anyways, my cousin had been over since yesterday and I've pretty much have been visiting with him most of the time. He's moving back to the States at the end of the month so I'm not gonna have that many chances to see him before he leaves. Last night we all watched Godzilla on TV for some reason... we pretty much spent the whole time laughing about how unrealistic it was in some ways. Then I watched Panic Room, with my parents and cuz. I don't know... It didn't scare me /that/ much. It was scary but... not a horror movie kind of scary... I don't know if anyone will understand that...but anyways. (lol) I got in bed after that but ended up talking on the phone till like 4:00. I slept till 11:00 but still I'm kinda drowsy. not good. my sleep pattern is all messed up. not gonna help for tomorrow. but anyways... I get to see everyone tomorrow!! yay!!! I think my dad is gonna drive me in, in the morning cuz he has to go to work anyway. how long did the test go? I guess I'll eat lunch with all you guys (^-^)
maybe I'll go lay down... tsukareta

posted by nori on 10/13/2002 09:49:00 PM

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