12 hours and one major tremor so far

I think it was this one. I had drifted off to sleep between 9:30-10ish, and was woken up at some point because the house was shaking, clearly in an earthquake. I basically went "Hmm... well... so this is an aftershock, huh?", waited for it to pass, fell back asleep. This morning when I tried to find out which quake it was, I was shocked to see that it must have been like, last night at 11pm, I thought I'd been asleep longer than that!

Oh, and I found the gas meter this morning, it's on the right side of my house, a little bit hard to get at due to my neighbors having a window that sticks out RIGHT next to it (and the neighbor's house being all of 2 feet from mine, if that). Now to go see if I have hot water again...

Also, I'm brilliant. It's freezing cold out here and even with the heater on in my room it's pretty chilly, even under my usual 2 blankets, which aren't THAT strong. So I got out my kotatsu futon (think a huge thick quilt) and put that over the bed and slept under it. I was totally warm. The downside was getting out from under it this morning to go out into the freezing cold to hunt down the meter :)

What a day

I had a really great day at my JHS (more in a locked entry). Let's just say that lots of people were very happy to see me and I was very happy to see them too. I signed a lot of yearbooks, gave out the cards for my 7th-graders, and received a pile of cards from my 8th-graders and a bunch of "thank you for 3 years" papers from the 9th-graders. (They can write them for all teachers, but an awful lot of students chose to write one for me.) The teachers were all like "You must be crazy to come here in such a difficult time but we're so happy to see you."

Though, since I didn't really have a JOB to do per se, I ended up hanging out until around 3ish and then I went to Toyama Park with Kozo. He wanted to find Hakoneyama, the "highest hill inside Tokyo proper!" and so we did... only to find you can't climb to the very top thanks to the earthquake. Doh! So we walked to Shinjuku and did karaoke for 2 hours instead. I'm happy enough with that :)

Shinsuke had mailed me earlier in the day like "Hey, I don't have late work today, want to get dinner tonight?" so I told him "We're in Shinjuku, join us!" So he did. We got shabu-shabu at the Momo Paradise and OH MAN I ate so much but it was so good! And so wonderful to be at dinner with two great friends. We walked around Shinjuku for a while after that admiring the lack of lights all over the place. I have to feel bad for all the part-timers who probably lost their jobs temporarily at least while chain restaurants and karaoke places are closing half of their locations to save power, though. Even the karaoke place Kozo and I went to, we arrived and were told "Sorry, this branch is closing now -- please go across the plaza to the other one." (The other one turns out to be much nicer though.)

Hopefully Shin and I are going to go to Yakyu Inari over the weekend, it'll make up for no actual yakyu, in theory.

I feel very alive, in a way I hadn't felt since leaving Japan...