What's my Age Again?

So despite the fact that I turned 29 last week, I have a new boy-like obsession. I've never really been into cars or toys or toy cars. But earlier this week I made my daily stop at 7-11 for breakfast. I have become a semi-coffee drinker. I say semi because it's not like other people who have a coffee machine at home and make coffee and sit and have their morning coffee every morning. I just stop at 7-11 and buy a can of coffee every morning along with the sandwich, pastry, or onigiri that I eat for breakfast. It's usually sweetened a bit as well.

So anyway, I went in earlier this week and looked at the coffee selection when I noticed a free prize on top of the Boss Rainbow Blend coffee. I didn't even look at the prize in my morning stupor. I just grabbed a can and headed off to work. When I got there and pulled the coffee out of my backpack I discovered a toy car was the free prize. I was only slightly interested until I realized that it was the kind of toy car that you can pull back and then let go and it will go forward at amazing speeds. All of a sudden I was very interested.

I looked at the thing that came with it and found out that there are 9 different cars in total. I have since become a Boss Rainbow Blend coffee addict. I have 6 of the 9 cars. Here they are:



I plan to get the other 3 soon and then have races down the hallways at school with my students. I'm sure it will annoy the other teachers, but after being here a year I find that I don't care about that one bit. It's gonna be fun!

In other news, we've been working on a website lately. I joined the Shizuoka chapter of AJET (Assocation of Japan Exchange and Teaching.) We are basically in charge of planning events and bringing the JETs of Shizuoka together. I am the Shizuoka AJET webmaster. Kelly designed the website and is teaching me how to manage it. So far it's going really well. You can check it out here.

Next week is my school's camp and then school starts back up again the week after that. I'll be glad to get things rolling again. Though I've enjoyed the break from classes, the days go much faster when stuff is actually happening. Plus, I miss my students! :)

See ya!

A month of fun and changes

So apparently Kelly and I have switched good blogger statuses. Sorry about that. I mean, good for Kelly, but sorry I've been so absent lately.

Kerry was here a couple of weeks ago for about 6 days. It was a short visit, but it was great to see him. I felt like we spent the whole time doing the same thing that we do whenever everyone visits...eating. But there's a lot of good food to eat, and when you have only a short visit to fit it all in, what do you expect?

The night Kerry got here we went to a baseball game in Yokohama. The Yokohama Baystars vs. the Chunichi Dragons. It was a fun game. A very old stadium, much smaller than the Tokyo Dome where we saw a game back in April, but it had a lot of character and great fans. Chunichi came out on top which was not surprising because Yokohama is apparently a pretty bad team. But it didn't deter the fans around us from cheering until the bitter end. Although, seeing as we didn't particularly care about either team, we left after the 8th to beat the people back to the train.

We spent the next few days in Fuji and the surrounding areas. We went to the beach in Atami one day (the only day it didn't rain.) Kerry and I then went on to Tokyo where we met up with a few of my friends. We stayed in a capsule hotel which was a cool experience. The capsule was small, but not as small as I always imagined it would be. Certainly not as small as the drawers that Kramer had the Japanese businessmen sleeping in on that one Seinfeld episode. We spent the next day going around Tokyo and seeing some different things, shopping, and people watching. We went out that night in Shibuya before getting chased by the rain back to Shinjuku where we played some pool. Kerry left the next day and hopefully was able to track down his luggage at Narita Airport. I only took a few pictures while he was here. You can see some on the Flickr site.

After Kerry left, I went on the Fuji Rock Festival for 3 days. This a big music festival in Niigata, Japan (nowhere near Mt. Fuji despite its title.) Fuji Rock is considered to be the Lollapalooza or Glastonbury of Japan. I had an absolute blast. We camped out at night and listened to live music all day. It was my first music festival and it was absolutely one of the most fun weekends I've ever had. I got very little sleep, got rained on several times, walked in a ton of mud, and enjoyed every minute of it. Among my favorite bands I saw were Oasis, Simian Mobile Disco, The Melvins, Ben Harper, Franz Ferdinand, The Airborne Toxic Event, Jimmy Eat World, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, The Shibasushirazu Orchestra, Diplo, and Weezer. All in all a great weekend.

My new teaching partner, Emily arrived last Wednesday. I'm looking forward to getting to work with her. A lot of the new JETs have been arriving and I'm really excited about meeting them. It feels like when a new freshman class would come into the theatre department at ACU. There's so much gossip going around that I feel like I know them even though I haven't met them. So finally on Friday night we'll get to meet some of them. Then next week I'm working at the new ALT orientation so I'll get to meet a lot of them there. Should be fun.

