The jury is still out on the snowboarding thing. I went to the gym today and did my regular routine (sans yoga, because if I fell over doing eagle pose, I would never hear the end of it. Concerned housewives would be coming up to me in the grocery store three months from now and asking if my knee was better yet, and take care dear! No thank you.) The good news is, the knee is basically fine. A little sore, a little numb, but overall, fine. However, this was a mere hour of exercise, with chunks of time for upper body and abs, which don't involve my legs at all. Snowboarding, on the other hand, involves a full day of tromping around in very heavy boots that force your legs into a sort of cowboy swagger, not to mention the actual snowboarding. And if I am getting up at 6 am, I am doing a full day of snowboarding. I do not want to do three runs and then have to spend the afternoon sipping overpriced, lukewarm cocoa in the cafeteria while I wait for everyone else to finish going up and down the mountain. So it remains a wait and see thing.

In other news, I love my job. Yesterday morning my housewives class consisted of eating chocolate cake (made by yours truly, and very tasty it is!), drinking fancy tea from France, and looking at pictures of Avignon from Tokiyo's trip to France last week. Feel free to hurl abuse in my direction...I will just smile beatifically and go on eating my souvenir Godiva chocolates.

Well, from a purely medical viewpoint, this weekend was much better than last. No migraines (apparently I get migraines now), and I didn't cripple myself. It was...quiet. Really, really quiet. Payday is sometime this week, and I am reaching that point where I look in my wallet and see empty space, so I mostly hung around the apartment, watching pretty much the entire season of Dead Like Me in one go. I did go out for lunch with a lady from the gym...she's very nice, but keeps asking me if such-and-such is popular in Canada, and I'm running out of polite ways to point out that I haven't lived in Canada for over six years now and I have NO FREAKING CLUE what you kids are doing for fun these days.

I went back to the gym today, and that was nice. Hardly excericisey, though, as I had to coddle my knee. It's doing much better but still twinges from time to time, and I still don't trust it enough to, say, run for a bus or up/down stairs. I hope it heals quickly, though, as Pauline just called me and said they are going snowboarding again on Saturday, and I REALLY WANNA GO.

Masami swung by the kindergarten today to talk to the principal about the changing classes in April. And she brought Liam! At 9 months, I swear he is almost as big as the three year olds.

hee hee hee

I had an interesting talk with one of my 10 year old students today. I missed the first bit of the conversation she was having with Miho, but for some reason she was telling her that her mom is 34. So we asked how old was her mom when she got married, and how old did she want to be when she got married? The answer was "before 25". So Miho asked, "Why not wait until you're 30?" To which the little angel replied "30? Obasan desu!" ("Obasan" means "grandmother".) Miho, who is over 30, just looked stunned, and I squawked indignantly. After explaining to the girl that I was already 29, thank you very much, she looked surprised and said I didn't look it...I look around 25. Which is nice and all, but.....25 is acceptable, but a mere five years later you are over the hill and require orthopedic shoes? Ack. (Miho declined to tell her that she is over 30 and unmarried, on the grounds that she didn't want to deal with 10-year old pity. )

Well, Tuesday afternoon and I am still very much Limpy McGee. But the swelling has gone down a lot, and I can bend the knee further (although I still will not be doing yoga anytime this week), and although I still cannot ride my bike, I can limp to work a lot faster than I could even yesterday. So, all in all, things are looking up, although I fear I will have to decline Wataru's offer to take us out snowboarding again this weekend. And hey, I've learned a new skill...how to bandage injured knees. (Although I am forced to wear a skirt today, as I have not yet learned the art of pulling on pants without completely rearranging the bandage so that it is completely useless.)

The worst part is (aside from the inability to ride my bike) that it is still not comfortable to sit under the warm cozy kotatsu for very long, so I am forced to resort to the couch and a lot of blankets. Also, this is not good weather to be pressing an ice pack onto yourself.

