I have some super awesome news though! My contract got extended until April 2013! I'm the first teacher to be offered a two year contract. My boss was telling me that he's very happy with how hard I've been working and would love to have me stay a while. I'm really happy about it.
To celebrate, we went out to dinner with one of my favorite people and her family. We went out to a yakiniku restaurant. Yakiniku is just soooo awesome. There is a mini grill in the middle of the table, and everyone just grills the meat however they want. The meat is sliced impossibly thin, so it cooks in little to no time at all. It was beyond delicious. Afterward, we went to her house to play games with her kids and eat ice cream. We let them try root beer floats, and they liked them! Which is awesome, because the last person I told to try root beer wasn't a fan.
We also had an awesome taco night with our two foreign friends, Leigh and Aaron. Aaron handmade burritos and we had real Mexican food for the first time in about nine months. We played games and chatted, and just had an awesome time. I'm so glad that we've got such great people living so close (I can almost throw a rock and hit their apartment).
However, the best news of all happened a couple weeks ago...MY CATS CAME TO JAPAN! I have missed them so much. Our family is whole again! They seemed to have missed us too, because once they recognized us, they wouldn't leave us alone. They were purring and loving on us like crazy. I really can't explain how happy I am to have them back. Of course, I also have my allergies back...but they'll get better with time. In fact, they've already started to get a little better. I guess my body still has some of it's immunity from before.
But, with the good comes the bad. And I really wasn't prepared for what happened right before the cats came here. I got a ridiculously short email from my mom saying that I needed to call her. I knew that it wasn't good, so I called immediately. She said that my grandpa wasn't doing very good, and that I should be ready to go home soon. I called her again the next morning and we decided that I needed to go back to Vegas ASAP. That afternoon she bought me a ticket and I got a reentry permit. I got on the first flight to Vegas leaving Nagoya the next day.
After something like 24 hours of travel (without sleep), I arrived in Vegas. I went to see my grandpa, and it was really bad. He was so weak. He'd never looked his age (91) before, until that moment. He was barely able to talk. However, when he saw me he said my name. Which made me happy. The next day he could only say "Oh man," because he was in so much pain. After that he went into a three day long coma (of sorts), and finally on Wednesday September 30th at around 3:30 he stopped breathing. It was so heartbreaking to lose him. I loved him so much. He was one of the best people I'd ever known. I miss him already.
I came back to Japan a few days after my Grandpa passed away, and got my cats. A week after getting my cats, I got attacked by mosquitoes. My final count put the number of bites at 45. The worst was when the bites on my face swelled up to the size of golf balls and looked like I was starting to grow horns (it was straight out of FLCL for any anime fans reading this). It was scary! Luckily, the swelling went down. Recently, I haven't been bitten as often...but I'm still very afraid that it will happen again.
Poor Rhett has been having his share of bad luck too. In total, he's been in three bike wrecks in the last month or so. They've all happened on the way to Kira. The first time, he fell when he ran over an overgrown bush. His bike was slightly broken after that, and his rib was sprained. It took about three weeks for it to heal. The next time he T-boned a car that wasn't paying attention to where it was going. Luckily, Rhett was smart enough to buffer the accident by stretching his limbs out to protect him from the car. Both he and his bike suffered no damage from that wreck.
Unfortunately, he wasn't so lucky this last time. In Japan, a lot of the restaurants put flags outside of their businesses to attract customers. Well, it was a particularly windy day when Rhett was riding last week, and the wind blew one of the flags right into him, causing him to fall. His shoulder, knee, and feet are all sorts of scratched up. He currently has scabs all over him and looks like he got into a fight with something and lost.
But worst of all for Rhett, his computer monitor broke! Anyone that knows Rhett knows he loves his computer. He works on it every day. Without his monitor, he hasn't been able to do much. He tried fixing it to no avail. We did order him a new one, and he'll be setting it up today.
We do have something fun coming up: we're going to a cooking circle with Leigh, Aaron, and my friend Esaka-san. I'm very excited and will be sure to blog about it (probably a month after the fact, but whatever.)
We have joy and sorrow in our life. If we face to sorrow, joy will come next....
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