November already?

I've been saying things like this alot recently:

Wow, it's already November?
It's already Thursday?
It's been over a week since I last updated my blog?
It's already time to pay rent again?

Time seems to be flying by!

Last weekend I watched a wheelchair marathon here in Oita. It draws people from all over the world, and coincidentaly enough Shawn and I met two out of the three Americans racing at dinner one night. It was quite inspiring. Here are some pictures of the event:







Halloween is the first holiday I've been able to teach here so I went all out. I made a Halloween DVD consisting of clips from Hocus Pocus the movie, scary music and some clip art images. I wanted to give my students some visuals. Then, I designed a fun class with some games, etc. Little did I realize that after the EIGHTEENTH time of teaching this class I would be oh-so-over Halloween. I was excited, and now I'm glad I don't have to say the words, "Happy Halloween!" for at least another year.

Yesterday, on Halloween, I hosted a small party for the ESS club. I was promised some orange pumpkins from the fruit stand guy near my house, but I was delivered 7 very small, squat, thick green pumpkins. It was terrible, I was so disappointed because I had been telling my kids they would get to carve American pumkins... I accepted defeat, and we tried to carve the green ones. Guess what! We did it! And they really didn't look much different than American orange pumpkins once you got the candle inside. It also turned out that my high school has four big boxes of all kinds of costumes, so I brought them out. We had 'dirt cups' with chocolate pudding, oreo and gummy worms. And the whole time scary music and sounds playing in the background. We even toasted the pumpkin seeds! They were happy, I was happy, and the Jack-O-Lanterns were happy:





Shawn even stopped by!












It was a good Halloween.

As you may have read we also got a new couch! The arrival of this new couch prompted us to reorganize our entire apartment and rearrange furniture. It looks so great now! It seems like we have so much more space and we are feeling very comfortable. Love the new couch. Much better than the two split-seam chairs we have been sitting on!

I want to send a special thanks to my wee cousins DJ and Jessse - Thanks so much for the letters! They were great! I will reply very soon. :)

Hope all is well. Happy November!