This year, I will eat more vegetables

Today I did many classes on New Year's resolutions. One of my students told me that he thinks he drinks too much beer, so his resolution is to switch to drinking shochu. He assures me it is quite healthy. Also, every time I said I watch too much TV -- that I usually have the TV on 1-2 hours a day -- my students say things like "Oh my gosh, that is nothing, I have the TV on for like 5-6 hours a day. I love TV!"

Something else funny is that everyone has a Kanazawa story it seems. I managed to give the entire box of Kaga ankoro to my students in the last two days and about half of the Tawaraya ame. I'm saving the Matsui museum box of cookies for Saturday I think.

Went to Coco Ichibanya in Kawaguchi for lunch today, with Oren. I got katsu curry which it felt like I hadn't had in ages. Then after work, managed to meet up with Carl AND Oren and we went to... Denny's. In Akabane. Quite exciting for me because I could get a club sandwich, and quite exciting for them since they could order Japanese food at Denny's. Well, maybe not. They're both staying in Ikebukuro tonight, so Oren left around 11:45 and Carl and I took our respective penultimate-train-home at around 12:25am, after getting some taiyaki in the little cart by the station (with that same old lady who apparently remembers me asking her about custard cream taiyaki like TWO MONTHS AGO, sheesh). I might meet up with them all for breakfast/lunch in the morning but...

...tomorrow is going to be a really tough day for me at work. Eri is going to be at the hospital all day taking care of her mother, who is having eye surgery, so I'm going to be holding down the fort completely alone. To add to that, I have classes pretty much all day tomorrow from 1pm to 10pm, with maybe two breaks in the middle. If I survive, though, that's the hardest point of my week, I think.

Never could get the hang of

I watch the sports news on TV here all the time, which means I get to see some funny things. Like random interviews with that Matsuzaka kid all the time, and Ichiro's stubble at a batting cage, and whatever. But just now I got to see the BIG NEWS that Ishikawa Ryo, the 16-year-old golf sensation, decided to GO PRO. It was topped off with him saying in English, "I would like to win the Masters." (I think he's going to go play in some big event in Australia.) And my first thought was "Wow, his pronunciation is pretty good. I wonder if he could do Sprint 5 or 6?"

The other problem is that the sports news all show the rookie kids practicing at the minor league baseball stadiums in the area, which sort of ruins my idea to go exploring and find more of them this weekend. Well, I mean, I could, but my guess is it'd be awfully hard to sneak into the dugouts with, you know, real players working out there. (Maybe I'll go stalk the Fighters event in Kamagaya that I missed the deadline to apply for. Not.)

Anyway, today was supposed to be my BIG AWFUL DAY but overall I got through it really well. I was the only person in the building and of course today several people came by during my lessons -- the guy fixing the copy machine, a guy replacing the front rug, the credit card people, a person interested in finding out more about GEOS, etc. But I had classes all day so it was hard to do much about anything. Classes went pretty well though overall.

Since I couldn't really leave the building all day though (I did leave for about 4 minutes at one point for a real emergency -- we were almost out of toilet paper so I had to go buy some at Matsukiyo), I pretty much only ate bakery food for lunch, and then didn't eat anything all day, so by 10:30pm when I finally left, I was really ravenous, and went to McDonald's. I guess I've been eating pretty poorly for the last week or two and really should get back to some better habits. Or more like, I need it to become warmer out so I can do more bike riding, dammit!