me to taka: “how’d you sleep?”
taka: “i slept tight”
me: “what the hell does that mean?”
taka: “you told me to sleep tight, i did.”

yesterday, taka got a letter from the uscis (new name for ins) and the conditional status of her residency has been removed. the first 2 years were on the condition that our marriage was legit and now that they’re satisfied that it is, her residency is permanent.

the entire process was straight forward. since we did all of the paperwork at the US embassy in Japan, we didn’t have to do an interview, and other than a few sets of documents and letters from our friends and an appointment to take fingerprints, it was pretty easy. taka and i did all the documents by ourselves (f expensive lawyers) and the fees for the whole process was under $1000.

a few weeks ago there was this 60 minutes episode about horror stories of people trying to become residents, like couples where the husband died during the 2 year conditional residency and the wife was being deported, so that freaked us out a little bit. but short of me dying, i never thought there’d be any problem in our application process, and it’s now one less thing to worry about.

i made the appointment to get my wisdom teeth pulled almost a month ago and i’ve been anxious about it ever since, and each time i felt like just canceling, i realized that i get a 4 day weekend if just go through with it, so yeh, today i got them pulled.

the procedure was quick and painless. the oral surgeon, dr. silegy, is this buff, cool dude, with a very fancy office and hot nurses. i think i already mentioned that he’s one of the surgeons on that extreme makeover show. after they put the anesthesia drip in me, i had about 10 seconds to say ‘i’m feeling woozy’ before i was out. when i woke up, i felt like i hadn’t even fallen asleep, and there wasn’t any pain.

taka took the day off to drive and take care of me, and i picked up gears of war 2 to keep me entertained. i’m also on a good strong dose of vicodin and a steroid called methylprednisolone, so i feel pretty drugged up and pain free. at least it’s over with, and after this heals i can start some braces.

two years ago today, me, my wife, and my friends were waking up in japan after a night of drunken karaoke-ing after a day of wedding-ing. it’s hard to believe that it’s already been two years, but they really have been great. i won’t start to gush about my wife ’cause no one likes to hear couples gush, but i really am lucky to have her.

random, but astronaut garret reisman who went up on sts-123 and lived aboard the international space station for 3 months, installing the new japanese science module, kibo among other things, signed this for me yesterday:

and this is a part of taka’s card that i thought was cute enough to post up here:

tonight taka and i took our first dance lesson. we’d been talking about doing it for a while and taka finally found a dance studio only a couple of blocks away from where we live. we’re going to be taking classes twice a week and tonight the first dance we took on was the cha cha cha. Neither of us are much for dancing, but by the end of the 1 hour session we had the basic steps down.

it was a lot more fun than i thought it would be. half of the class were beginners and half were more intermediate, but they were all good looking and we rotated partners often. i was under-dressed. everyone else was dressed classy in slacks and dress shirt and wearing fancy dancing shoes. i was wearing my gym pants, a black wife beater and tennis shoes, but now i know to class it up next time.

our next class is swing, which i imagine will be a much more useful dance at parties and random social events. if we find we only have time to take one class, i’m assuming it will the swing, because i can’t imagine we’ll have too many opportunities to cha cha cha. we’ll see how it goes.

taka and i’ve been playing tennis once or twice a week on the weekends or after work. there are some really nice courts at wilson park in torrance and if those are occupied, there are about 10 courts at torrance high that we can play at too.

great exercise and we’re getting pretty good too!

anyone wanna challenge us? :)

mike and lisa got their wedding pictures and they look great. i was a dancing machine at the reception after i took full advantage of their open bar. here’s a couple of pics of me in action.

taka and i are actually planning on learning to tango. there’s a dance studio just a few blocks from here that we’re going to take classes at.

and me getting groovy with the beautiful bride

taka’s always leaving me these silly notes, but i figured i should share her advice with you all since we live on the same planet.

click on the image to see a full screen shot:

me: *spit out my coke* “whatf#@?!”

of course i knew she meant she just checked him into his flight, but yeh, not words you want to hear from your wife when she comes home.

she said she didn’t actually know who the hell he was, but one of her co-workers passed her a note during the check-in process to let her know. she had never seen him in any of his work, but she said he was “pushy and demanding” i was like “if you only knew…” he also checked in under his real name and not his porn name of course, so even if she had heard of him, it probably wouldn’t've connected. she’s bound to meet all kindsa famous folks at her new job, and i’m bound to get all giddy since i’ll be only 1 degree away, or maybe half a degree with california marriage laws they way they are. stay tuned!