My February

It has been an interesting month. To start things off, I received a painfully small paycheck at the beginning of the month so I had to cancel some trips and budget for the rest of the month very carefully.

The first bit of fun I had was during the first week at Franchesca and Kelsey's wedding dinner. Congratulations! There was some joking about how informal the dinner would be, which I took too literally. As a result, Matt (the only other American) and I were the only two people wearing jeans. This event was another 2 hour open bar, so I was again determined (along with Matt), to get my carefully budgeted $40 worth. I called in sick the next day.

Pictured from left to right is Josh (?), Franchesca, Matt, Kelsey, and yours truly.

Things were slow until last week when my friend, Phil, came to visit from San Francisco. We spent the week having dinner with friends I've made here (actually, they're not really friends, but girls that put up with my limited Japanese speaking abilities in the hopes that I'll teach them English). Here is Phil, me (doing my rock-n-roll face), and 3 of the English leeches.


And here are a few pics from our drive down the coast.






Then we had some AWESOME snowboarding. It snowed most of the week and it was the best day of snowboarding I've ever had.




So with some carefully budgeted fun and lots of top ramen I made it to payday (today) with 351 yen. Even though I splurged on groceries after I got paid a regular sized paycheck today, I'm going to try to watch my spending again this month so I can have a little more than 351 yen left at the end of the month ;-)