Two more days...

I have shed many tears and said many goodbyes. It is hard and sucky. The final out of the house went well and is done, Mandy is out of school, the car is sold, now we just have to reduce the amount of things we think we can carry all the way to Mississippi and mail a bunch of stuff. Tomorrow is our last day and we don't really have any plans, an easy relaxing day before the big travel day. We are lucky enough to have very short layovers, unless of course we miss connections and then short layovers are a bitch.

The pets are in a kennel, we go and visit, our dog cries like you would not believe we we have to leave, it breaks my heart. The cat has lost a little weight which is good because she is huge. This time next week we will be living in our very own house. We may be sleeping on the floor and without lights or water, but we will be in our home none the less. At least the pets will be happy.

Living in very close quarters in the hotel has been an adjustment. Jeff and I were talking today about how we plan to all enjoy a moment to ourselves when we arrive. We will all go to separate rooms and shut the door. Jeff says he is going to find himself a trail and take a very long hike. Perhaps I will wander down to the Ocean and take a lovely stroll on the beach.

We have been doing a lot of walking. Taking Lily along too, so they are slow walks. Still it is lovely. When we lived in Italy, before coming here to Japan, we lived in a down town area of a mid sized city and we walked all the time. Even when we traveled we walked and walked. But, here we almost never walk together. There is something great about walking with Jeff. We get a chance to talk and talk and laugh and laugh. Especially when we have to wait up for little miss Lily, who when the mood strikes her can run at a pretty fast clip for about a mile, but mostly she gets bored by all the walking and slows way down.

Lily has a habit of wanting me to repeat every last thing she says. This began when she first started to speak, because she started a little later than I had hoped I tried all kinds of things to encourage her, including repeating what she had said, to show her I understood. This gets quite annoying now that she speaks nonstop all the time. I haven't been able to break her of this yet, and I really don't think this is a good time to try. Still it is funny to see us walking down the street, taking turns repeating Lily while having a separate conversation with one another.

Many people here now have the flu that we had a couple of weeks ago, I am trying to avoid said people. They are everywhere and we had dinner with many of the a couple of days ago. This coupled with the fact that I haven't been sleeping well is scary. Hopefully if I did come in contact with the scourge again I have the immunities all built up. It would suck to get sick now. Good thoughts.

I am afraid that I was not aware of an earthquake in Japan until I read Patrice's comment. I haven't been watching much TV. I looked it up on the Internet and the earthquake was pretty far away from where I am, the main island of Japan, where I live and where Tokyo is, is about the size of California. I live in the very northern eastern tip and the earthquake was about 3/4 of the way down on the West coast. It was a pretty big one, we had a bigger one here when I first arrived but there was minimal damage and no injuries, it appears that this one was quite devastating. In Japan they measure earthquakes on a different scale then we do. They measure it based on how many people feel it and how much damage occurs. Interesting.