Saturday, December 31, 2011

Top 5 news of 2011

Nisen ichi nen no go dai nyuusu

1. 3/11 Quake, and The Pumpkin Clan battles...um...gasoline and toilet paper shortages and guilt trips about having power and running water the entire time? Pumpkin Daddy leaves Pumpkin Palace for a week to do volunteer work.

The Americans have 9/11, now we have 3/11, I guess. In retrospect we were hardly affected, but at the time I was pretty depressed.

I don't know if I mentioned this, but the Pumpkin Daddy went to one of the severely tsunami-hit areas to do volunteer work for a week, helping to clear out wreckage, shoveling sand out of gutters, that kind of thing. We missed him, but we managed without him, amazingly enough.

2. Department head retires at Pumpkin Mommy's work. My direct supervisor becomes new department head at work, and I get his old job.

I think a lot of people would have been happy with the promotion. Not me. But the alternative would have been leaving the current work environment and going job hunting. I am quite familiar with the positions available to me locally (they all kind of suck in varying aspects and degrees of intensity), and I don't consider moving an option right now, so here I am.

3. I go through, and lapse out of, a fitness phase.

It was a couple weeks long. Maybe I'll go back next year.

4. Tropical vacation in February.

Around the New Year holidays, here in Japan, the A-listers go to Hawaii and the B-listers go to Guam. If the Pumpkin Mommy, Daddy, Prince and Princess go to Guam in February, what does that make us?

5. Disneyland vacation on Halloween.

We are shallow. We are commercial. It was fun. It made us poor.

Even not considering what others had to go through this year, our year was a happy one. Here's to hoping our and your coming year will be as good or better.

Monday, December 19, 2011

Behind the scenes

Butai ura






This doll is supposed to be the Baby Jesus. What it actually is is just plain scary.