Last tidbit: Now that Andrea has left, I have suddenly become the person that two of the girls at school tell all of the gossip to. I never knew what I was missing out on before. I now know who is dating who, who nobody likes, etc. Useful information. :)

Busy busy bu...oh sorry I got distracted by all of my work.

Yeah so the last two weeks have been the busiest of my time in Japan. I've had plenty of extremely busy days or two days but these weeks have been the kind where I get to work and don't have time to sit still, much less check my e-mail at work. Which is saying something since I have an iPhone and can check e-mail while I'm going to the bathroom. Not that I ever do that...

I'm not sure what's made me so busy. I think it's the combination of finishing up classes for the semester, writing tests, recording listening tests, tutoring students for speaking tests, planning for orientation, planning for English camp, grading tests, and checking essays. When everything piles up on you suddenly you're like, "Whoa, what happened?" But the funny thing is, I don't mind it. I think I found myself with the ability to do as little work as possible so much in the last few years that actually having a lot of work to do has been a nice relief. I like not having to think of work to do. When I have to find work for myself is when I stop working. But I've worked overtime almost every day for the past two weeks and it's great. Not to mention the fact that people have taken notice, which never hurts. Not saying I prefer to work overtime. But...you know.

We had an area schools softball tournament on the 4th of July. It was a teachers' tournament. I played left field and batted cleanup for my school. I probably should've batted leadoff since I went 5 for 8 with 5 singles over our two games and our leadoff hitter hit like 5 homeruns. Oh well. We won our first game 12-0 and I was 3 for 5 in that game. Then we lost our second game 12-9. I was 2 for 3 in that one. I made a pretty costly error in left in the second game. The bases were loaded with one out. Our pitcher had already walked in two runs and the batter hit a sharp ground ball single to left. It should've been a simple one run single but I went after it to pick it up quickly from the side to keep an extra runner from scoring. I didn't use good fundamentals and the ball went straight under my glove and rolled forever. Everyone scored (it reminded me of little league because there were no fences) and like 8 runs ended up scoring in the inning. We scored a lot and made it close but we couldn't catch up. It was interesting playing with people who speak a different language. They use English terms for a lot of stuff in softball/baseball. This includes thing like, "Nice pitching", "Nice batting" "Nice play righto" "Nice play Thado" (that's third.) But at one point there was a run down between second and third. Now being the knowledgable baseball guy I am, I knew that more running, less needless throwing is always better in a rundown. So our shortstop gets the ball and doesn't see that one runner is standing on third and another runner is running to third. So I start shouting There! There! There! Second Second!" And he's like, "Huh?" Then he sees him and we start the rundown. So the other guy is still standing on third and the shortstop is about to throw to third and I'm thinking that's an error and run waiting to happen so I yell, "No! Run! Run! Run!" But this guy doesn't speak English so I should've been yelling "Hashitte! Hashitte! Hashitte!" Fortunately people spend a minimum of 6 years learning English in Japan and this guy is relatively young so he knows "run" and runs him down and tags him out to end the inning. It was fun though. It took all Saturday afternoon but playing softball was not a bad way to spend the 4th by any means.

After the softball tournament I went and met up with Kelly and many people at our friend's house for some 4th of July festivities. We did some grilling and listened to lots of music and had a good time. Americans were outnumbered by non-Americans (including English, Scottish, Irish, Kiwi [that's New Zealand], and Japanese) but no matter. America's birthday was celebrated and respected by all. There was a lot less America complaining than there would have been if George W. Bush had still be president that's for sure. Everybody loves Mr. Obama. And a nice, loud rendition of the Star Spangled Banner was sung as well. Nice. And loud. In tune? No.

I'm looking forward to Kerry getting here soon. He gets here in 10 days as a matter of fact. So far on the schedule for his 6 days here are baseball, karaoke, Tokyo, and food. Pretty standard. I wanted to go to a Yomiuri Giants game (the Yankees of Japan) while he was here. Unfortunately they're playing the Hanshin Tigers which would be awesome expcept for the fact that the Tigers are the Red Sox of Japan and therefore the game is very very sold out. So we're probably going to see the Yokohama Baystars instead who can probably be considered to be the Pittsburgh Pirates of Japan. Oh well. They're playing the Chunichi Dragons who we saw play the Giants in April and who Tom Selleck played for in Mr. Baseball. So it should be fun if not necessarily crowded.

