Spring? Is that you???

I don't want to get too far ahead of myself again but I think Spring might actually be here now... we've had many false starts and some serious flirtations but this might actually be IT! We have had a couple of days of warm (but heavy) rain followed by several beautiful days of sunshine! The snow is melting fast and there are green things poking their heads up... I walked outside the other day and it SMELLED like spring! Yay! (mind you, it's about time!! It's MAY!)

We are officially into Golden Week now. It consists of several days off in a row for different holidays including Showa Day (used to be celebrated as the Emperors Birthday), Constitution Memorial Day, Greenery Day and Childrens Day. It is the busiest travel time of the year here so we elected to lay low rather than go to Hakodate as was our original thought. It's kind of strange though - we had Thursday off and then had to go to school on Friday. Then we're off from Monday through Wednesday and have to go back to school on Thursday.

Anyway, we didn't do much on Thursday - just kind of laid low - it was one of the rainy rainy days so it seemed nicer to just stay home. Ian took Taran to the hospital for his follow up appointment on Friday. He asked about the possibility of Taran seeing a specialist to try and get to the bottom of the problem so Taran was given an MRI appointment for next Thursday! It's amazing to us that he could get in that quickly! I'm sure the only reason it was six days later is because there were four days of Golden Week! On Saturday Joisan and Naoko and I went to Tomokomai for the day. There is a big western-style shopping mall there that we wanted to check out. We left around 9:30 and we shopped till we dropped! We didn't actually buy much but we poked around almost every store. We had Takoyaki for lunch (octopus balls - you didn't know octopus had balls did you?!) Just before we headed home (as we were about to drop) we stopped for some Baskin Robbins ice cream. Yum!

Naoko stayed for dinner and we discussed a cell phone deal that we had seen while we were shopping. We had been considering getting a cell phone for those emergencies that might arrise and for the convenience of being able to communicate with each other while we're out and about. We decided to go for it since there was a great sale on so on Sunday we headed into Date to make the arrangements. What should have taken only an hour or an hour and a half wound up taking most of the day but we ended up with two skookum cell phones with cameras in them! One is pink and one is white but otherwise they are identical. If anyone wants to send us a text Phaedra's phone is: pink_cakeness at ezweb.ne.jp and Ian's phone is: ninja_kittens at ezweb.ne.jp

We're not sure what the rest of Golden Week looks like but we'll hope to catch some time on Skype with anyone who's there! I have photos to add but I'm on the wrong computer to do it right now so they'll have to come later... sorry!