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The good news is, I seem to have mastered the art of not falling down. (For the most part, anyway.) Four times* I swooshed down the mountainside, gleefully remaining upright. I still need to work on my approach to speed, though. Everytime I picked up some speed my thought processes went like this: "Whee! I'm going so fast! This is fantastic! Huh. I'm going awfully fast. Ack! Slow down! Slow down!" Fortunately, I've figured out how to slow down without actually falling over, which vastly improved the experience for me.

The bad news is, I still haven't figured out ski lifts. We went up six times...the first four times I went up with Wataru, and he helped me get off the lift without incident. The fifth time I had to go alone, and I promptly fell on my leg and twisted my knee. There was a very small but enormously disquieting sound in my knee, and probably I should not have gone back up the mountain for that sixth and final time. Oops. A few hours later, it had completely stiffened up and I am currently unable to bend it. Or put any weight on it. I am limping quite dramatically, and watching me climb up and down stairs is something of an ordeal for spectators.

* The last two times were after I sprained my knee, so there wasn't as much majestic swooshing as there was just trying to get down the damn mountain without falling over too many times.

After we finished for the day, we went to a nearby onsen. It was magnificent. The Disneyland of onsens, if you will. After 5 pm, the price falls from 2000 yen to 1200, and it is a very good deal for what you get. There is actually a co-ed part, but Pauline doesn't own a swimsuit (an Australian who doesn't own a swimsuit. I know. The mind boggles.), so we stuck to the nekked bit. The pools were heavenly and we could have stayed there all night. After we (reluctantly) got out and dried off, we put on the yukatas that the onsen supplied us with and wandered off to find Wataru and Nao, who were in the "Relaxation Room", dozing off in comfy chairs. I would very much like to live there.

Today we spent mostly sleeping and then hobbling around the apartment; Pauline didn't sprain anything, but she is feeling the various aches and pains that come from strenuous activity. (On another positive note, my throbbing, useless knee aside, I'm really not hurting that much. A bit of stiffness, but nothing incapacitating! Whoo! This is what happens when you spend the day not falling down.) I was very tempted just to stay in Shizuoka again tonight, but eventually reasoned that it would be better if I could spend tomorrow resting before work, instead of negotiating the train station stairs and the truly epic journey from the bus stop to my apartment. And now I should go see if I have enough ice cubes in the freezer to make up a cold compress.

Yay! Two more days of work and then it's snowboarding time! I'm looking forward to trying it out with snow pants that actually fit AND are waterproof, as I'm sure this can only make the experience more enjoyable. I also have a great new toque, courtesy of my parents, that proclaims my nationality ("Canada!") proudly AND comes with earflaps.

There are just two things that are clouding my horizon...

1) a few months ago I bought some warm underwear from Uniqlo. Mostly shirts, but also one pair of leggings. I bought those specifically with snowboarding in mind (although they'd also come in handy on a really cold winter night at home). Problem is, I can't find them. No clue where they could be. This is the point where everybody starts making snide comments about the general chaos in which I live, but truthfully, I can usually lay my hands on whatever it is I'm looking for. Organized chaos, if you will. Anyhow, if I don't find them tomorrow morning, I'm gonna have to go back to Uniqlo and get some more, at which point I fully expect that I will return home to find the original pair folded neatly on my pillow.

2) Wataru just sent Pauline the plan for Saturday. We will be leaving at 6:30, which, while painful, will ensure a 9:00 arrival at the ski hill. Hardly unreasonable. I imagine we will leave around 3 or 4, and then we are going to dinner in a nearby town. So far, so good. Then we are going to an onsen, which will be most welcome for my sore and aching bones. Apparently it's a new, fancy onsen, with lots of baths. We will even need swimsuits for some of them, as they are co-ed. (So I will be packing snow gear and my swimsuit, all for a 12 hour period.) Still good. Then things get puzzling...he has our arrival time back at Shizuoka at 4 am. FOUR. A. M. I have no idea what we will be doing for all that time. Has he included "falling asleep in a hot tub for several hours" as part of the itinerary? Only time will tell.

