happy almost birthday to me

Hey all,
so i figured it was time for an update, life in Japan is pretty normal, my day to day stuff: teacher, japanese class, shopping and what not is going well and I like it. It still takes me a bit of extra time to go grocery shopping but i find I have a fairly narrow diet here so that makes it easier... rice/tofu/chicken/vegetables/junk.. yeah that sounds right.
Because my birthday this year falls in the middle of the week I had my party last Saturday. It was a lot of fun!! I had about 8 friends come out to dinner with me and we followed it up with 2 hours of karaoke. a pretty standard Japanese night out. But it was really great. there are some photos on my flickr account.

The most exciting news is that mom is coming in just over a month!!!!! i can't wait for her to get here.. i think life is going to be a little boring until she arrives. the school year ends on March 4 and doesn't start again until April 8th so I starting at the end of this week i will have A LOT of down time. nothing to do but grade papers and start working on lessons for the new school year.
Its so strange that school runs april to march here.

any way back to mom coming... she'll arrive on the 23rd and I'll meet her in Tokyo and from there we will spend 3 days wandering aimlessly around the giant city hopefully finding places with english menus cause my japanese is still bad.
after that we will take a train to Kyoto, basically the old Japan full of temples and shrines. We have 4 days of wandering around here, before its back to Tokyo/U.S for mum and then back to Toyama for me. But I think it will be a great week. I will definitely have much to say about.

Well like I said life is quiet, it finally decided to start snowing in Toyama and we have some snow on the ground which is nice for a change... except I'm not supposed to ride my bike in the snow..so walking everywhere takes a bit of time. but it's pretty and I know that in a month it will be mostly gone! yay Japan weather.

Hope everyone at home is doing well, thanks for all the birthday wishes and such.

love
Me