First contact

HP is safely entrenched in Tokyo for orientation, exhausted and nervous but out-of-his-mind excited.

Elsa is excelling at outdoor-only potty training.

I only have five or six more boxes of stuff left in my apartment.

I plan on taking a long, looong shower tonight and scrubbing the hell out of my sweaty I-just-moved-my-entire-life-into-boxes skin.

Small things make me feel a lot better.

And there he goes.

It's 8:30 am.

I slept maybe an hour and a half last night.

I woke up at 3:00, dragged HP out of bed, and he picked Elsa up out of her kennel to say goodbye. She knew something was up, as it was 3am and he never picks her right up out of the kennel. And she's no fool - she's known something was up for weeks now. She clung to him, scrambling up onto his shoulder with a panic that read "something is going on I don't like it what's happening OH GOD" and refused to relax like she always does when he holds her.

This, of course, did not ease any of the anxieties he had about leaving.

I kid you not, this is exactly what her expression looked like.

We stopped at Walgreens for wedding prints (which was an adventure in itself) to show to the kids and his family, then spent the drive to the airport chatting about this ridiculous thing we were doing and watching the sun rise.

I had made it through this whole experience without crying. But when all of his bags were unloaded and he kissed me goodbye, I will totally own that I broke a little. I was exhausted, this whole ordeal was intense, and I still had a long day ahead of me.

When I got back to what was left of the apartment, Elsa was awake and pacing. I grabbed a box of clothes and the necessary dog supplies, tossed them in the truck over my moving boxes, and took her out to pee before the trek to RI.

Seriously, I'm surprising the hell out of myself with this newfound stamina. Two days of information overload, packing and no sleep, and I still managed to complete three one-hour car trips. And am still fairly awake, if unhappily so. Badass level of stamina, people.

Maybe I should grow a beard.

I couldn't find her car harness, but Elsa knows how to ride in a car. She sat obligingly in the passenger seat, but was visibly nervous. So when she inched over to ask for affection, she got it, and alternated between staring out the windows and sleeping with her head in my lap. It was the first time she'd really asked for reassurance, and while it did freak me out a little bit, I was super impressed that she understands car manners enough to know to ask rather than bulldoze into the driver's lap.

She was super ecstatic to arrive at my parents' place, as it's the land of Grandma and Grandpa Have All the Best Parties. She ran around in their huge gardens, scaring moles and bees and being a general terror until I brought her inside and kicked the cats out of my bedroom. In went her kennel, litterbox and toy bucket, and somehow she just knows that this time was different. Instead of tearing through the house like she normally does, she only went a few feet beyond the bedroom door before ducking back in and crawling into her kennel. Even now, the only time she's spent out in the living room (previously her favorite place to rampage) has been velcroed to my feet and being extraordinarily clingy.

Maybe she's just tired.

Or maybe she understands a lot more than I give her credit for.

As it gets real

This week has been full of packing.

All. The packing.

To anyone reading this, never marry a person who loves books. Twenty-one boxes of books later, he has more boxes of books than I have my entire life's possessions in.

Bastard can get a goddamn kindle.

Know how much box space this takes up? NONE BECAUSE YOU BRING IT WITH YOU, BITCH

It was easily the most stressful week of my life. We had a few friends come over to move boxes to my parents' place of storage, and my apartment STILL has a ton of crap in it. I'm going to die.

As far as packing goes, I don't need to be truly out of here until August 3rd, so I might take tomorrow to recuperate, strategize, and recruit people to help me finish packing and moving on Sunday. Sunday will be a day of trips to Goodwill and exhaustion.

But seriously. All the things still in my apartment.

It has to end sometime, right? Right?

It also doesn't help that my major support is about to leave. I'm inches away from exploding like a volcano filled with stress and misery and covering the poor villagers below with molten anxiety.

"OH GOD IT BURNS LIKE SELF-DOUBT" scream the doomed townsfolk.

But the JETs had their orientation lunch today, where they got their passports back (my visa just got approved, so I'll have to come by and pick it up later), their plane tickets and instructions, and it hit me that at 8am, he's leaving the country.

Get up at 3am. Make sure everything is packed. Leave at 4. Drop him off at the airport at 5. Take a nap. Drive to parents' house to drop off dog and more boxes. Die of physical and mental exhaustion.

I have not yet cried this week.

How has no one *actually* died of drowning in paperwork?

for serious.

Because I think I'm pretty close.

I got the approval for notification for the pup, so customs knows she's coming and plans on getting her in and out in less than an hour. The people at customs? SO. NICE. They were very kind to e-mail me with questions and forms, and I'm very appreciative. Thinking of bringing a thank-you card to the person who's been helping me out.

I do not have rabies. love, elsa.

Paperwork I have yet to do:

Thing: Yakkan Shoumei (to bring over more than a month's worth of prescriptions)
Progress: Have to get a written note from my doc - doing that tomorrow morning. Also have to get an International Reply Coupon to use on an SASE to get it sent back. And fill out like, eight forms. And get CVS to fill 6 months' worth at once.

Thing: Elsa health certificate
Progress: Can only have her inspected less than two days before departure. But my vet is APHIS certified, so I can have her endorse it with their stamp and take care of that all in one go.

