Here in the Austin area of Texas, it’s been freezing the past day or so. Literally. The temperature as I write is 21 degrees Fahrenheit. For those of you in the rest of the world, that’s -6 degrees Celsius. Now, to people up north, it’s really not that bad, not when they have temperatures of below 0 F. I offer up the follow explanation, but not defense, for what drivers in Texas are so awful during winter weather:

1. Have you seen them try to drive in the rain? It’s bad. Now change it to a different form of precipitation, say, snow. It’s rare down here, so you have drivers paying more attention to the snow than the road.
2. The ground here usually stays warm, so when that snow hits, it melts, but the wind comes over and turns it into ice. Thin layers of ice we call black ice. That’s part of why people here can’t drive during winter: we can’t see the ice on the road.

What does this all mean? Perfect weather for job hunting! Well, except for when I have to venture out to the temp agency next week to see if I can find some work. As long as it gets me on my way to paying off a few bills and saving up money, I’m down with that. Of course, if I could get hired on directly with a company to have benefits, that’d be even better.

When I spoke with my mom about my idea, she kept asking, “OK, but once you’re in Japan and you learn more Japanese, then what?” I replied by telling her that I wanted to work in Japan, and she kept asking, “Doing what? What will you do in Japan?” At the time, I didn’t have the best answer really. Now, I think I’d like to stay in the publication design field or try to get into localization/translation.