It's all good news!

Quick update on the news fast. So far, in the year of 2008--nothing bad has happened. No one has hurt anyone else, for money, in anger, to make a political statement or to turn a buck. All parents that I have been in association with love their children and are trying their best to raise them as best they can. As far as I know there is no other nationality lurking in the shadows here in my neighborhood or even prefecture, waiting for the chance to blow me up. No one has attempted to break into my house and strangle me in my sleep.

But guess what? Turns out that I am so addicted to the news. It took two days to train myself not to even attempt to click on the various news sites that I have bookmarked on my computer. I really need to make a folder for them. Then there was the hurdle of training myself not to cheat by looking at the bits and pieces pulled from the news that Yahoo! puts up on their main page.

I have been indulging in researching the weather instead. I have always been a big fan of the weather channel anyway. But recently I am looking at the 15 day forecast. Tonight we might get more snow from midnight through morning. By afternoon the skies should be clear again. And I know the current weather conditions of every town I have ever lived in in America. That is sooooo useful, I know, I know. But it doesn't stress me out at all like say, being able to tell you what CNN led with tonight.

Last year I spent a lot of time quoting from the Bernstein Bears book "Fear of Strangers" in an effort to reassure my daughters over the unlikelihood that they would be the child that some bad man grabs and takes away forever. Admittedly, it is not only my news addiction that has made them nervous. The schools tell them about every incident of violence against a child perpetrated in this prefecture--in an attempt to make them "aware" of their surroundings and "prepared" to scream and yell out and escape from any weirdo that should try to get them. Then there is my preference for T.V. shows like Bones, CSI, and well, Bones and CSI. But then CSI has the three different ones, Miami, Las Vegas and New York so it is like three shows all about people doing bad to one another and how to catch them after they've done the bad.

But back to the Bernstein Bears, in that particular book Mama Bear tells Sister Bear that bad people are like bad apples: you can't tell that they are bad from the outside. But also, like apples there are only one or two in every barrel. I.e., most strangers are not potentially your murderer.

Living without daily doses of what the bad apples are up to has helped me refocus on the fact that I live in a community of many, many good apples. My neighbors are good apples. The girls' friends and their families are good apples.

Whew. It is amazingly relieving to be reminded of this.

And we went up into the mountains to an outdoor onsen. There is nothing better than sitting up to your neck in hot steaming water with big fluffy flakes of snow falling on your face. In fact, sitting in that onsen, watching Saki show us how she can do "the crawl" (although technically you're not supposed to actually swim in an onsen, but hardly anyone else was there) while Reno was timing how long it took snow balls to melt in the onsen (technically you're not supposed to put snow in the onsens but. . .) looking out over the snow coated mountains while Masa kept telling anyone of us that would listen "It looks just like a sumi-e!" I was completely happy to be here in Japan with my family greeting the new year. I felt--positive.