Thing: Tax exemption paperwork
Progress: Mailed to the house in Warwick. According to HP, it might take a while. Like a month from mailing the application. Ugghh.

Thing: Visa!
Progress: Theoretically all set...? I'll check with Susan on Friday when she hands us back our passports. She should also be handing back our...

Thing: Marriage Certificate
Progress: I sent an official copy to the consulate, which she theoretically made a copy of and will hand back. It'll save me $15 if I don't need to go to city hall to get another one.

Thing: Medical records?
Progress: In theory, I should have a copy of these, even in brief so that I can see a doctor in Japan. Maybe. I'll ask around, as that might be making more work for myself.

Not to mention all the things I have to cancel when I leave and the things that I'm sure I'm forgetting...

Ugh. I hate packing. Packing and paperwork.

T minus 35 days. 

I hate booking flights

After a grueling battle with various airlines, I now have my ticket to Okinawa all set and ready, and all three legs of the journey notified that I'll have a dog with me.  It's a huge weight off of my mind. AND 24 HOURS IN TRANSIT. 3hrs, 2 hr layover, 14 hours, 2 hr layover, 3hrs.

I also sent off my Notification for Importing Dogs after (yay, more fighting!) another battle, this time with the fax machine. Luckily, this morning I awoke to a message in my inbox from Narita customs saying that they'd received my notification and had a few questions. And now I just sit back and wait for my confirmation number!

Here's hoping the rest of the 363287654834 sheets of paperwork go as smoothly.

Punctuation is important

As I mentioned in my last post, I was facebook-swarmed by Showa girls, which was super cute, and I got to see pictures of the fun things they've done so far in Boston, like going to Fenway and Blue Man Group and fireworks on the 4th.

One of them, who I tease by calling Yukari-sensei (she was one of the rotating tutors I had in my group), is a bubbly ball of energy who was very chipper and also wanted a bazillion pictures. Anyway, she knew that I am very poor with kanji, but I can do hiragana and katakana well. So when I posted on her Facebook wall, she was a saint and took the time to write out hiragana in her response.

I can read and understand this. Mind officially blown.

And I learned something important.

When communicating with a Japanese teenager, various adorable emoticons and pretty much all of the Lucky Charms shapes are vital. More so than punctuation. It's fun, it's silly, and it makes learning Japanese feel a whole lot less scary.

I jumped on that train like a spaghetti western bandit.

My first foray into conversational Japanese, and I DID NOT FAIL.

On Saturday, we had a second Japan orientation, this one run by JET alums.

Side note: Go the the official orientation. I am so glad I went. Meeting people who've actually done it and seeing everyone else who's in the same boat as you really makes it feel less daunting. Also, they talk about important things, like squatter toilets :

we seriously broke Ita-san, the consul, by one of the alums giving us a detailed instruction/demonstration on the proper way to use them, and she dissolved into giggle fits for a good ten minutes

 ...and banking and mail.

Anyway, this one took place at the Showa Institute in Boston, which is an awesome resource. They have sister campuses and send students back and forth for language learning. The campus is beautiful. I hate to admit, it's more than a little surreal being in a classroom geared toward teaching English, but I saw some familiar faces and a lot of my nervousness dissipated.

The first half of the day was spent on learning different techniques for listening and comprehension exercises, which was nice, but the real thing I was looking forward to/dreading was lunch and what came after: meeting the Showa students.

We went into the sun room for pizza, and met about a dozen very shy (well, most of them) Japanese college girls, and were told "socialize!" When they let us loose, the girls had the most terrified looks on their faces.

oh shi- I just forgot all of my english

Then we descended like hawks in a field of baby rabbits, pulling some to each of our tables and encouraging them to speak English as we put together our terrible pidgin Japanese. They opened up a lot more as time went on, especially when they saw that while some of us had a few years of Japanese under our belts, others had varying levels of "none."

BUT I COULD HOLD ACTUAL CONVERSATIONS. I did! I managed to find out their names, where they were from, what year they were in, when they arrived, and a whole host of other things. Turns out, they were all 19-year-old sophomores, fresh off the plane 3 weeks ago. So as nerve-wracking as it was for us to talk to native Japanese speakers, at least we had home court advantage.

I was super nervous at first. I rehearsed things in my head before saying them, often missing my window to actually say it out loud. It was frustrating, and I quickly realized that this was Not Going to Work. Thus, my "Say Stuff and Correct as You Go" system was born. And it was awesome.

In less than an hour, I was speaking confidently and quickly, although I might not have made a whole lot of sense. But the girls were all over that. (It probably also helped that one of the teachers earlier in the day had given us a quick vocal coaching.) We got used to laughing at each other.

A lot.

The rest of the day was a lot of fun, as we rotated in little pairs and groups of english and Japanese speakers to do self-introductions and skits and whatnot. By the end of the day, the girls were a lot more social and friendly, asking to take A BAZILLION PICTURES (seriously, there are about fifty pictures of me on Facebook with a variety of Japanese schoolgirls) and asking for our facebook information.

HP commented that I was like a rockstar in the number of girls who flocked to me, further chirping that he was right about just loosening up and being a chatty, friendly person in order to win over everyone ever and make ALL THE FRIENDS.

He might be right this one time. Might be.