Positive feelings and Photoshop

I had a good day today. Nothing really special happened but it was a good day. I had a new OC I lesson today, and it didn't go exactly according to plan, but I just went with it and figured out what will work better next time. It's nice to teach a lesson and have the luxury of figuring out what you can change to make it better and not just assume that the reason why the lesson wasn't perfect was because of the students. It sounds weird I guess for me to want my lesson planning to be the problem, but my students were the problem so much last year in Channelview that it's really a relief. And it really went well even with the planning issues. I do this lesson 4 more times, the last being an observation by my prefectural advisor and his boss. The PA is a guy named Ashley from New Zealand who is a really good guy and fun to hang out with and his boss is named Yasuo Suzuki. I've met him a few times and he is really nice too so I'm not worried about it. I can get some good advice on how to make my lessons more effective and some feedback on what I do well. It will be much nicer than the occasional random drop-ins from my boss last year which always just succeeded in making me nervous. I'd much rather have Ashley and Yasuo-sensei coming to observe me than Dolores Umbridge. Did I say Dolores Umbridge? Sorry about that. I meant the CISD Fine Arts director who will go unnamed. Don't know why I'm going off on a tangent about Channelview. I guess I'm just thinking about how I felt a year ago at this time with another semester to go and how much I dreaded every day. I've been dealing with the usual winter homesickness/culture shock/my goodness it's freezing/I want some Tex-Mex feelings that apparently are very prevalent at this time of year for JETs, but it doesn't make me forget how much more I like this job than the job I had last year.

We had curry for dinner tonight for the third time in the past two weeks. It's becoming sort of a comfort food for us. I guess it's always been a comfort food for Kelly but it's getting more like that for me. Maybe it has something to do with the cold. More accurately it's probably the fact that it's easy to cook and so requires less time in the unheated kitchen.

Well anyway, I think I had something really interesting to write about tonight but in all my rambling I seem to have forgotten it. So anyway, hope everyone's doing well. I hope more people are reading our blogs than are commenting on them. I'm trying to write more this year so the more feedback I get the more motivated I'll be to write. It's like having a good audience for a show. As much as you hate to admit it, you always give a little bit more effort when your audience makes you aware of the fact that they're there.

And now the unveiling of my first photoshop effort! I got home today and took some pictures of Mt. Fuji and later played around on photoshop. It's not as impressive as what Kelly can do but here it is anyway. It's just something basic to start with. I'll put it on Flickr too. Hope you like it!