Wow! What a start to the morning. I was running late and didn’t stop at a zebra crossing on my way to work and got stopped by the cops. Terror seized my heart as I am an unlicensed driver. Luckily I am losing my voice right now and I basically just bumbled around in English until he got annoyed and let me leave. I am well aware of the chance I am taking in not having it and I won’t bother listing the various precautions I taken against this fact as it doesn’t make much difference once you’ve been caught. When I renewed my license in the summer I apparently signed outside of that box for the signature on your card and thus it is void. Because they are a ridiculous organization (Ontario drivers bureau), it has been an up hill struggle to correct this problem. Various faxes and phone calls have been made but the bottom line is I need to go back into the office. This is a bit impractical for me as I have explained on more than one occasion. My family has regularly tried to assist me in the matter but eventually I got tired of pursuing it and just kept driving my car under the strict warning to myself to be very careful. This morning I realized that I may have become a bit lax. So it is time once again to start pursuing that the license and driving with extreme caution. Or better yet, letting Tom drive whenever posible.

Anyways, other recent happenings include a three day weekend! I love Constitutional Memorial Day. I am not required to do anything except take a Monday off. Lovely! So I went to various places in the prefecture for a bit of a holiday. I went to Reah’s place for a chili party down in Narakawa, went up to Hakuba skiing for the day on Sunday, and went skiing in again the next day in Kiso. We got watching a movie so I didn’t make the last train and had to come back up to Shio in the morning before work. That was fine though. Hakuba was quite nice for skiing. I got there a little late in the day but it was still fun. It snowed the whole time and I didn’t fall very much. It was quite crowded though. The snow was so fluffy and soft that when you did fall it was just fine. I met a bunch of nice people up there. Hakuba is the area where the winter Olympics was held for skiing events I think. It is amazing to be able to enjoy Olympic ski facilities even if you aren’t exactly Olympic quality yourself. Right now it is a very popular destination for Australian people. Apparently they are buying a lot of land up there and making bars, clubs and backpackers and such. It is the ideal place to start a business but I would imagine it is only seasonal. I met a very cool girl who I drove back down with. Her name is Kumi and we had excellent conversations the whole two hour drive. I am always glad to meet really interesting Japanese people that you can have great conversations with. I hope to hang out with her again.

The only downfall to the day of skiing was that I locked my keys in the car. I could see the key on the dashboard as we approached the car and I felt very sad. It was quite cold and our clothes were locked in there. We had gotten changed into ski clothes before going to the mountain. So we went and got a coat hanger and tried to open the car door for over an hour. It was the end of the day so a steady stream of cars past us the whole time but NO ONE stopped to help us. We called road side assistance but because of the weather conditions around the area, they said it would take three hours to come and unlock the door. It would also cost about $100. Very annoying. Both Gisela and I had almost completely run out of batteries on our mobile phones but got one last call into our friend Carmen (my savior in the kitchen / pipe bursting incident) and Tom who tried to look up opening the car door with a coat hanger on the internet and give us some instructions. I have seen it done before so I though we could do it. We almost had it but it just wouldn’t come. So we decided to smash the window before we froze. We finally got two girls to stop their car and we asked them for a heavy object. No one was willing to give us anything. They just told us to call roadside assistance and then drove off. We got one more guy to stop and he eventually agreed to give us his tire iron. When he saw that we intended to smash the window he made us give it back. Gisela stalled him for a little while so I could get a start on it though. It is harder to break a car window than you might think. I put on my ski mask so that glass would not hit my eyes and started smashing it. It did not break. Apparently glass wouldn’t have hit me because its shatterproof but I didn’t know that at the time. The best we managed was to scratch it up a bit. Ridiculous. The guy took back the tire iron and drove off. Pretty much everyone was gone and the restaurant had closed. We were very cold and upset. Just then Carmen pulled up and brought us back to civilization. We knew we needed foreign men. One thing we have both learned this year is the value of foreign guys in Japan. When it comes down to it, they are capable of all the things that need doing. I am not one to believe too strongly in the roles of the genders but we could not get into that car and we were pretty sure a foreign man could get the job done in no time. So Carmen took us back and we found some. This is where the resourceful Australian people come in. There was a guy named Sam who I am very grateful to have met with his visiting sister Jemimah. He had that car open in about 3 minutes. Frickin great! I bought dinner for him and his sister and dry warm sock were attained. I thought my fingers and feet were dead to me. Once again, foreign guys, I salute you! More and more women I know are saying these days that they hope they marry a competent man like their fathers. Someone who can fix a minor electrical problem or the like. This situation just reinforces that. You want a guy who’s handy. There are quite a few situations that I am capable of handling myself and so is Gisela. She is an extremely competent woman who is most likely made of steal. This just wasn’t our challenge. Although I was irritated with all of the car loads of Japanese guys who were passing us and not pulling over to help, that too was redeemed for me when a complete stranger walked me to my car last night because it was night time and I had no umbrella. Thank you sir!

The skiing on Monday was quite icy and slippery and I fell about 1 million times. We eventually stopped and took a break for an hour because we weren’t concentrating. I got hit by the ski lift for God sake! It was painful and I have many bruises. Dec was fairly patient with it and tried not to be too embarrassed at my assing around. Although he has only been skiing once, he has been a good ski coach, even offering advice on the technical aspects of the lift. We were out with a nice crowd of Japanese people who he had spent the weekend with. I also managed to take out some girl accidentally who was standing in the middle of the slope. I swerved to miss a little kid and then slammed into her. We both lay in a crumpled mess on the ground for a good long while but no one was seriously injured.

Today's photos are of a shrine in Shiojiri that I visited on my bike, the cats frolicing in the driveway on a very warm saturday and some action samples that I just got developed from the summer. They are friends jumping off the cliffs in Agematsu. Ah thoughts of warm weather. I think Spring is on its way here. We are going back and forth between rain and snow. I want a bit more snow for skiing and then an early spring would be just fine. Lets see if we can get that arranged.