Hello everyone,
How does this Sunday evening find you? Personally I'm feeling terribly guilty - I should go for a run, in preparation for my 10km race next Saturday, but I have come down with a sore throat. In the interest of shaking it quickly, I have decided to substitute a 10km training run with a 500m walk to the supermarket to buy lemons, so I can sit at home drinking lemon and honey drinks! At least I can get an early night tonight and hopefully be back to normal tomorrow morning. Cross fingers! I hardly ever get sick (knock on wood!), so it would be terrible luck to be crook just in time for the race I signed up for ages ago and have slowly worked my way up to!!
In other news, Jeff and I have made our Christmas plans. We will be joining a group of other English teachers to visit Thailand and volunteer in an orphanage for a week. We will finish just in time to travel to Bangkok for New Year's Eve and will spend a few days exploring before we head back to Japan. I'm sure I don't need to tell you how excited we are! Except that, we are really ridiculously excited. I mean, we went to Malaysia and Singapore last year and that was fun, but I'm at least five times more excited over this. Partly because we are going with friends, which will make the experience so much more fun, and partly because of the volunteer aspect. Anyone who knows me will know how much I love volunteering and fundraising for charity. Yes, I stress way too much about it, but I also get the most incredible buzz out of helping others. I am all too aware that I am a flawed, selfish, materialistic, self-absorbed human and volunteering gives me a chance to escape that (if anyone who works for a charity wants to offer me a job, I'm back in NZ in August!!).
The only downside to our Thailand plans are that we need to fundraise 15,000 yen each before we leave (a little over $200). I THOUGHT I could raise some money fairly easily with a raffle - one in Japan and one in NZ, with a prize of 1/4 of the money raised from the raffle. But I've had a really poor reception for it thus far, so I'm just hoping people are thinking about it for a few days before they donate... Cross fingers!
Maybe my family have already sucked all my NZ contacts dry - I know Laura has been fundraising frantically for her two school trips and Mum and Kate did some fundraising for the Thai elephant sanctuary before they went.
Our other fundraising plan is to contact a wee cafe we know and ask them if we can hold a function there in December, then sell tickets to a lunch there. We have yet to speak to the cafe (something we were supposed to do this weekend and didn't get onto!), but cross fingers they like the idea and we can go ahead in organising that.
What else is new? Jeff has started counting down till we leave. Sometimes I think it's because he is really anxious to leave, like when he tells me it's only 9 months and one week of classes left till NZ, but then other times I can see he will really miss Japan, like when he said, sadly, that it's our last autumn in Japan. I agree that missing out on the autumn colours of Japan will be one of the saddest things about moving back to NZ. Guess who will be planting Japanese maples when she gets a garden...!
Ok, it's dinner time now. Time to heat my asparagus soup, then go get those lemons. Then I have an evening of writing my latest Wide Island View (www.wideislandview.com) article before getting an early night!
Night,
Charly
xo
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