Damn my brother and his addictive gifts. Er, I don't suppose anyone wants to buy me seasons 2-5 of Kids in the Hall for an early birthday gift? No? How about as a Valentine's day present? Anybody?

Well, this has not been the most productive of weekends. I mean, I managed to do the laundry (even to the point of putting it away, lookit me go!) and make a batch of peanut butter cookies (my food for today has consisted of a cheese bagel and rather a lot of pb cookies. Mmm. Nutritious.), and even clean the kitchen a little, but overall, I spent too much time on the computer, not actually doing anything.

Next weekend will, of course, be different. I may not actually accomplish anything useful, but at least I will be active. I just hope my body remembers how to not fall down, because while I have all kinds of fun snow gear this year (pants that fit! Gloves that will hopefully prove to be waterproof!), I do not have padding for my bum and/or knees.

I was supposed to be visiting Masami's new house this weekend...they moved in in August and I still haven't made it over. It's like there's some sort of conspiracy at work. Whenever I have a free weekend, they are busy and vice versa, and when we do end up with compatible schedules, I get a cold. Well, technically this time Liam is the one with the cold, but still. (However, given that he weathered his daddy's bout of bronchitis and his mommy's spell of pneumonia without so much as a sniffle, I will no longer be quite so scrupulous about visiting when I have a cold. This kid as the constitution of an ox.)

Aaaaaannnnd I've just remembered that I have no mushrooms in the house, and I want to use them in my dinner tonight, which means I have to drag myself out from under this nice warm kotatsu and go outdoors. Sigh. I couldn't have remembered this when the sun was still out? Blargh.

And thus ends my first week back at work. It's been good...the kids have been cute and funny and in two classes, surprisingly well-behaved. And, as Andrew greeted me on Monday, only nine more weeks until our next vacation.

And next weekend we are going snowboarding! Apparantly the plan is to just make a day trip to someplace relatively nearby. I'm excited...this year I have ski pants of my very own! They fit! I just hope my body remembers the basics, so I don't spend the entire day falling down again.

I just plugged in my AC to use it to check the temperature in here, and it just flashed "LO" at me. Which means it is less than 10 degrees.

And just as I was beginning to think we might skip winter altogether.

Four words:

Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter

I am so not making that up. I arrived home on Wednesday to find a package from Ottawa waiting for me. Included among the books and the maple syrup fudge was a VHS copy of JCVH. I watched it last night and now I feel the urge to add "The power of Christ impales you!" to all my emails.

So, to sum up my Christmas vacation: I read 14 books, managed to have mashed potatoes on Christmas Day, received JCVH, the first season of Kids in the Hall on dvd, and a very Canadian toque, making this Christmas possibly even more Canadian than the one last year which was actually spent in Canada, watched many Japanese tv shows with varying degrees of amusement/incomprehension, and...um...did I mention the bit about finishing 14 books? Yeah, it was not the most active of holidays. I still have the weekend to go, and I don't start work on Monday until 4:15. It's actually a national holiday, so I'm not certain how many students will show up.

It always cracks me up when people are horrified/sympathetic about the fact that I don't get national holidays off. Yes, three day weekends are nice, but let's face it...I work approximately 16 hours a week and get 6 weeks of vacation time a year. I hardly need to add on more time off.

And speaking of time off, it is time to start thinking about where to go during my March holidays. I only have five days off, so I'm thinking that it might be a good idea to stay in-country. There's so much of it I haven't seen, and I'm sure I wouldn't have any trouble finding someone willing to go to, say, Okinawa with me.

Happy New Year!

So far 2007 looks good. I'm not being forced to spend 13 hours sleeping in an airport, and as of yet there are no signs of cat urine on my bed. All in all, best New Year's Eve ever!