Not much of anything

Well, nothing has been happening in the village. October finished and I'm still slowly recovering. Tom's parents came to visit and our group went out and had a nice dinner with them. November has been slow with a long anticipation for cold weather (which hit yesterday) and snow (which hasn't quite hit yet). I finally broke out and wore gloves to work today. However, I still am wearing basketball shorts under my track suit. When it starts snowing, I'll start wearing 2 pairs of long pants, but I'm going to wear my basketball shorts as long as possible.

Last Thursday was "Culture Day," and I spent most of it inside studying. I took a couple hour break and went to the community center for the village music festival. I watched old ladies sing karaoke enka (think opera...karaoke Japanese opera sung by old ladies). And after about 2 hours, that was enough culture for me.

The Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) is coming up in December and so is the Mid-Year Conference. It's the craziest week of the year making the 6-hour trip to Sapporo twice in 4 days, but after it's all done, I get to go back to LA. I'm frantically studying every day with the test as the goal, but more eagerly looking forward to jumping on that plane for 10 hours and getting hugs and eating burritos.

I'm...exhausted. I don't really have a reason to be, especially this week. Not much is going on, and my class load is relatively light. I only have 10 classes to teach this week (next week I have 14). Now that it's November, basketball ends at 5:30 instead of 6, and those extra 30 minutes are precious. Perhaps it's just that season when my body is adjusting to the lack of sunshine and warm weather. It's just a season. They come and they go, just like the leaves on the trees lining my walk to work.