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.