My wife Yoko and I really love visiting temples and shrines and we make quite a pilgrimage out of Hatsumode every year. For those of you new to the word, Hatsumode refers to the Japanese custom of visiting your favorite Buddhist temple or Shinto shrine to pay respects to the appropriate gods and pray for [...]
Anytime is a good time but …. Now is THE time, as another well-spoken Smith’s School of English Franchise owner recently said, to own a Smith’s School of English Franchise . One of the cornerstones to our success is putting to work the straight-forward and effective brand tools and brand resources exclusively available in the Smith’s School of English system. [...]
Hi everyone! It’s been a very long while since I last talked much on the topic of astronomy. Two main reasons are that I have had very little time for astronomy this summer, and even then the sky conditions were so unusually and uniformly bad that there really was no point. Atmospheric instability dominated July and August so most [...]
Every once in a while you just have to get away and relax, and this year with all its ups and downs and continuous bad news here and there and all around the world, it is tempting to just remain complacent and wait for better times. At least we are not at war! But the [...]
Hello y’all! I hadn’t actually planned this to become a competition but as an after-thought, here it is! We really do have a favorite festival each year! So here goes: this is the third and final installment in my rather lengthy 2011 Fireworks Festival Calendar and Review. Tsuruga has by far and wide been our favorite [...]
The second festival on our most-loved list and one that deserves at least an honorable mention in any one’s top five review is the Aug 8th show at Otsu Biwako. This is a very good show in a charming setting but the crowd can be quite daunting as you’d expect. The setting off the beach [...]
Hello! A handful of students at my Smith’s School of English Franchise in Kotoen are interested in science, and a couple of them have research jobs in pure science fields. It is mainly for them and for potential future students like them that I offer this. Several previous astronomy articles focused on the subject of [...]
Hope you all had a great break! With the festival season now pretty much coming to a close, I thought it might be a good idea to review and recap some of the festivals that my wife Yoko and I are particularly fond of. The rationale behind this is that next year all of you [...]
Hello all! Now I cannot profess to know very much about Ikebana, but it is one of my wife Yoko’s favorite hobbies and she is surprisingly intuitive and talented for it. Sagagoryu is the type of Ikebana Yoko has studied at length as a hobby, but anyone even remotely knowledgable on the subject can tell [...]
Hello again everyone! Recently I’ve been making a fairly continous rant about the virtues of local promotion and doing the basic leg work to grow your Smith’s franchise. I admit I have been a slow compared to some other fellow franchisees in getting this job done but I made a commitment to change that last Golden Week. In the relatively [...]
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