I'm All Shook Up

This morning, at about 5:40, my own little prefecture of Tochigi was graced with a 5.1 magnitude earthquake that quite literally shook me right out of bed. As the preliminary tremors nudged me awake, my first thoughts went to the heater on the wall above me. If it fell it would crush my skull. I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, but as my bed began to shake back and forth, I felt less like a baby being rocked to sleep and more like...a baby being shaken. At this point I was wide awake, so I figured it would be okay to get up forty minutes earlier than usual.

Yesterday morning, I checked the weather forecast before I even started getting ready, hoping for rain so that my exhausted body would have an excuse to ride to school in a taxi. No precipitation predicted. I got ready and dressed for a chilly bike ride as usual. When I left for school, there were dark blue clouds in the morning sky. I thought, "Ooo! How pretty!" Ten minutes later, it started to snow. When I'm ten minutes into my morning commute, it's not worth it to turn around and call a taxi to take me to school. At this point, all I can really do is press forward. So that's what I did, laughing at the absurdity of the situation: a freak December snowfall decides to descend right in the middle of my morning trek to work, ending just a minute before I pull through the school gate.

It's as though the forces of Nature are playing a last-minute "Best of Moka" marathon in my honor. This evening, I will be boarding a plane to Honolulu, and it will be sayonara freezing misery and a warm, welcoming aloha! to sunny happywonderfulness.

I'm sure that after three weeks of traveling in first Hawaii, then Singapore and Indonesia, I'll start to miss little Moka and I'll be ready to come home. But, at the moment, it's hard to imagine. And, as I sit in my own living room with the electric heater blasting, huddled under a blanket and wearing several layers of clothing, including snow pants and a down jacket, I'm not apologizing. I'm ready for this vacation to begin.