Moving Update!
Moving SUCKS. In one week I'll be home in America, and then a month later I'm coming back to Japan to a new job and new house and new life in Matsuyama. So I'm packing up now in preparation to be homeless for a month with a million things to stash somewhere or other. And there's so much stuff!!! I've thrown out about thirty FULL trash bags in each of our three trash categories, from Burn Me to Don't Burn Me to Really Don't Even Think About Trying To Burn Me. And now I'm in the final throws of the Things Go Into Boxes stage, in which things go into boxes and then more things go into more boxes, and then even more things go into even more boxes, and THEN I have to go GET more boxes from the supermarket and I end up seeing and playing with my lovely students who are really as of now my former students and then I get all sad and locate consolation chocolate for myself since I'm still in the supermarket anyway and might as well leave with some chocolate, and then when I get home it's become late in the day and I'm sad and fat and I STILL have to put more things in more boxes!!! Braaaaaaa! This is moving.
A piece of truly great one-in-a-million luck has come my way today however...although it is just the kind of Hooray for Friends in Imabari thing that brings it back home how sad I really am to be moving away (which I am; very sad about it). So here's the short, short, super short-version: recently I've become friends with the scion of the towel corporation that owns the apartment building that I live in, Tamai-kun, through boxing. Two weeks ago at a boxing after party in his cool rec-shack he said that he'd let me store all my things-in-boxes at the towel factory in some unused corner. Great! But yesterday a new and even better plan came up: Tamai-kun said that instead of at the factory I can stash all my stuff in an unoccupied apartment right down the hall from me in the building I'm in now!!! Hooraaaaaay!!!! It's going to be so simple and so doable!!! I can even keep my bed and my carpet and my kotatsu table now, all of which I was going to have to sell to my predecessor for lack of storage space! Hooray!!! So just now Tamai-kun dropped by and opened up the place for me (it's seriously only three doors down) and showed me in, and it's HUGE!!! It's this HUGE and beautiful place on the street-side corner with these big windows (I have no windows in my place) and white walls and a huge entranceway and a big big kitchen with counter space and cabinets and a working bathtub and a tokonoma in the bedroom and just this crazy amount of space....what in the hell!?! If I had been living in this place from the beginning maybe I wouldn't even be moving! It's so big and lovely! I know that this is just crazy talk and that the last thing I needed would have been more space to be messy in, but hachi machi those windows! Sigh.
So now to hopefully go put the final putsh into the Things Into Boxes stage. And then I'll be done with moving prep and can move on to other finishing touches to my life here. Crazy. Wish me luck, and a special thanks to Robin and Ellie and Jim sensei for their congrats on my shodan test! It went really well--I saw some video from it and I look pretty good! And how about that picture in the paper, huh? So I'm a black belt in Aikido now! Hooray!!! OK, back to business. BYEEEEEE!
