I am so thankful that today is already Friday. I can already feel the shadows of "senioritis" and "lame duck"-hood creeping in under the door. Of course, since I still have 7 months before I'm done with this job, it would be pretty weak to shut down already. As my students say, "Fight-o"!

The good news is that it is a new season (it finally snowed yesterday so everything looks a lot cleaner and brighter than when I left) and this job is still challenging me (currently trying to come up with a fun activity to practice using verbs as nouns a?@la: "Visting Grandma is always fun." or "I finished studying for my test." Somehow the schedule is such that I keep missing the grammar points I taught last year and am planning all over again for things that I didn't do. I'm a bit dissappointed that I'm not able to reuse some of my favorite and successful lessons. So, I'm back to stretching out my brain to come up with ways to jazz up random grammar patterns.

Regardless, I am going skiing tomorrow! Tom's heading over late tonight and then Jaclyn, Danielle, and the two of us will drive or train to Kashimayari, our favorite ski resort from last season. Hopefully I can remember how to get down the runs in one peice. I am really looking forward to it.

Apparently, Mother Nature also heard that we were planning to spend the day outside tomorrow: it just got COLD. Its strange, because in Minnesota and Chicago, freezing didn't really seem so severe. Waking up to below 0 (32 for you non-Celsius folks) temperatures in my room makes it a bit more serious though.?@ I woke up around 6 am this morning and my forehead was aching it was so cold. All I could do was to shove down further under my futon and wait for my heater to start at 6:45.... (if I turn it on early it will turn itself back off by the time I'm ready to get up). I was surprised that I was so cold- it wasn't so bad last night. I was reassured that I wasn't being a wimp after returning from the land of central heating, when I saw that my heater in my kitchen was registering a lovely 0... for inside my house. All my windows were frosted and my toothpaste is the consistence of that paste kids like to eat in elementary school art class. Stepping naked into my shower room was just brutal...

But- its Friday, my boyfriend will be here tonight and I'm going to play in the snow tomorrow, so I can deal with anything.