Hope everybody's doing well and had a good 4th. We're looking forward to rainy season ending, which is awful. Hopefully only about another week. At which point it will just be hot. And no, Houston people, don't talk about how we should be happy to get rain because it's just been hot with not enough rain there. You don't want me to wish this your way. Trust me. You like being able to breath, don't you?

Finally, here are a couple of pics from our karaoke night with the Haseltines:

Claire wasn't feeling karaoke at first (as you can tell by the microphone laying on the table) but she found her groove eventually.


Jeff and Gwynn sang a few duets I had never heard in karaoke before. Including songs by Bread and Elvis. But they were great!
Not pictured is Jeff and my duet of "America" by Simon and Garfunkel. My harmonies were questionable.

Here is a picture of me and Kelly after the Yoshiwara Gion Festival. It was our first festival wearing jimbei and yukata. Bunny ears courtesy of Jeff. :)


Peace!

Future Comic Book Authors

Just a short one tonight. I wanted to share some funny things some students turned in. Only in Japan do you take pictures of your students' work.

In our 2nd year English class, we are doing a lesson on Problems and Solutions. The 2nd year classes have been a bit boring so far this school year due to several things. The textbook is not very good for one thing. Also, we only have each class once every other week and since there are two ALTs, I actually only see each class about once a month. We used to see these students every week. Finally, there is something that happens when students become 2nd years. They seem to lose all of their excitement and energy. The classes with them become almost painful.

So I decided with this lesson to try to give them something creative to do. So instead of just talking about Problems and Solutions, we are having the students draw their own 3-frame comic strip about a problem situation and how it is solved. Some are pretty basic, but some are very creative. There were two from a class today that I thought were really funny. So I took a picture of them to share! Here you go...

The problem:

Notice it says "Lun over the person" at the top? It never gets old.

Tension mounts:


The Solution:


Glad to see everything worked out okay. I like how the one guy is breathing a sigh of relief. I think I would too.

And the next one...

The problem:

Cat is plump. That is definitely a problem.

What's he gonna do???

Oh, of course!

The solution:

Now that's one good-looking cat!


These made me happy. :)

Happy Memorial Day!

I was thinking last night about different American holidays that I've missed this year or had to work on. And when I thought about all of them, I realized that I almost feel more upset about working on Memorial Day than any of the others. I worked on Thanksgiving which was strange of course, but we did celebrate it with people a few days later, so it wasn't like I missed out on Thanksgiving altogether. I didn't work on Christmas and although I wasn't with my whole family or family-in-law I was still with Kelly and Caspian and we had a family Christmas. I worked on Labor Day but that wasn't a new thing. I've worked on Labor Day many times and used to have football practice on Labor Day every year. But Memorial Day was always one of my favorite holidays. I liked it because it kind of marks the beginning of summer. There would usually be only a little more school left or it would be completely out. I spent many a Memorial Day weekend at the lake swimming and jetskiing. It was a good way to get my first suntan (or burn) of the summer. The food is good, it's relaxing, it's warm, and altogether a great day/weekend. So, it was a little disappointing being at work today. I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever worked on Memorial Day. Thinking about all of the people who will be spending the day grilling, watching baseball, swimming (unless it's raining of course) etc. makes me a little jealous. But, it's like I tell Kelly quite often when we think about things we're missing back home, we have a whole life worth of Memorial Days to enjoy, but right now we're enjoying Japan. I don't always say Memorial Days of course, I fill in that blank with whatever fits the situation. Kind of like an English class.

But I guess the main thing I realize with missing Memorial Day is that there is no clear marker for summer here. I will keep working all summer and am actually at the beginning of a pretty busy few weeks. So while the random weeks here and there with no classes that I spend just sitting at work are a nice break from the regular class schedule, nothing beats summer vacation. I'll have to get my summer fix in different ways I guess. We need to get to the beach before rainy season starts.

Well, I guess this post hasn't been very deserving of the exclamation point in the title. But I do mean it. To all of you lucky people out there with the day off today, Happy Memorial Day! Have a hot dog, take the jetski for a spin, and watch the Astros lose for me.

Our apartment

We don't make claims of liking our apartment that much. In fact, we're pretty open about the fact that we don't like it. It's old and not well cared for. Really the only positives are that it's cheap, close to Kelly's work and bigger than our other option, which is my school's apartment. Nevertheless, it's our place and as I was talking to my friend James on Skype the other day, he mentioned that he hasn't really seen many pictures of our apartment to the point where he knows what it looks like.

So, earlier this week I walked around taking pictures of the apartment with my phone and now I will share those with James and all of you. (Warning: I did not clean the apartment at all before taking these pictures.) So here you go. This is what we see every day...


