Sick to the back teeth....

...of snow! Seriously! I am sick of shoveling it, driving through it, wearing it, falling in it... somebody please make spring come?!
OK so it's not all THAT bad and I know this is making up for the longing I had as a kid for properly snowy winters - it all seems so much more romantic when you have a dad to dig the path and a warm house to come home to I guess! It has its beautiful side, as you'll be able to see when I post the pics from the Snow-Lantern festival in Hirosaki. Am SURE we didn't have this much last year!! But hey next year I'll be back in rainy England missing it, I guess. The grass is always, well, whiter, and all that.

Last Friday we had an Eikaiwa social - a Valentine-themed Chocolate Fondue Party (-a rather gloriously invented Western Tradition). It was really good actually, we had cheese fondue as well just to add variety, and it turned out really yummy - certainly more palatable than the Halloween fish-orange stew anyway. My abiding memory is of two-year-old Mitsuki, the daughter of two of my students, breaking into the stash of chocolate before anyone got around to fondue-ing it - there was this glorious moment just before all the "grown-ups" realised what she was up to, and the picture of her delighted face while biting a huge chunk off a giant bar of Ghana Milk while the rest of it melted to her sticky little hand was just priceless. We were lucky there was any left for the rest of us... :)