Christmas will come early this year...

When SMS gets here!  3 more days!  This Sunday was our one year anniversary of meeting each other at December Nights.  SMS actually went and met up with his sister and her husband.  It sounds like he had a great time even though he missed me.

I'm excited to create a December Nights-ish experience here in Japan.  There are a lot of Christmas villages around based on German tradition (?).  At least that's what I read.  But there are two I'm looking forward to seeing- Yokohama Brick Warehouse and Tokyo Tower.  When SMS arrives, we're going to stay up in Tokyo for a few days so we'll totally get into the holiday spirit!

This past weekend, I cleaned the apartment.  I'm excited to get everything settled because then I can also post an apartment update to the blog.  Exciting!  I also ended up doing something every night so it was a pretty good weekend.

Motomachi Arch

On Friday, I went to Yokohama with one of the ortho surgeons to buy a mask for the holiday party, which was weirdly themed as a Masquerade Ball.  Ok.  Santa meets Phantom of the Opera, I guess.  We went to Don Quixote which is the weirdest general store I've seen.  It has EVERYTHING.  Besides my mask, I bought a magic Christmas tree which is growing in my office and a surprise present for Mom.  I could have bought a lot more but since half of my apartment cleaning consists of throwing crap away, I refrained from adding more to the pile of the eventual dumpster-bound bounty.

Xray Bar entrance (2F)

The store was right next to the Motomachi district so we headed over to find a restaurant or bar.  We ended up going to Bar Xray (which made the orthopod nerdily happy).  It was a whiskey bar and is my new favorite bar.  There are tons of craft whiskey bottles around and it's a really nice, polished atmosphere!  After a drink, we left and caught the next-to-last train home.  We got a late start plus the trains end fairly early, even on a Friday.

I'm with an invisible SMS!

Oh yes, caterer, nothing says festive like the decapitated
 pig head.  Who ate the other half of the apple?

On Saturday, I cleaned, did some yoga and headed out to the Holiday Ball.  It was an ok party although I had a great time with friends that I ran into there.  Afterwards, Jen, Adam, Carl and I headed out for some karaoke.  We headed out to the place I used to go and it was...ok.  At Carl's suggestion, we went to Budweisers, which had a much better song selection and a warmer atmosphere.

On Sunday, it was more of the laid-back sameness until I went out for a run.  I ran to base and was running really fast when my feet decided to catch a crack in the sidewalk.  This led to me doing my best impression of a slip-n-slide bellyflop onto the ground.  I skidded along after slamming my arm into the ground.  Don't worry, my right hand was holding my iPhone which bravely took the brunt, shattering the bottom 1/4 of the screen (&$*#&$&%&@#*!!!!!).  I have some scattered scrapes and bruises and once again, Mom is proven correct is that exercise is good for nothing but trouble.

I was pretty out of sorts after that but I headed over to Doug and Rose's for a Mexican pork dish that was pretty delicious.  Then I headed home and started The Art of Fielding, which is shaping up to be a pretty good book already!