Twas the night before Christmas

So as usual (I should just make a message I can copy and paste...) I'm a bit behind on my blogging. I was meant to post part 2 of my Christmas holiday ages ago. Truth be told, me and my amazing memory are having trouble recalling all the details exactly as they happened, so this may be a slightly fuzzy story. But anyways.

So day two we were stiff from all the exercise of the day before, but still ready to hit the slopes again. We had an absolutely enormous breakfast, then took about 30min to recover from all the food before heading to the snow. And when we eventually did head out, the combination of the super heavy space boots and all the food in my tummy made the walk quite a mission. On the other hand, the weather was perfect, as there was light snow drifting down gently, and the ski slopes were wonderfully powdery. It seems the weather was on our side. And surprisingly there were not that many people clogging up the slopes and lifts, so we had quite a good day out doing our thing. Luckily for the two of us, he had his camera with him, because I was quite scared to take mine along - visions of landing with my bum squarely on the camera forced me to be quite sensible... Had some cool pics by the end of the day though. Christmas eve dinner included a bottle of champaigne for the two of us, which we polished off quite happily over the meal :D But to be fair, it wasn't such a big bottle...

Christmas day was another wonderful breakfast, slightly less great conditions, but still lots of skiing. We even ventured out to some other mountain slopes (we had all mountain passes, but had been stuck on our one little area). We found a super beginners slope at our new place which was great. Really helped me to build up some more confidence I think. And at one point we took a less travelled on path, and found the thickest snow I've ever been through in my life! I demanded to go back again, just so that I could take off my skis and play in the snow. It was so much fun. I threw snowballs, and we both made enormous snow mounds for absolutely no reason. It was fun. The space boots made it quite tiring work though, and eventually I decided it was time to call it quits - I was quite moeg.

The last day we got 5 hour passes, and spent the whole time on the slopes by the hotel. Which was fine by me of course :) We had to catch the bus at 13:45 bus back to the airport, so we packed up and took back all the equipment in plenty time. Then of course we weren't sure where the bus would pick us up / what it would look like! But we found it eventually. Then on the bus back we got a message from his girlfriend to say that there was a good chance the flights would be cancelled, as there was a big snow storm in Sapporo that day. :( As can be imagined, I wasn't impressed. When we got to the airport, there were MASSES of people sitting around in the airport, which of course is not a good thing. :P

After standing around not knowing what to do, and then finding the queue for the standby passes for alternative flights (ours was the last flight of the day, and thus cancelled - others were only delayed), we finally got tickets to go back home. Happy happy. We flew to Kansai Airport instead of Kobe airport, which meant a longer journey home (although you can see Kobe harbour from Kansai airport, you have to drive quite around to get to Sannomiya).

If I remember right we got back at around 23:00. I was quite happy to collapse at home :)

I just dug this up from my flash disk, and realised I never posted it. ごめん。 Its from last year halloween :D

I feel like writing “Dear Diary” suddenly. For no apparent reason. Oh well.

I'm sitting on the train at the moment listening to music on my awesome new iPod (I love you Apple) - and funnily enough the music playing right now is Japanese...) - and typing my blog on my laptop. I love this. :)

So this weekend I have a bunch of halloween type things to figure out. I need to decide what I'm wearing next weekend, and probably make whatever it is too. I have to find / make gifts for my kids that are doing the comic competitions – more about that in a moment. I have to have an awesome night tomorrow night, but still get enough sleep so that I can do everything last minute on Sunday as I always end up doing. And if my Moneybookers money has gone through (which hopefully it has) I want to phone a million people at home as soon as I get some Skype credit. Hooray!!

Ok so for halloween, I'm doing specially themed classes with my kids. This week I did the ninensei classes based on halloween with a presentation, a short clip from Nightmare Before Christmas, a random YouTube video on halloween costumes, and a comic activity where I gave them scenes from a haunted house and halloween characters (ala Che, arigatou gozaimasu). Now they have till Tuesday to come up with whatever they can for the “Most awesomest halloween comic wins a random small prize” competition. :) I'm looking forward to the awesome funniness. Should be good. Anyhow...

Just going home from Sannoymiya now. Went through straight from work, so I was lugging the awesomely heavy laptop around with me (hence the playing on the train – I have it with me, so might as well use it). Wasn't nearly as busy as what I'm used to though, which was a little strange, but nice as I got a seat for once when I got there (although I was early this week, so I suppose its not that weird). Was nice to catch up with the peeps again. As of next weekend, theres going to be no relaxing on weekends anymore! Lol. Scary...

2009!

Recently for some reason I’ve been thinking about the future a lot… Yesterday I was looking on the internet for the best cities to live in in the world. Zurich looks nice, as does Geneva… but that will have to wait until I’ve learnt a bit more German. And on that note, I can’t decide if I want to learn German or French first. Hmmm… But of course Japanese all the way for now :D

Today I got a message from a friend, randomly saying we should travel somewhere. It turned into quite a long back-and-forth conversation on all the places we could go… Well as it turns out (surprise surprise) I want to go to too many places. Unfortunately though, even though I’m now all the way over here in Japan, I realized that where I really want to go right now is to Europe. Must be the future minded part of me. Hmmm.

I finished “People of the Lie” the other day (Dr. M. Scott Peck), and I just started yesterday on “The Road Less Traveled” (same author). Now I can’t stop thinking about all sorts of psychology things… what I want to do my masters on, what types of patients I want to teach, what type of psychology I should do, what I should write in my application… Sigh, just way too much to think about at once. The biggest problem is that I want to start reading up on all of the above. At once.  And of course I do have masses of time to do that these days :P Although strangely enough I was just admonishing (admonishing?) myself today on the way I use my time (thanks Dr. Peck!). I wonder if I’ll ever get it just the way I want it. What? you ask? All of it. Everything. There’s so much I want to do, and just never enough time, not even with all the proper scheduling in the world.

And all this is just the tip of the iceberg. I wonder what the metaphorical Titanic in this story is??

In the more immediate future, I’ve been thinking for a while now about whether or not I want to change schools next semester (we all do, unless we request to stay, in which case we might not). I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to go to a different school, as I can then start everything well from the start, and create that impression that I wanted from the beginning… Although now it’s possibly “thought” – my students were super げんきtoday, so I got all sad at the thought of leaving them.  Sigh. Oh well, we’ll see what happens. I’m going to talk to my 二年生 teachers about it, and see what their opinion is.

And now, in my oddly productive mood (either I’m trying to make the best of my time rather than sitting idly at my desk, or I’m avoiding something else more important, but I haven’t realized the latter just yet…) I think I’m going to clean this keyboard, cos it’s nasty (school computer, not mine).

P.S. Will still get around to finishing my Christmas story and my New years and holiday stuffies. :D