"Oh the weather outside's delightful..."

"...and the fire is slightly frightful!"

I’m blown away by the snow today.

It’s been snowing, off-and-on, since yesterday. I say off-and-on, but a better description might be “bipolarly.” I was out running some errands yesterday, and when I went into the Post Office ATM just a few flakes were drifting down, giving the impression that the storm had petered out for the day. But in the time it took me to extract 3-man, the snowmachine had ramped back up into an icy gale.

It would have been a damn cold night in the apartment had it not been for the translative powers of my okasan (Japanese mom) and the swift generosity of my Board of Education. Last Friday, I had elected to try to get something done about the icy conditions in my bedroom. With the help of aforementioned okasan, I asked the BOE if they might not be able to install another kerosene heater in my bedroom as all of the required gas lines and ventilation pipes were already present, and the current temperature back there was lingering icily close to zero.

Where I had expected the universal Japanese diversion/negation of teeth sucking, I instead encountered a remarkable gusto for getting the problem solved—post haste! My supervisor quite literally jumped onto the phone and started calling around about heaters. In the span of a minute, he had found one and was already apologizing to me that they couldn’t have it installed that very day as it needed to be cleaned and, thus, might not get installed until some time later this week. I assured him that was fine by me.

And then at the high school yesterday, just after my and Nishida’s first class, we get a call out to my apartment by my supervisor. By the time we get there to let him in, he’s already gotten a key from my landlord, and a team of no less than four dudes is busily fixing light fixtures in my hallway (HAL 9000 got an upgrade, apparently) and installing heaters in my bedroom.

That was fast.

So when I was finally able to turn the heater on last night, it registered the inhuman temperature of 2 degrees in the room, but it quickly got to work firing it up to something more habitable. Sure, the heater’s a bit old, and it’s got a vague air of burning about it, but it’s a comforting kind of burny smell—something like throwing your childhood blankie into a roaring fireplace on a cold winter’s night.

To celebrate the victory, as well as the three other problems she solved for me last Friday, I had my okasan over for dinner last night. She was my first dinner guest, and she routinely has me over for lavish spreads at her place, so I made sure to do it up right. She had requested something Canadian, so I made her one of the things I’m most proud of: Jonezer Chilli. I rounded it out with salad, rice, Japanese pickles (tsukemono), daikon kimchi, and some COSCO-bought-and-actually-drinkable red wine. When it was all arrayed on the table, there was a distinguished air of presentation about it, something ol daddio would have been proud of as neither he nor I are much for presentation when it comes to serving up grub.

As my okasan was leaving last night, I took a last look at the snowstorm before heading to bed, seeing that it had not let up and was settling in to a steady rhythm for the night. When I woke up this morning, I found that a good 10cm had settled in on top of the 8-or-so-cm that had fallen yesterday, and the snow wasn’t showing any signs of letting up any time soon, coming in on a near-horizontal angle at a near-whiteout clip. Needless to say, I was all smiles by the time I got to my junior high school this morning, and, seeing me grinning widely with no less than a good few centimeters of snow accumulated on my shoulders and bag, the second years who greeted me must have thought I was some special Canadian brand of crazy. With this much snow coming down this early in December, I’m thinking I definitely got placed in the right part of Japan.

And then I get into my desk in the teacher’s office and find that the big Alphonse Mucha print I’d torn off my brand new calendar...

…had spontaneously spawned itself some offspring in the form of another random Japanese act of kindness.

With the snow still coming down outside the teachers’ office’s tall, panoramic windows as I write this, it would seem as though it’s shaping up to be a great day, and the bitchy, disrespectful second years that I have in last period are going to have to be pretty crappy indeed to bring me down from this high.

Not that I don’t think they’re up to the challenge. They’ve shown themselves to be more than capable.