My Official Moving Post

I'm going to miss Chiba.
Tomorrow starts serious moving time. I had some kind of joke yesterday about "thinking inside the box"...since...yah...everything needs to be in boxes...but...the joke kind of died on me.
From tomorrow, we waste not a minute of money on our "Renta-truck" and we haul things frantically into it, as our dear and dedicated drivers go back and forth from old house to new. I wish I had a camera and was clever enough to take artistic pictures of the scramble and disarray--boxes from all angles and people's scurrying sandals. I am very sorry for my lack of talent in that respect. All I ever seem to be able to provide on any topic is a sort of quasi report on my crooked emotional state. So here it is.
For the last couple of days we've been drinking all our ice coffee out of plastic cups. The king of big, tall, fleurescant plastic cups that come with massive spiral straws. It's not very classy, but it feels like change.
Change is good, and as "huge" as this change is, it doesn't feel so huge. It doesn't feel like a leap into the dark. We've gotten lots of our home guidelines hashed out, our rooming plan fixed, our schedule decided before most of us have even seen the house. Which is okay, it means someone is looking out for us.
This kind of "moving" change is something that I've always enjoyed the idea of. I don't know if it has something to do with having rarely ever moved in my life but always wanting to; I have a definite desire to get on with it, even if it means sleeping on a cardboard box for a few nights just to get it all in the car and gone.
But there were a lot of things that were convenient about living here. Being right next door to Bayside, right down the road from QQ and Donkey, just 1,500 yen and one trainride away from the HCS. There's a lot to be said for all the sentimental bits of this house and memories in it, sure, but what I liked most about it was its location. Being at the center of all these other homes that made a triangle around us.
Still, I'm happy about this change. I'm happy that, at last, the office will be big(ger). We'll have a real uketsuke desk at our front door. We'll have aircon in every room (which we probably won't use, for the most part.) We'll have a big ofuro and a house that is not so blasted difficult to keep clean. We'll have lots of kids who speak English, and God knows I love a good English-speaking child. Lots of people that I'm looking forward to living and working with. A chance to change, to work harder, to love bigger and better.
So the good has triumphed over the bad in this situation, and I'm mostly thankful for the change and the opportunity to work with new people.
And maybe you can hope for some keitai pictures!

Activate Japan

Finally! A post about real life and its intricacies.
I work for Activate Japan, and it's probably the closest thing I have to a full time job (although, in our exciting lives for Jesus, we tend to take off doing lots of other things.)
The funniest thing about all this is, even though I grew up on the computer, typing out this and that, making little magazines and writing little stories, I never thought I'd be doing the work that I do now. For one thing, this is not the language I thought I'd ever be doing work in. It has been, for the last 3 years, a steady "learning as you go" experience. TYJ for the challenges that force us to learn new languages!!

Here! Is my handsome and quite qualified co-worker. His name is Akira. He is acting out his Muslim tendency to hide his face from sinners. He is also a very handy handyman, and really wants more people to come and help us in the FUN office so that he can do more handyman things with his handy hands.

So there's lots to be done and so little time to do it in. Some of the things we do are:

• Receive orders for products and ship them off to field homes!
• Process orders that come in directly from the General Public (I hope to be able to start marketing directly from Activate Japan more in the future...that would be so cool.) via our website, etc.
• Process and coordinate the monthly printing and shipping of Activate magazines to subscribed readers! (As well as take care of incoming subscription information.)
• CREATE new tools for witnessing in Japan, (Thankfully, we're able to outsource our translating, but the rest of the concept, design, and publishing for the most part happens right here.) as well as ship in products from overseas.
• Keep up with all the financial business that is quite an ass-pain when you run an official company.
  

<--That is something Akira made to cheer himself up yesterday.
Things that cheer me up working in the office:

• Akira trying to figure out his Spanish computer programs.
• Getting @ed on Twitter
• Knocking off lots of little to-dos
• Remembering that, when we move, we will have a nice, big, new office to get inspired in.
• Friends who know that I am loved best by a phone call that is short.
• A clean canvas in Indesign
• Crystal coming in with a snack for us (Crystal randomly makes snacks for us all the time. It is amazing.)

Things I've Been Up To

What's better--a boring blog post, or none at all?
Since I happen to be the lucky owner of this blog, I get to answer that question, and while there is no real conclusive answer, the answer for today is "a boring blog post." So here I race!
Things I've been up to:

>>Attending (and staffing) Ken and Natacha's wedding. Which was good fun, good food, and good blisters. Highlights include: romping around with Mike D., singing in French (???) and harmonizing "I'm Yours" with Gabe, having storytime with the kids afterward in a half-dead aspirined-out state of mind, embarassing myself in front of guests with my strange inability to speak the right language at the right time, getting to know Ken and Natacha who I am very happy to be moving in with soon.


>>Designing a new Christmas CD for production in Japan.

>>Finally getting around to tying up the loose ends with TCD approved songs "Remember Me" and "Stupid Things"
>>Anticipating a huge home move in the beginning of August. Packing/forsaking things.
>>Laying out WOW #6

>>Praying desperately against a seriously unwelcome nerve/muscle cramp in my hand that acts up every time I need to use my computer. (You. Also. Pray. Yes?) I may need to think about changing the way my stuff is set up.
>>Dying my hair. (This is really a very anticlimactic tale. For all of you who know me and know I've never dyed my hair before, you'd probably imagine something really exciting. It was really exciting when it was going in and when I was washing it out, but when all was said and done, it was still sort of the same color, except a duller, greyer, strangely purple-tinted version of my previous dirty blonde hair. I just went and kind of...blahed it out, I guess. Definitely not the intended product. Must fix.)
>>Praying in some funds for an MP3 player.
>>Missing my friends (and my phone).
>>Drawing a picture of Jesus.
>>Baking cookies!! (You'd never believe it, but I baked whole batches and batches that were ALL eaten by real humans!!)