Disaster!!

...first off, apologies once again for my lack of blogging action recently, though i get the sense that folks have been busy with christmas and such, and reading blogs probably hasn't been high on the list of things to do...not much is new here...we finished up school on tuesday, ironically, the day AFTER christmas...the last few days have been spent buying last minute, late, christmas presents for folks back home, the wrapping and packing of which i hope to achieve later this evening...
...chieko and i live next to a small train station, and when i say small, i mean tiny...the train that comes through only has two cars...quite quaint, actually, the only problem being that this particular train doesn't really go anywhere useful, like downtown...so we rarely use it, but when we do, man it's convenient...the upshot of living beside this little station is that our apartment has double-pained windows and sliders on the back side (to keep the noise down), which if you've ever lived in japan, you know it is not common...this means that our house actually stays warm (or cool) long after we heat it up (or cool it down)...energy efficiency, at least in terms of heating/cooling, is something the japanese have not embraced thus far (that i know of)...
...i woke up this morning and stepped outside to get some milk for my coffee...they don't have half and half here, so milk it is...there's a convenience store just down the street and as i was walking past the little train station, it was pure destruction...bicycles everywhere...it was quite a stormy morning with some severe wind and rain...school kids and other bicycle riding folk tend to park their bikes in front of the station for the day when they head off in the morning, and on days like today, they have to dust them off when they get back...there's something comedic about this scene, i think...it's not like the wind blew one bike over and it knocked the others down domino-style...there are bikes EVERYWHERE here...



...and now, it's snowing, hard...and apparently it will continue to do so for the next day or so, which is fine with me...



...we went out to dinner with some friends tonight to a gyoza restaurant which was delicious but kind of far away...in retrospect it might have been better to head there on a night when it wasn't dumping snow...but we made it there and back unscathed and well-fed, which is all you can ask for really...interesting here they don't plow the road, but they have little spigots that pop up in the center of the road and spritz out water, in turn melting the snow on the roads (and creating lots of puddles)...they can get away with this here because generally it never goes far below freezing, and the traffic is enough to keep the roads from freezing...i'll get some pics in the daylight, it's kind of interesting...reminds me of the beaches back on the cape, walking along and a clam would blast water out from under the sand...
...chieko and i are heading to her parent's house on sunday for new years, which i'm looking forward to...i'm keeping my fingers crossed that i'll be able to get a little snowboarding done while we're there, but snow as been slow to fall so far this winter, so we'll see...
...tomorrow she's dragging me to another wedding planner...at least one of us is motivated about having a wedding...
...so that's about all that's going on here...life as exciting as ever...hopefully i'll be posting more regularly now that i have a little more time on my hands...time to go wrap some presents...