Happy New Year!

Well, it's a bit late, but Happy New Year. I managed to catch a cold for New Years and today is the first day it's finally finished. I actually started back to work last Friday, but it was a bit early for most of my students, so today will be my first full day back in the swing of things.

Today I finally managed to send out my newsletter. Newsletters are hard to write. They stress me out sometimes. But it's finished and sent.

Not much has happened since the last post. I'm still trying to get my computer to work the correct way, so I'm still not able to access some of my pictures, but I will put some new ones up soon. For now, these are some pictures back from summer that I've never put up.

First is of one of my kids events. This year we changed from me telling a Bible story in English and having it translated, to just telling the story in Japanese. It's much easier this way!

In Japam, trains are a big thing. I use trains every week. They are ususally quite convient. I really only miss having a car when I want to do a whole lot of shopping at once. I've had to learn you can only buy what you can carry in most cases. (sometimes there's shipping options...)

Anyway, near my house we have this cute little thing that's not quite a train. It's a shuttle. It's much smaller than normal trains and runs up pretty high off the ground. So here are some pictures of the train coming at the main station.


And a random frustration... Because I live in Japan, a lot of my webpages default to the Japanese version. For e-mail this is ususally ok, because after I sign in, it usually takes me back to English. But lately, I can't get the blog out of Japanese! This is annoying because there is no spell check in the Japanese version. But if I don't try to do too much, I can still post with realitivly few problems.

Anyway, the good news is that I'm back to feeling better. The past few weeks weren't very fun. Possibly because I was sick and that makes me grumpy. But I'm feeling much more cheerful today. The sun is out, things are looking like they will all work out. It's good. Like a sun rise after a long night.

Ah, one more fun thing. I got to see the sun setting behind Mt. Fuji this week! It was really pretty. On clear days you can sometimes see Mt. Fuji from Tokyo. But ususally there's too much haze and stuff. But in winter and esp New Years, the sky's clear up. (New Years is because many of the buisness are shut down, so there's less pollution) There's not a good place where I live to see Fuji, but sometimes when I ride the trains I'll pass by a clear area and can catch a glimpse. That happened to me on Saturday. It was a nice bonus to my day! I was gonna take a picture, but my cell phone couldn't pick it up. Sorry!

Ok, that's all for now. Time to get ready for teaching!