Darkness

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Last thursday was a holiday in Japan marking the first day of fall. It was quite a striking difference, and I was quite happy that the weather finally started to cool off. But today I realized the other thing that happens in fall. It gets dark. I got home at around 4:30, had a snack, and noticed it was dark. I didn't expect that it'd sneak up on me like it does in the US when daylight savings time ends. There's also been a lot of misty Washington type rain for the last few days. It makes me tired.

Now that it's getting dark and cold, I'm getting some furniture for my room. Ai and her uncle drove down on Saturday to bring me a table and chair which will become my desk, and a kotatsu, a low table with a removable top and a heater underneith. During the winter, you put a square blanket over the frame, but the table top on top, and sit with your legs in the heated area under the table. I don't have a blanket for it yet, but I saw some at a shop yesterday, and when It starts getting colder, I will go get one. I will also be getting a real bed next week. It will have a real matress, and will have some storage space underneith. My room's getting smaller, but more livable.

Pictures

WWU students
Originally uploaded by noexit.

Two weeks ago, I met some old friends from WWU along with Dansen in Shinjuku. Dansen is leaving for Korea pretty soon for a teaching job in a regular school like me! That means he'll have to start waking up early. He'll also be a millionaire. 2 million wan a month. (that's only about $1700usd though). The people in the picture are Keiko (left) Chie (middle) and Hiromi (right), and Dansen above.

Great Blogs

Most blogs that I see are really horrible. I don't pretend that mine is great and interesting, but at least I can usually spell, or at least use spell check, and I write words out completely. Usually I have something to say as well. But list night I found two really great blogs. One blog I would swear was written by a history professor I had at Western. This professor describes herself as
"an overworked, underappreciated, over-educated, undervalued Professor seeking asylum from the often mind-numbingly boring world of academia. Help me use my grand IQ for something more than entertaining 19 year olds and conducting exciting, life-altering research for scholarly articles that only an average of 4 people will actually read...." and "a thirty-something, Professor with a long list of grievances and shorter list of things that are working in my life...."
Her entire page is black, and she has an avatar of a gothish looking cartoon girl. My history professor at Western always wore black, with these strange black wrist guards, drank at least 12 Diet Cokes in a day, and was never in a good mood. It was either bad, or worse. She wasn't a bad prof; I learned a lot, but we were all scared of her, and I think that's what made us learn.

The similarities between my prof and and darkness of this web blog are so similar, I might think that I've found her blog, except that this professor says she has two dogs and a husband of five years. I'm positive that the only living things in my professors house were a couple of cats.

Here are two fun professor blogs:
Advice at your own risk
Cheeky Prof

Coloring Contest!!!

I'm going to redo the layout of my blog with some cool stuff that I've been learning, but I am having problems deciding on a color scheme for the new layout, so I'm having a

Coloring Contest

Just send me the colors that you thing would look good. It can be from 2 to 4 or 5 or so, and I'll pick one after I've received a few submissions. If you want to be really fancy, you can send me the hex numbers for the colors if you know how to do that(For example #FFFFFF is white, and that blue color that is my current background is #112233).

I will also be able to post some pictures from my camera soon. Ai's probably somewhere in Texas right now on her way back from Chicago. She's really excited to be in Dubya's home state for a for a short period. As short as possible. So she'll be back home tomorrow, and she's already been bugging me to go on a road trip to Yosemite.

Womens Uni

There was an ad on the train this morning for Kamakura Womens University. It listed some of the exciting majors to choose from like Home Economics and Child Development. I guess with Child Development you could be a kindergarden teacher, but it sounds like a spend-four-years-preparing-for-marriage shool to me. Child Development can be part of education, psych, and other majors in the US, but I doubt thats how its intended at this school. Have there even been majors like this in the US since the 60s?

yuenchi

Well, this is the best I can get out of my phone right now. I had to split it in four and email the pieces separately from my phone, the glue them back together on my computer.

This is Ai and I on the Pirate ride at an amusement park we went to a few weeks ago. There was a big water park too, be we both had colds, so we decided it would be best not to do that.

There, you got a picture.

Edit: I had to take the picture down. I can only get away with putting Ai approved pictures of her on my blog. That's why there are so few of them.

Anwser to Marcia's Question

My anwser to my aunt Marcia's question was pretty long, so I decided to make a post out of it.

I don't have more pictures because my girlfriend took my memory card with her to Chicago.

There's been six typhoons to hit Japan so far this year, but none have made it to Tokyo yet. Right now, there is one going up the west coast, and another going up the east coast. The east coast one will be here on Thursday or Friday, and might get Tokyo. They usually just have a lot of rain, and the wind makes it difficult to walk, but not usually dangerous by the time they get this far north.

To get this much vacation after a month of work, first you'll have to put up with 250 little kids a day, and probablly cut your sallary in half. That's not all there is to it though, because you could also end up not getting more than 10 days of vacation a year, so you also have to avoid the conversation schools.

Kyocera Ceramic Knife

I got a new knife. It's one of those Kyocera Ceramic knives. Apparently, the only thing harder than the type of ceramic that these knives are made of is diamond, so it's supposed to stay really sharp. And it is really sharp! It also doesn't stick to things like meat (maybe chese, but I haven't tried) like steel knives do, so it just slips through. It was really cheap too compared to the US; about $18USD, but in the US, they are around $40 -$60 for the small one I have, and more than a hundred for the bigger ones. One site said that this is due to a huge import duty that the US has on them. I really needed a new knife, my old one was a $5 one that I used as a can opener once.

Back to Work

I don't know what was going on, but Blogger was being really slow last week. I wouldn't even post, and my page was loading slowly too. I don't know if any of you noticed. I guess that's what happens when I use free websites.

I started work again Friday. I didn't want to go back, but it's a great school, so a good place to start my second quarter.

Dansen's moving to Korea soon, so we met some friends in Shinjuku today, and I found out that one of them actually lives near the station next to mine. I hadn't seen any of them for a while, so I had fun. Nothing much else. Rain.