Aaaarrrghhh!!!! Offline!

Yep, I had to endure over 24 hours offline!

Scary to realise how dependent I've become on it, but to be fair, I was mostly worried about my various money-making schemes - selling on trademe and amazon, needing the website to do the translations, and needing to get back to a potential student about a time to meet.

I went shopping instead, which is not much of an improvement. I visited the other three 100yen shops and bought up on Hello Kitty goods to make into packages to sell on trademe. If we sell new stuff we won't have to become second-hand traders! Hope they sell well...

And this morning I put my internet-free time to good use and hung some hooks in the hall by the spare-room to tidy up our mountain of jackets. Why don't Japanese houses have coat closets! That, and the lack of a laundry tub are the greatest inconveniences of a Japanese house (and the lack of insulation, but this winter is either much milder than the previous ones, or I am acclimatized). One other thing they lacked were squeejee floor mops - or any mop with a long handle. There were ones for outside, for cleaning cars and windows but not for the kitchen. Then I saw one last week and snapped it up! Although I can't for the life of me figure out how you would go about changing the mop - I can't even get the rest of the plastic off it.

Lena has learned to skip. She is SO proud of herself. It was so cute to watch her as she tried to coordinate it at first, then her glee when she got it right! Now they both skip through the supermarket, which is better than walking, because they can keep up with me, and better than running, because I can keep up with them.

Amy's fascination with fish biology continues. Just after watching a Discovery channel medical/surgery documentary, she came into the kitchen where I was gutting some small fish to simmer (recipe will be on the soy sauce site when its finished). Did she say "Ugh, yuk, gross, I'm not eating that!"? No, not Amy. After poking its eye (see previous message) she said "Where's the heart?" So I fished around with the knife and pulled out a red blob and said "Maybe that's it". Who needs to bisect frogs in High School biology?