2 months!

Wow! When was my last post? Two months already! Time sure does fly!

For now here's a quick summary of what's been going on the last couple months. More details to come if I find the time... but given my track record we shouldn't get our hopes up!

My job at the high school changed a bit. The Japanese school year starts in April and when I came back from Taiwan I had a new schedule. I only used to teach students who were in the foreign language program, but this year they allowed students from other course programs to take my class as an elective. So instead of getting one new class to replace the graduating seniors, I got four. Also for some reason the different classes see me a different number of hours per week (one, two, or three hours) so I'm teaching them all at different speeds. It's been keeping me on my toes trying to remember who's learned what. Exams are at the end of this month and I'm already dreading having to write up so many different tests. Anyhow the lack of free time after I started this new schedule is the main reason for the hiatus in posting.

I'm still enjoying my evening job. I find so many things I want to turn into lessons. One of my new pasttimes is searching for weird pictures on the net and putting them on handouts... like putting photos of monsters on the lesson about pets or using photos of superbly fugly people for the lesson about using compliments to start conversations. With my busy schedule, this is how I relieve stress.

The cat is still as cute as ever. I never named her but a friend started calling her Chiro. I've been putting her out when I leave for work, and she comes running home when she hears my car pull into the driveway. It's the cutest thing, seeing her sprinting through the parking lot towards my car. During mating season in April and May I'm pretty sure all the tomcats in the neighborhood were having their way with her. She'd come home with the smell of other cats mixed into her fur. One time she'd messed around with a real stinky bugger, and I couldn't bear to have her near me because I couldn't take the smell. I had to give her a bath and she really didn't like that; she kept screaming the whole time like I was torturing her to death. Strangely she never got pregnant.

One of my best friends left Oita a couple weeks ago. We had similar schedules and were always tired from work, so sitting around doing nothing was always the best way to hang out. With other friends there's always something to do, or some kind of plan. I felt a sudden loneliness overcome me when I realized how I don't have anyone to just do nothing with anymore. I also realized that most of my free time was spent doing nothing at his place, so now that he's gone I'll have to muster up the energy to branch out and find new friends.

My apartment is cramped full of stuff. The friend who left Oita will be living in Britain for a year, and in the meantime needed a place to store all his stuff. I'm pretty impressed with how I rearranged my apartment to be able to keep most of his stuff out of my way, but I'm still wondering what to do with the washing machine, TV, and large stereo speakers in the middle of the kitchen. I foresee resigning myself to swerving around them for the next year.

I finally destroyed the thorn monsters. There were these really nasty thorn-covered bushes that sprouted up a couple years ago. Every square centimeter of every branch had dozens of thorns. The monsters even had thorns on their leaves. I let them be and the bushes just kept on growing until they were taller than me, and then their evil offspring started appearing all over the place. Something had to be done. I spent a couple days snipping them to bits and digging up their wide-spread roots. Whenever a baby one tries to take root I rip it out of the ground with a pair of pliers (even the darn babies are covered in thorns).

I bought 40 plants and made the backyard look nice. I'm most pleased with the herb garden because of how much better the pizza sauce tastes with fresh herbs, although the rosemary just isn't growing fast enough. I keep snipping off little bits and there's hardly any left. And today I just learned that having rosemary in the garden repels mosquitoes, giving me additional incentive to plant some more rosemary out back.

The blackberry bush I planted last year finally has berries! Up until April it looked like a twig sticking out of the dirt, then suddenly branches started appearing out of nowhere. Clusters of pink flowers blossomed, and now about 30 baby green blackberries are forming. I can't wait till they ripen!

Japan got dangerous. I haven't watched the news in forever, so my students tell me what's going on in the world. A man killed his neighbor, then cut her into tiny little bits, small enough to fit down the sink drain. At first I was simply appalled by the gruesome thought of slicing through bone and mashing up organs to stuff down the sink. Then I was impressed by the patience and determination this man must have had. Or perhaps it wasn't patience and determination he had, but just a little bit of crazy. In that case, not so impressive. And then a couple weeks later a man drives into a crowded Tokyo shopping area and runs over some people, then gets out and stabs people at random. Senseless violence. What is Japan coming to? Thank goodness guns are illegal here, otherwise it'd be as dangerous as America.

Wow, time really does fly by. It's way past my bedtime! That's all for now... nighty-night!