J is for Japanese

It's eleven minutes until midnight here in south Texas. Merry Christmas Eve.

I got my grade back for my Japanese class yesterday -- I got an A. If I had skipped the final altogether, I would've gotten a B in the class, so the A wasn't a huge surprise, but I'm proud of my progress. Japanese is an extremely fun language -- crazily challenging, and incredibly confusing and inconsistent, but very fun.

I've got a lot of plans, which include things that are more and less probable, like a professional certificate in photography, for instance, but somewhere near the top of my list is spending a year in Japan with my love. It's a remarkably practical way of spending a year in a part of the world entirely different from the one I've lived all my life. It's a way for me to work out my traveling itch before I settle down. It'll be crazy-hard, but hopefully, it'll be an experience that serves me well. So I'm learning Japanese, slowly.

And tomorrow night, my love arrives in Texas once more. I'm beside myself.