So when I said that I was back over a year ago, I lied. I lied like a card-counter in Las Vegas who's been in business for ten years and has yet to be caught. I was doing a lot last summer getting ready for two of my AP classes and so, instead of being on here, I disappeared to the land of boring academia. That's where I'll be this year too, but with some minor changes. I have one AP class this year instead of three and so I have a bit less homework. A bit, not a lot. I still have to read Jane Eyre, As I Lay Dying, and Grendel. But I digress...

This last year was insane. Three AP classes (I finished them with two A's and a B, and got a 3 and two 4's on the tests), friends who are nutters, drama, and the like. High school is something, I tell you. I had been planning on going to Japan in August for 5 to 6 months but as of the end of last summer I got real sick with a condition called complex carbohydrate intolerance and, by February of this year, it was decided that I could not go to Japan. I had all the money and paperwork filled out and I was told that I'd probably get really, really sick if I went. So that plan was shafted and stuck on the backburner until around 2012 when I will be a junior in college and will go on a study exchange (hopefully to Kyoto, woot!).

Now, as the end of July approaches, my family is getting ready for an exchange student from Tokyo to live with us for three weeks. Her name is Satomi and she is one year, eleven months, and 12 to 13 days younger than me depending upon whether or not it is a leap year. She'll be arriving on Wednesday the 22nd. That's three days away. Forgive me if I disappear again for those three weeks, we've really got a lot to do and I'll be busy going to English classes with Satomi and the other students from her school.

Not a whole lot happened this year besides that. I had a spat with my Dad's family, I got a new cell phone, I'm going to an acupuncturist named Shimizu-sensei who speaks to me in Japanese way too fast, Sakuracon 2009 was utterly amazing, I can now dress myself and other people in kimono (guys are fun to dress up as girls), and my sister is now (thankfully) out of the house more often because she is going to cosmotology school. Thank God.

If you've read this far, you're bloody insane. Which reminds me, I went to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Oh. My. GOD. That was amazing. Totally worth the 6 hour wait in line <3