I spent the better part of two hours trying to make my way through the now 6 tenses of verb conjugation. There are godan verbs, ichigan verbs & irregular verbs. You drop the ru, add an atte and in some cases use the ‘dictionary’ tense. It is making my head spin! And also showing me in black and white how little I know even about the ins and outs of my own language. There are qualifiers and particles that go after, before and between words – wa and wo go after, de goes between and there are a few others that go before… I am very confused. And I have yet to even approach Kanji!

Eleven days!

I also called American Airlines to see what a Biz Class upgrade would cost. I should’ve known, but a single outbound upgrade from where we are to where we’d wanna go is $3,400 or 25,000 points and a fee of $350. Guess where we are not sitting! I think we’ll save the upgrade for the hotel suite with the fancy bathroom and unbeatable view. I mean, enough Ambien CR and they could probably just tie me to the wing for all I’ll notice.

I get more and more excited. There was a Tokyo article in a magazine in one of my offices today that was written by a snarky first time visitor. It seems he spoke less than we do and still wound up having a frickin’ sweet time. Yippee!!!!