Doctor's Visits and Star Festivals

Spent another enjoyable Saturday morning/afternoon at the women's clinic today, to get the results of my uterine cancer/health check from last month.  I went in shortly after 11am, thinking I'd be in and out rather quickly since I was just there to get the results from the check.  Nope.  Had to sit for an hour and a half before I was called in to see the doctor.  He showed me the paper with my results, told me I had no uterine cancer (yay!) and that all of my blood counts, blood pressure, cholesterol, etc. was all normal.  Though there was a little asterisk next to my BMI and he told me I was "ちょっとやせています" (a little skinny), but that otherwise everything else was fine.  Took all of 1 minute, then went out to wait again for about 10 minutes before they called me up to the counter to hand me the same exact documents the doctor just went over with me, and tell me there was no charge for today and that was it.  Woo.

Today is 七夕 (tanabata, Star Festival).  I'll let Wikipedia tell you about it in more detail, but normally one would write their wish on a piece of paper and hang it on bamboo.  However, it's been rainy all day and it's said that your wish won't come true if it's cloudy/rainy, so I didn't make a wish this year.  Tanabata was the first festival I got to experience when I came to Japan for my homestay 8 years ago, so I am quite fond of it.  Though I didn't make a wish, I did make some of the traditional origami to hang on the bamboo sprig I got from my boss.  :)  I don't have a picture, but here's a website where you can learn to make some origami of your own: Star Festival Origami

Now, just thought I'd upload a slideshow of some pics I never got around to putting up here, from the Thai Festival that Roomie and I went to last month.

Now just some other recent pictures:

Roomie and I met up with C-chan at a cool cafe!

Roomie and I made pancakes at home!  In high school my friends and I would always put food coloring in our pancakes, so for old time's sake I wanted to do it again.  The powdered food dye is a lot stronger than the liquid stuff so the colors came out really amazing.  I don't recommend using the blue though, unless you want hunter-green poo for two days.  That was weird..