Sky so Blue

Been really busy lately, and really tired, haven’t been sick exactly, but feeling really lethargic and it’s been interfering with my daily life a bit. Not a big problem though, and I’ve been pretty pleased with how things have been going. Sorry that I haven’t been working on finishing the posts about my trip with Mom and Grandma, especially since it’s been two months now. I just got kind of tired of writing those posts so I kept putting it off. I’ll try to put some more out, as they are good stories and the trip was a lot of fun, but since I want to keep doing blog posts I feel like I should take a break and just talk about current events.
I’m having trouble with Japanese, and I think it’s the same problem I have when studying math, in that the point at which things stop being related to common sense is the point at which I start having a lot of trouble with it. It’s discouraging, but I think I’m keeping up, if only barely. Overall though, I feel decent about my position, and I’d really like to keep practicing Japanese when I get back. It would really be nice to become skilled in a second language, especially since I’ve always had so much trouble with foreign languages. I feel like if I managed to become proficient in Japanese I would have overcome a personal issue. Anyway, we’ll see how things go once I get back, but I’m not really sure where I can study. A couple of the new people here are from St. Cloud, and apparently you can take Japanese there, but only 101.
Weather has been getting warmer, which I have mixed feelings about. I always get excited when Spring comes because by that point I’m ready for it to be warm again, but by the time Summer rolls around I long for the snow and ice. I just really don’t care for hot weather, and prefer the cold. Spring here is truly beautiful though. Our university has tons of Sakura trees scattered around it, which bloom in a beautiful pink. Sakura trees are one of the things Japan is most famous for, and unfortunately it only lasts 1-2 weeks before everything greens up. I did take some pictures though. It’s been raining a lot, and I do like that. Call me crazy, but I really do prefer the rain to the “good weather” days. Something about it just pleases me. Yesterday was particularly stormy, it rained buckets and the wind was strong enough to rattle windows. Overall I’d have to say I’m enjoying the weather, and I’m hoping Spring lasts just a little bit longer.
A little over a week and a half ago I got hit by a car, though it was nothing serious, just disorienting. I was borrowing a friend’s bike so I could pick something up from his room. There’s a sort of ally that runs along the back side of the dorm building, and since the dorms are in blocks there are walking exits onto it every 50 feet or so. It’s rarely even used as a street, so I rarely even think of it as one, and I was coming out of one of the exits when a car hit me. The timing was really bad, as neither one of us really could have seen the other unless we had stopped completely to look, which no one ever does on that path. It was raining pretty nard, so the ground was really wet too. So I came out, and I could see what was going to happen a split second before it did, and I had time to run through it in my head. I hit the front corner, and rolled onto the hood before they stopped and I fell off into a gutter (drainage gutter, I got really wet). It was really weird, because I was really calm through the whole thing. I remember thinking the whole time “Well this sucks but nothing too bad is going to come of it” although that may not be a good thing. In the end my friend’s bike was fine while the guy’s car was banged up a bit. He didn’t ask me to do anything. Just wanted to exchange ID numbers (he was a student) in case I needed to go to the hospital. I was fine though, since my head never made contact with anything. The worst I got from it was a skinned knee and elbow, a bruise on my forearm, and a nasty cut on my finger, which got infected before healing up. The only lasting effects are that the joints on the left side of my body are still a bit sore, especially when I twist them (which I don’t do often anyway). Anyway I’m fine, and everything else is going pretty well.