Thursday -- one of my busier days...

Important update: if all goes well, I should be getting internet installed in my house on September 4th! I'll find out from Sachi what happened when KDDI called her, when I get to work today.

Anyway, last time I updated was Wednesday night while sitting in the office at GEOS.

I'm trying to remember if anything happened after that. I don't think so -- I think I just went home to Warabi and walked walked walked. I didn't even end up eating dinner, I just had some Ritz crackers...

...oh, and that's right. While sitting there eating Ritz crackers and watching the MLB updates on TV, I started hearing what sounded like some sort of critter running around near my window. So I went to investigate it, and it wasn't a critter at all. It was water dripping down from my air conditioner and splashing on my windowpane.

WTF. It seems that my AC has been leaking water on and off for days, but I didn't know. It's weird, it just comes and goes, like it'll be really leaky for 20 minutes and then just stop for hours, then start, then stop. I will talk to Sachi about it, but my guess is that my current solution of putting a bowl and towel under the part where it leaks might be the best solution. I need to go get a window fan sometime, and some more hangers, I just keep forgetting to. The evenings have actually been cool enough that if I could circulate outside air into the apartment, I wouldn't need the AC until morning, seriously. Unfortunately, my windows have no screens, but with no lights on I won't be too worried about it.

So, Thursday. Busy, busy, busy day. I had 5 classes officially and then was told to teach a 30-minute children's trial lesson. So this means that my schedule was:

12pm: arrive at GEOS, sign in, leave

12:10pm: go to Ikebukuro to get a ticket to the Seibu game on Sunday

12:30pm: eat curry from C&C in Ikebukuro, for lunch

1pm: arrive back at GEOS, work on lessons/paperwork/etc

3pm: first class, daytime Sprint 7Y... in reality we talk for 35 minutes and do Sprint for 10 minutes. It's what works best for this particular student.

4pm: second class, daytime Sprint 6Y. "Natsubate Noriko" showed up for the first time since I've been here, and now told me to please call her "Crazy Noriko" instead. It is not entirely inaccurate :)

5:20pm: run out to grab coffee and a snack, stop by bookstore and look at the selection of JLPT prep books (which, fortunately, exist, with the ONE bookcase of English books)

5:40pm: Sachi asks me if I can teach a sample lesson for two kids, like, RIGHT NOW. I'm thinking "I have to still prepare my Sprint 6X class for later!" but I say okay.

5:50pm: These two kids come into my classroom and I teach them. Kind of. I smile really big and present this week's Ko lesson, and play some games, while the kids mutter rude things about me behind my back in Japanese. I pretend not to understand and smile really big and run the lesson.

6:20pm: I turn the kids over to Eri to do a level check, and get back to preparing my lessons.

7pm: Sprint 6Y. It's on disagreeing and debate. I have to claim all kinds of crazy things to get my students to disagree with me (like "Japan isn't hot enough in the summer, it needs to be hotter" or "Ichiro is the worst baseball player in the world"). In the end, though, we actually managed to have a pretty good lesson. Turns out that playing the "Money can't make you happy" card got two students to argue for 7-8 minutes, while I argued with the other student about "Country life is better than city life".

8pm: Mill A... except... nobody showed up, except my one student who is a carry over from my 7pm Sprint class. So, we did the lesson, but with one person I couldn't really do the discussions very well, so we mostly just talked about characteristics of cities and came up with nicknames for places in Japan, which was essentially the lesson.

9pm: Sprint 6x. This was a lot of fun, even though it was only one student, because she is very clever -- has been in Sprint 6 for a while and is moving to my Sprint 7 class in a few weeks. It turns out she had even done this particular lesson before, so I decided to make it more complicated to teach her some new things. We played a Chutes and Ladders game for making invitations and worked on discussing the process of planning parties (rather than just how to invite people). In the end I think it worked out well. Also, she told me about a trip to Toyama and the "Alpen Route" that she went on -- maybe it'd be an excuse for me to go to Toyama? It sounds neat, lots of different transportation, you go on buses and cable cars and trolleys and whatnot to get from one point to another along a mountain.

I ended up staying to talk to Eri for a while and thus didn't leave until like 11pm again. I stopped by Mos Burger in Warabi to get food and to read Shukan Baseball for a while. It's funny these days, I mean, I know I don't understand every word but I actually can read the articles and get the general gist, which is interesting. I have to just keep trying, I think.


This morning I woke up around 10:15 and I swear that nobody wanted me to finish taking a shower. First, the KDDI people called when I was about halfway done my shower... so I got out and talked to them for 15 minutes about arranging to have installation and for them getting info from Sachi.

I finished my shower and IMMEDIATELY after I stepped out, the doorbell rang. I yelled "chotto matte kudasai!" and heard a "hai" from outside; I ran into the other room and threw on shorts and a t-shirt and with my hair still wet, I answered the door. It was a mailman with a big box for me, my box from Seattle that I had packed of extra stuff. Carl sent it to me a week ago or so. Yay! It has a whole bunch of stuff in it, including my baseball glove and some more sneakers and two more skirts. Yay.

Anyway, I missed all of the morning's rerun of the Hana Yori Dango dorama marathon final (they ran both seasons for the last three weeks, one episode every morning at 10am). I wonder what they'll be running next? It's also really neat seeing Saga Kita on all the TV stations -- they're calling them the "Miracle Team" essentially. I like that a lot better than something-or-other-Oji, at least.

In theory this afternoon I will meet up with Sam and go get a bicycle! I'm psyched.

(Small note -- I DID get a bike! Yay!!! Now I just have to go home and hope it is still where I left it... in theory tomorrow I will also get a parking space at a bicycle lot near Warabi station. I'll write my Friday entry at home as usual and post it when I'm on a real computer sometime.)