Damn! It's cold!

I woke up this morning to a thermostat reading of 7.5 celsius. It is so cold in my house, I have to pile up the blanket that is supposed to live in my lounge on the heating table on my bed. My bedroom is the warmest room in the apartment, but that's not saying much. And they tell me February is actually the coldest month.

After a great trip home with the fam, I find myself once again in the little town that modernization looked at briefly and then blithely marched on by. I can't help thinking my apartment would be just a bit more moderate in temperature if they hadn't turned window into a sliding-glass door with no curtains. It's not unlike living in a fish bowl, except that fish die when the temperature changes this drastically on them. I remember this from Biology. About the trip back: Tintin was a great movie. Not necessarily completely true to the books, but definitely capturing the spirit of our spunky kid reporter. My dog is so totally like Snowy, it is uncanny, except for Snowy being all white and Caboose being grey and white. In attitude and deportment, however, they are twin-ish. The new Sherlock Holmes was decent in its way. One thing I will say for Guy Ritchie, his imposition of modern style on the Holmesian world actually works quite well. No, that's not how Holmes would say it, nor how Watson would act, but it's rather like what they would both do if you view them through our current-day lens. Why not? Entertaining.

My brain is a wee bit addled from the cold. And from the jet-lag.

But I have been back at the office for three days now and I am looking forward to doing anything new and exciting again. It really is a great little gig. I teach one class a week, co-teach one class a week, am a human tape-recorder (for which there is zero prep) three times a week, and come up with awesome topics for my adult class once a week. All of this leaves plenty of time for study of Japanese (3-4 hours a day), researching music scores, listening to recordings, practicing Japanese conversation, taking a walk, practicing piano and/or clarinet, and generally wandering around making a nuisance of myself or hanging with whomever happens to be around. There's a lot of learning going on here. And more to come.