Thursday, November 18, 2004

It's cold. I need a coat


Here are two stupid pics of me wearing two coats. Which do you like? (This is as good as I can possibly get with my cell phone without the memory card.)

Monday, November 15, 2004

New Job

I started a small part time job today. I'm teaching 5 beginning level students at their company north of Yokohama, about 20 minutes from my house, for an hour and forty-five minutes, twice a week. I was kind of nervous this time because I've never done a real business English class, and that's a long time to be teaching a single class. This time, a lot of time was taken by an orientation from the head of the company I'm working for, but I don't know how I'm going to fill that much time next time. The conference room that we're using has a projector, so I might be able to bring some movie clips of something for listening practice or something, but I'm not going to be ready for that for a while.

The students are two women and a man in their late 30's, one guy in his 40's, and a young guy probably in his late 20's. The oldest guy is the best, but they are all pretty low level. Of corse, all of the have "studied" English ever since junior high, but in Japan, that usually doesn't mean much. After studying that long, their listening and reading is okay, but speaking is not that great. Still, it's nice to be teaching adults that can at lease understand what I'm saying for a change.

This small job will end up making me ¥50,000 extra a month (about $500) which will be nice if I go on vacation early next year or decide to move. The bad thing is that I'm stuck doing it every monday and friday until the end of March, so I don't even get to take a long weekend until then.

Friday, November 12, 2004

No pictures from me

Ai has my memory card again, so no pictures from my cell phone. I should just give it to her and get another... I have a roll of B&W to develope, so if I get around to mixing up some chemicals, I can get that done this weekend. I don't remember what's on it though...

In the meantime, here's a nice site I found | sorryeverybody.com

Edit: Link fixed

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Short Days

Since have been shortening so much over the last few weeks, when I get home, there isn't much daylight left. I'd been wanting to go riding for a while, but this weekend I bought some lights for my bike, so now I can feel safer at night. So when I got home from work today, instead of being tired and lazy, I hopped on my bike and went for a ride. I rode 50 km in 2 hours. That's a half century! (but a half metric century, which is 35 miles (huh? A century? Yea. It's a 100 mile or 100 km ride.)) The cool thing about 50km in 2 hours is that it's only 47km from my house to Tokyo station, and if I could ride the same distance by bike, it would take only twice the time as the train (and probably the same as by car.)

So now instead of "I'm tired" being the first thing on my mind, it is ranked 3rd, preceeded by "I'm hungry" and "I can't stand up" in first and second places.

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

Guess I'llbe staying here for a while...

Hmm. I don't really know what to say. I guess not enough people from Ohio read my link. That's too bad. I guess they wont be having a visit from me for a while. Neither will anyone else really.