I am leaving soon!!!

I leave for Japan in just over a week!!! This trip has really snuck up on me. I spent so long trying not to get over-excited about it because I knew that I wouldn't be able to work or focus on anything else, and I did such a good job of not thinking about it that now I feel totally unprepared! I'm actually in ok shape: I have been trying to learn a bit of Japanese, and I'm finding that it's a good thing that I was such a mega-nerd in high school because I'm realizing that I had actually managed to teach myself a pretty decent amount back then and it's come back to me pretty easily. I'm mostly worried about not offending people by not eating 99% of the food that I will probably be offered (because there is fish. in. EVERYTHING), but oh well!!

In other news I am SO CLOSE to finishing a major knitting project and I'm really proud of myself for a) actually finishing it and b) finishing ahead of schedule!! All I have left to do is to weave in the final loose ends!! I've already started my next project, but now I'm trying to decide what the heck to bring on my trip. Apparently you can only bring plastic knitting needles on planes (.....................) so I'm trying to decide if I should just break down and buy some plastic needles (I wonder if bamboo is ok???) or if I should just bring some crocheting??? Boo for rules!

Finally, here is an awesome picture of an awesome real-life Angry Birds game that I saw at the Let's Talk Science conference I was at a few weeks ago!! The coordinators at Calgary made this and I am totally going to steal this idea because it was super fun and physics-tastic!