Saturday

Saturdays have, of late, become rather delayed starting days where we sort of ease ourselves into the weekend. In summer I am usually out of bed by 5.30 - 6.00 and in the water before 7.00, but winter puts paid to that. It is still dark at time, cold outside, maybe even snowing and, well, the bed is warm, soooo warm. So today for instance, commenced at the rather late, by our standards, time of 7.40, when we finally got it together to get up. Cian was waiting patiently in his bed for Mammy and Daddy but I reckon another five minutes and Cian would have got his army of stuffed toys together and attacked us.

The rest of the day was mundane in its ordinariness - I went for a jog, Sanae and Cian went to visit Mrs. Takahashi where Cian, as usual, was given his body weight in fresh fruit. In the afternoon in attempt to rid ourselves of our mundanity, we went for a drive and a walk down to a cove on the far side of Muroran. As you can see from the accompanying photographs, it is a surprisingly picturesque place, albeit a bloody cold one.

Day Off

Cian had a fever yesterday, the boy can't seem to get enough of them lately. He's already has been through the whole oink, oink swine-flu thing, so we weren't too concerned, but it did necessitate taking a day off to look after him. One of the drawbacks of living so far away from family and friends is that on days like these, either myself or Sanae have to take time off work to look after sick-boy. Yesterday was my turn, today Sanae gets to start her weekend early. The result is that weekends lose their 'weekend' status, as one of us, or both of us, have to go into school to make up for lost time.
See, I warned you this blog would quickly become plaintive and whiney.

Introduction

As emails to all and sundry have become scarcer and scarcer due to the pressures of time and a soon-to-be 3 year old boy (world's most demanding, too), we, the Gaynor-Takahashi family, have decided to explode onto the blogger scene with this, our eponymous titled blog.

It will be of necessity, brief, intermittently updated, riddled with grammatical errors and misspellings, unreservedly self-pitying, utterly subjective and prone to long, weary diatribes against the evils of English education in Japan and the herculean task that is toilet training.

Some of it will even be written in Japanese.

Topics, topics, topics...well some grand, a lot mundane, maybe vaguely interesting, probably not. Rather, this blog is an attempt to bridge the distance between here and wherever your 'there' may be, by offering red-eyed snap shots into the life and dreaming of the three of us here in Muroran.

'Daily' is not something I can promise - the best I can do is 'frequently', though even that could be a bit of a fools promise, maybe 'not so infrequently', would be closer to the mark.

To begin, I am going to kick off a series (indecently cribbed from the AV Club, see: www.avclub.com) on the best of the noughties, the best books, music, films, stories, websites, places I've been, hot, dinners I've had, etc. in the period from January 2000 to December, 2009. It is, note, my best not yours so feel free to disagree, criticize, berate me, label me ignorant, and generally treat me the same way as I usually treat my students. My ultimate aim is to spark some give and flow from the millions who undoubtedly read this blog (hello Mother).

First up, this weekend hopefully, are the best books of the noughties.