Surprise!

So I know that there might be a few family members who follow this, so I’ll write all about my excitement leading up to Christmas early, and just save the post for after I have left!

That’s right!

It is being kept from my extended family that I will be coming home for Christmas and New Year!  I leave back home in less than 2 weeks now, and will return shortly after New Year. :D  I’m so excited about it!  I can hardly wait to see the look on my little cousins’ faces when they see me there!  I know they miss me, and I miss all my family too!  It will be really nice to be able to see everyone again.  I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do the same next year, and if I was being 100% honest I’d kind of be interested in spending a Christmas in Japan.  I think, of course, it would be best if it was also with my family here.  I’d love to be able to take a trip though and spend Christmas here somewhere.  I say this now though, I might actually be more down than I imagine spending Christmas without my family.  I’m sure that I’d probably plan something with A-san if she were free, and some of my co-workers/friends here would most likely invite me to join them as well.  Not to mention gatherings that the other JETs here would plan.

I’ve also been trying to find small gifts to take with me for my various family members.  I think I have pretty much everyone, although at this point there are a few people that I’d like to find some small extra gifts for as well.  One of these days I may make another trip back to Izumo, (maybe even leave super early to purchase the items before my first flight) and get one or two more last minute items.  It’s not much, one of the things I was considering was replacing a phone strap I bought that is starting to get dirty and fall apart.  It still looks pretty right now, but I may save it for later.  I may also get one final set of chopsticks personalized for someone.  The difficult part of it all was actually finding the time to go and buy the gifts themselves.  One of the problems I found myself running into was the fact that the only time I really had to go would be on the weekends if they were open.  With Saturday English school, and other appointments it made it a little difficult.  But something I realized, maybe a bit late, was that when I do get out of school I actually still have time to go into town if I wanted too.  The malls don’t close until about 9 or 10, but what I risk is the hour drive home making me pretty late when I get back.  Then I have to get ready for school the next day.  I think if I really needed to I could, but I’d still rather save my trips for the weekend.

I still have the last few Christmas cards finish and mail home, and I also wanted to prepare/set up the presents I did buy already.  I thought of the idea of making little gift bags of stuff for all the many little ones we have in the family now.  I found a nice shop that sells little candies pretty cheap, so I bought a bunch and am going to give them to the kids.  Thinking about it know, there is one that I should have gotten something for, but I didn’t think about it until now.  I’ll have to go see if I can find something small before I leave.  I know that it should be fairly easy to find something, and maybe that day that I got back to Izumo.

These next few evenings are going to be pretty busy for me.  One thing I want to do before I leave is give the apartment a nice once over!  LOL I’ve got papers and various things littering all over the place.  I can’t even remember the last time my table in my room was cleared off.  It’s been filled with papers and flyers from various thing for weeks, and even after I bought some bins to sort them into, I still haven’t gotten around to it.  I also have some boxes from things I’ve bought that I need to break down as well.  I’m happy at least that the day I leave is plastic trash day (which I realize now is a kinda funny thing to be happy about…)!  That way when I come back I won’t have a super full bag of plastic trash to throw away.

It's that time of year!

It’s getting colder outside, and here in Japan we’ve already had a day of snow!  Sadly (or maybe not so much) it came and went in the same day…  I woke up that morning (thankfully a day off for me), and the ground was covered in beautiful white!  It even flurried a bit!  So with this colder weather, and the beginning of the last month of the year, comes many things.

First is to add furnishing to the apartment that will make it more winter friendly.  I’d already been using my heating blanket (a wonderful gift that makes sleeping at night pure heaven!), but I’d only wanted to use the little electric heater so much (it can be so expensive!).  One of the first things that I did recently to help make it warmer in the evenings is to purchase kerosene for my space heater (I also gave one to A-san as I had discovered on my first arrival that there was actually 2 in my apartment).  It was soooo nice that first evening that I added kerosene and turned on my heater for the first time!  I still need to figure out what some of the functions of it do (there are various lights and buttons on it, and of course like everything else it is all in kanji).  I’ll tell you this though, it sure makes my little room nice and warm!

Something that I’d found was happening though, as you learn in science heat rises.  This means that a lot of the time, my feet would be left cold.  There are a couple of remedies for this.  One would be to buy this kind of foot cushion that some stores sell that are supposed to keep your feet warm.  However, I don’t fancy keeping my feet in place like that though.  Lap blankets are nice, but as the name suggests they are usually on the small side so they don’t do much for your feet.  The other option was one that I had been toying with for a while, but was still very much on the fence about it.  As it happened (and kind of spur of the moment too), while I was in town the other day to buy a new thicker futon for winter, I found that at the same time they had some of their kotatsu items on sale as well!   The table was the lowest price I had ever seen it (even compared to Amazon!), and some of the basic and simple covers and mats were on sale for a really good price as well!  I was able to get all the items for it I wanted for under 10,000 yen! (a little under $100 at the current exchange rate)  As wonderful luck would have it, there was enough space for it in my living room, so now I keep nice and snug with my feet under the kotatsu, and the space heater warming the rest of me up!  I’m also considering buying a little hot water bottle as well.  The kind of cool thing about it, is that you can use it both to pour hot water in to keep you warm, or ice water in the winter to cool you off.  They also have some cute decorative covers for them too.  I might stop at Juntendo later to see about getting one.

This doesn’t help me much at school though…  Some of my schools are ok (seems like maybe only the smaller ones), they’ve already started using the heaters.  But the one I am typing in right now for example… not so much…  I think since it is just me and one other person (and this is one of the bigger staff rooms), it isn’t very cost affective to have the heater going.  So, I’m sitting here with my little lap blanket trying to keep warm.  I think it also doesn’t help that my desk is by the window side, so the cold radiates through it really easily.  It’s especially noticeable because the side of me facing the window is much colder than the other side…

 

The other adventure I’m in the middle of is getting Christmas preparations under way.  I’ve already bought, signed, and mailed the important Christmas cards; but I’m considering going to get a few more and possibly send them out this week.  I’ve also been looking for little Christmas presents that would be easy to send back home.  I’ve gotten quite a few done, but I’m probably still about halfway there…  I’ve only got 2 weekends left, and both of them have some events that may make going to town to shop a bit difficult.  I may have to do some late afternoon shopping this weekend to try and get most of it done.  If it wasn’t such a far drive, I’d consider going more often during the week, but by the time I’d get there, I’d have maybe an hour or so before the shops would close.  Part of the problem is trying to figure out what I’m going to be getting people.  I know that if I can decide that beforehand then it should make shopping faster.  The Daiso has been a big saver here!  One of the advantages to the 100 yen shop (Dollar Store) here is that a good portion of the items are in very good quality (way better than back home), and it allows me to get some nice trinkets for family back home.  As shipping can be a tad pricey, the other trick is to find items that won’t be that heavy or delicate to send.  There are a few cute and interesting items at the Daiso though that I think will make for some interesting gifts!