What we see when we open our front door and walk into our apartment:


The front door from the inside. And our new shoe shelf. Makes the genkan much tidier.


Turn right after entering and you see the guest bedroom. Otherwise known as "the place where we throw all of the stuff that we don't have room for anywhere else and then try to clean and make livable when someone is staying over." Those clothes would usually be hanging outside to dry, but it was pouring down rain the day before so I hung them up inside.


Our wardrobe:


Turn left after entering and you see the bathroom area:


Behind that door:


The shower (across from the sink):


Turn right after entering (and after the guest bedroom) and there is the kitchen. That bag hanging is the recycle bag for プラ: Pura - everything plastic you could possibly imagine. We don't have a trash can for it yet.


The kitchen sink. And some newly purchased Dr Pepper.


Open the shoji doors on the left side of the kitchen and you have the living room:




The underside of the kotatsu table:


Turn left when you enter the living room and you see the bedroom:


Our futons (without sheets)


The view from our bedroom window. That's Mt. Fuji in the distance:


The view the other direction:


The door you saw in the kitchen leads to this, the balcony (equipped with washing machine and clothes line):




The view from the balcony:


Kelly's school, also from the balcony:


Go out the front door and you have the stairs. We're on the 3rd floor:


Fuji-san from the stairs. Getting harder to see every day as we near the summer:


The other direction:


Our local neighborhood rice field. Since I took this the field has been flooded because apparently that's how you grow rice. That's also how you attract thousands of frogs to croak all night long.


So there you go! I hope you enjoyed the picture tour. No more writing for tonight. Goodnight!

Rainy Sunday Ramblings

Pretty normal stuff lately here. Golden week was a few weeks ago. We didn't do much. Karaoke one night, the Hamamatsu Kite Festival one day and a lot of resting. Then school got started back up and it's been pretty routine the past few weeks. Mid-terms are next week, so it should be an easy week with a lot of grading. We're leading up to our school culture festival which is at the beginning of June. That is supposedly one of the busiest times of the year, but I'm looking forward to it. I have a feeling it'll remind a bit of preparing for a show although English club is not really doing anything all that big. But it'll be fun to be a part of a big event like that at school.

Other things going on: I recently got a membership at a gym. It's on my way home from work, so it's not hard to make myself go. My deal has always been that if it's convenient for me to get to the gym, then I'll go. But if I go home first or have to go past my home to get to the gym, I won't go very much. But I've been going there after work very consistently and it's making me feel a lot healthier. I run everyday and lift weights. Everything is pretty much the same as a gym in the states other than the fact that all the weights are in kilograms instead of pounds. But I know that 1kg = 2.2 lbs, so I can get a pretty good idea of how much to lift.

Here's an interesting development I've been noticing at work. A few weeks ago I noticed 51 yen sitting in the corner of the teacher's kitchen on the ground. I didn't pick it up because I didn't really have a reason to, so I just left it there and went on my way. Then, last week I noticed this same 51 yen had been picked up and put on a table by the door to the kitchen. So someone took the trouble to bend down and pick up this 50 yen coin and 1 yen coin and rather than keeping it, they put it on that table. What's funny to me is that in America, if 50 cents was laying on the ground, it probably would not last a day. And I don't really think there's anything wrong with that. If I was in America, I probably would have picked it up the first time I saw it and kept it. Maybe not the 1 yen (or penny - in America's case.) But here it was just a natural thing to leave it there. What else is funny is that because people use so many coins here, it's likely that whoever it belonged to in the first place probably never even noticed it was missing. Yet, someone put it on that table as if the person would see it and say, "There's my 51 yen! I wondered what had happened to it." I'm interested to see how long it sits there. At what point do I take it? Will I take it? Will anybody take it or will it still be sitting there a year from now? I'll keep you posted on the happenings of that 51 yen.

Finally, I have recently discovered that after all of these years of saying I hate tuna fish sandwiches, it turns out they're not so bad. I actually bought cans of tuna at the grocery store a few weeks ago and have made a few sandwiches. I'm not sure why I thought they were so bad before. Maybe it was just the smell. Or maybe I really didn't like them and my taste buds have just matured. Makes me wonder what else I might like now that I didn't used to like. Meatloaf? Surely not. But I guess I owe it to myself to try it again someday. We'll see.

I'll be getting up at 4:30 Monday morning to watch the Rockets game. Hopefully if they lose it won't ruin my Monday. But I'll still be proud of what they've accomplished. I have a good feeling about it, though. Hopefully. Go Rockets!