It’s pouring rain outside, and I’ve just settled in for the night here at home. I’ve got the Talking Heads’ “Stop Making Sense” playing, and I’m sipping warm sake while I wait for my rice to finish cooking.
Despite the cloudy weather and rain, it’s definitely cold around here. I’ve changed the layout of my apartment a little bit to accommodate the colder weather. I’ve got a space heater that Andy left me, so I’ve put that right next to the shower. Tomorrow morning when I step out of the hot shower into the cold room, at least the heater will be there to ease the transition a bit.
Today at school the students took the English listening test that I created. I spent some time grading them afterwards with some of the teachers, and boy, did I write a tough test. Many factors could be involved, but really there were not many high scores. I’m afraid when I got back to the classroom the kids will be waiting with baseball bats.
After the test several of the teachers wanted to go out to lunch, so we visited a nearby restaurant where I had some excellent yakisoba. The history teacher, Mr. Kimura, Miss Kageyama, and Mr. Hayashi all came along. We talked about history while the history teacher smoked like crazy. Mr. Hayashi must have been feeling guilty because he let me go home after lunch. Nice!
Tomorrow it’s back to the regular schedule, sort of. We only have classes until noon, and the classes are all scrambled up. I just found out today that I have a class tomorrow. Luckily I am ready for it. I’m going to have my class sing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. This should be good. It’s either going to go over like a lead balloon or it will be horrible. Either way, it should be fun to watch. The classes don’t really count for anything – for the next week we will be doing classes but they aren’t part of either last semester or next semester. I figure we’ll just sing songs, play some games, and relax a bit. The students have earned it.
