Ah bliss!!!

I was just leaving the house earlier when my student called to cancel her class. She had some kind of emergenc operation she had to perform and as she is a cosmetic dermatologist/ plastic surgeon, I dread the think what kind of operation it was that it was so urgent! As there is no point in going to pick Joey up early because he is LOVING daycare at the moment (not even a whimper today when I went to drop him off, he ran over to his favourite toy and wandered off to play with it without so much as a backward glance.. SOB!) so I have a couple of hours of free time that I wasn`t expecting. As I have been faffing for about an hour, that leaves me with an hour to do stuff and clean up this room because I have a new student coming round for class this evening. It is a guy and I haven`t taught guys for a long time so I am a little bit nervous. OH MY GOD!!! You guys are NEVER going to guess what just happened.. As I was typing that last sentence and thinking "should finish here and go and clean" I heard a massive BOOM! and I thought "what was that?" Were I in London I would have worried about it being a terrorist attack/ bomb because quite often when I was a child we would hear random booms and it would be an IRA bomb going off somewhere or another but as this is Kagoshima my first thought was "SAKURAJIMA!" so I raced to the living room and lo and behold there was a HUGE plume of smoke coming out of the volcano. I raced back into this room because I had my camera in here and dashed back only to find that my battery was dead so I ran back again to get the video camera and digital camera charger, kicking myself for not keeping my camera charged the whole time!!! It is unfortunately a very cloudy day today so the pictures I ended up getting are not nearly as cool as they would be on a sunny/ clear day but all the same I was SO excited to finally see the eruption for myself close-up and to be able to take pictures! Here are the video and pictures I took: In this first one you can see a little plume of smoke on the right hand side:
Video Hosting - Upload Video - Video Sharing and in this second one you can see the plume as it gets much bigger a few minutes later:
Video Hosting - Upload Video - Video Sharing You can also see what I mean about how much cooler it would have been had the weather been better!!! I did manage to plug my camera in the wall and take some photos but I need to take some time to look at those and upload the best ones!! I am not overly excited about the pile of ash that is going to end up on my balcony and I am very glad I didn`t get around to cleaning up over the weekend because I can do it all in one shot but I am SO thrilled that after 5 years in kagoshima I finally got to see an eruption! ERUPTION PHOTOS! (I uploaded them all in the end, if you watch the slideshow it is like watching it live!!)