Carp and Spiders

On May 5th, Japan celebrates Children's Day. I am not sure what the big deal is about children...I mean I guess they are alright. Anyway, to celebrate the children, they have big old carp banners that they hang. The idea is that carp are healthy and lucky in history or something. The people want their kids to be like the carp and grow big. In a valley near my house, they have strung carp banners across the whole little valley. 

 See? Colorful right? Go children! Become like the fish!

 My friend Chitaru also told me that they want children to be like the carp because the carp can or sometimes swim up through waterfalls (I guess like the salmon) and they want their children to climb the waterfalls of their life...or something. May your children be like flying fish...slimy, slippery and airborne. 

Sometimes I feel like the school is just messing with me when they throw out stuff for school lunch. Here we had noodles in a bag that you had to combine with the meat stuff. Also you can see the spinach and something green something or other. 

 To add to the Japanese hall of horrors, we have this monster of evil that I found last week. Some people advocate keeping these big freakin' spiders around to kill the other bugs. You know that the problem is with that right? The only bugs that I can't handle are these spiders. No. Way. Ugh, I nuked this with bug spray. 

Not 3 days later, I found this horrifying cousin of the previous spider. I did consider spider resurrection, but I was forced to face the fact that there was more than one. For reference, those tiles are 4-inches wide.