Powering through

I noted on Monday that it was pretty quiet around here. There is a pretty big difference to having 11, 13, and 17 year olds on holidays as opposed to 1, 3, and 7 year olds! There is a 17 year-old missing this week, so that also makes a difference. Mind you there has been a lot of electronic usage, but that's been tempered by other things like sleep-ins, exercise, reading, jigsaw puzzles, board games, planning a scrap book of memories from our trip (youngest son), and even making dinner for the whole family. Actually the latter was part of our guidelines that I wrote about back here.

This looks a lot more exciting than sitting at my desk in Tokyo, doesn't
it? Part of our Tokyo survival plan is camping: remembering what we've
done and planning for the future. Even now we're thinking about our
next 12 months and what exciting camping adventures we'll get up to.

Now that we're done with all our big family plans for the summer I'm actually finding myself with more time than I thought I would when school finished (for 10 days after school finished I had boys here, but no husband, that's changed too, so I'm not doing as much household stuff as I have to when he's at work and the boys are here). 

I'm powering through my work-to-do list and feel like I might actually get to some of the more pie in the sky ideas. That feels very satisfying. Early in the week I was feeling quite stressed about all I had to do over the next six weeks, but it's now looking okay. I might even get some more sneaky holiday time in.

My pie in the sky ideas include some sewing and seeing if I can get started on learning how to use the software that our designers use to layout the magazine: inDesign. I've heard it is difficult to learn and a very steep learning curve, so perhaps it is best that I don't have any other goals besides these two. We'll see how far I get.

We also have a mild goal for the family (anything's mild after the camping trip we just did, right?): to go out somewhere in Tokyo for a day once a week, that plan will of course involve food, like chocolate cake at a cafe or ice-cream, bribery anyone? One of the places we have our eyes on is the Japanese Sword Museum.