....

yeeeeeeeeeeeah >_>

Tomorrow morning, I fly to NYC for the Pre-Departure orientation and then Saturday pile into a taxi with grayscale and yomimashou to JFK and fly out for JET.

I'd like to point out that packing, car insurance and laptop frustrations aside, I am still really excited to be heading out to live in Japan for a year or longer. Granted a portion of that might just be that I'm pretty desperate to actually get there and KNOW what its going to be like, but I am excited to meet my students, and the teachers I'll be working with, and my poor, long-suffering supervisor who has been the focus of my continuous barrage of questions for like the past...month. I'm still pretty nervous about the whole teaching thing, but I've got a month before I'll be running any classes, and I've been doing some research so that's mostly abated, so now I just want to get there.

Luckily, all the New York JETs are flying out together, so I'll be with grayscale and yomimashou, and we should be able to finagle seats together which means a 14 hour flight of company and JE variety shows as opposed to mostly misery. Well, some misery is inevitable given the length of the flight and general cramped state but it will be misery with company and entertainment. Yay!

( Other things that happened this summer )

and now, to close with some good news, after like a month or more of drought, it rained all yesterday evening and is raining even harder now *does a rain dance* no more slowly dying plants, hooray!

Brief update since I'm visiting my grandparents - but I got my JET placement, finally!

I'll be in Fuefuki, Yamanashi - Yamanashi was my third choice of prefecture, and its still within a few hours train ride (depending on how much time/money I want to spend) of Tokyo, so I'm pretty happy...but I know nothing about the place XD;; Except that they're apparently famous for their fruit? I haven't heard from my predecessor, and admin approval for the Yamanashi forum is taking a bit so I don't know anyone else who's there yet, but I am cautiously optimistic :D I'm not hell and gone from Tokyo and the area I know/friends who are there, and most of my other friends are not hell and gone from the same general vicinity (except El who had to go settle herself in Hokkaido >>) so one way or another I'm sure it'll turn out awesome!

So about that whole updating more often thing. Yeah, didn't happen. Who's surprised? :DDD So, we'll be going through the semester in bullet-point-summary-mode. I would like to point out that these are not necessarily chronological order, I apologize for the confusion.

( Semester abroad cliff notes yaaaaaay )

But I'm home, and despite being rather cold (heating vents to my room are closed when I leave for the semester, and they've not been opened up yet) and pestered by cats am enjoying myself. I have four days to unpack, finish an internship application, do laundry, see HP7 and repack for two weeks in Europe which I leave for on the 18th. Which means I need to find out where Dad moved the sweaters in the top of my closet to when he was doing stuff in the attic, because I kind of want to bring those...

( It's been a long five days @.@ )

Short version: The Japanese police are numerous and extremely bored so be careful about EVERYTHING, I have a phone named Shiro-chan who has some issues but is loved nonetheless, stay away from Roppongi unless you want to get drugged/robbed/die and I became thoroughly addicted to milk tea in under two days and am going to miss it immensely when I am again stateside.

And I haven't even started classes yet.

Pre-Japan update number whatever-the-hell, yaaaay :D

Phone stuff is sorted! *bounces about* I'll be stealing my dad's smartphone for the next 4 months, which is unlocked and has a keyboard, so all that's left to do is get myself a SIM card when I arrive in Japan. Which I should be able to do I think. I'll deal with replacing my actual phone once I'm back in the country, and parentals have figured out wtf is going on with our family plan. Woot solving stuff.

I am also packed ladies and...wait, do I actually have any guys friended?, what's more, I am packed with room to spare.

Well, ok, it's not exactly room to spare, but I have an empty pocket and I definitely did not pack my bags as tightly as I could have, plus on the flight home I will be wearing my peacoat, not packing it, so I'm calling it room to spare. :3 Ha.

So, all that's left is to pack the last few things (shirts that were just washed, ipod, phone, glasses, etc), and study like hell for that placement test I'll be taking...sometime after I arrive. Probably the first day of class. Which would be going a lot better if I could actually like, focus, and hadn't packed my textbooks. >> planning. Um. about that....

So...now I'm in that awkward timestamp where I feel it's too early to start putting things in suitcases (and some stuff I can't put in suitcases cause I, y'know, kind of need it over the next week) but I really want to get started on things - actually to be totally honest I really want to get started on the things I'll need to be doing once I arrive in Japan and those I really can't get to. -.- So I have to settle for making lists of crap and chewing my nails. I don't get how it can simultaneously feel like there is too much time till I get there and not enough wtf reality Also why is it impossible to find a map of campus >.> Like not where the buildings are but inside the buildings? nnnnnnnnng planning >.<

Also dad has a grand plan (since our phone contract is conveniently ending) to try and get me a phone here that I would be able to use in Japan and then continue to use once I got back - which would be awesome cause my phone is showing signs of dying, and would also not leave me with a random headset bouncing around upon my return...but it's less than a week till I leave. And he's leaving on a business trip like two days before I leave and knowing my family there just isn't going to be time. Plus, ideally, I'd like to get a phone with a proper keyboard hey faded_lace can I just steal your old one? cause I'll be emailing/etc so much in Japan, but sofar one of those isn't on the lists of phones he can get a good deal on. Though there is a pretty sweet touchscreen one but there's other complications with that one too Plus there's the issue of unlocking it so I can, y'know, use it in a foreign country. :/ It would be nice if we could have started figuring this sort of thing out at, like, the beginning of the month?

In slightly happier news, we are like 3 boards and a series of steps away from having a back deck, which will make the cats extremely happy once the workmen leave and means that there is no longer a foot and a half drop out the kitchen door. It does look damn strange, though, having stuff there though after like two years of the "moat".

Oh and my catbite is healed to the point I can wear just bandaids instead of gauze wraps :3 yay.