At just under ten degrees Celsius you can see your own breath in the morning. Today was the first time for me to see my own breath this season. Soon I’ll be putting on layers of clothing and struggling to stay warm in my own home.
No complaints about today – lots of classes, but a nice mix of different lessons. I’m tutoring students on taking the STEP English proficiency interview. I may even be interviewing some of them – if they take the exam at Takasago Minami I am scheduled to be one of the interviewers next weekend.
After school I went home and relaxed a bit. I downloaded Survivor and watched that, had a traditional(?) hot dog and caesar salad dinner. The caesar salad was kind of an impulse buy because they just started carrying the dressing at Ito Yokado. The dressing is quite good – I give it my gaijin approval.
Since it was Friday night I hit the orange juice pretty hard, in a bid to be 100% healthy for the weekend. We’ll see if it pays off.
I rely on my laptop. It’s my lifeline to news, family, this website, everything. It’s got all my pictures, all my music, all my files. It sits in the middle of my dining area, and I occasionally eat in front of it or around it. Over the last year lots of little crumbs and things have fallen on the keyboard, so I went over to Ito Yokado to get a can of air to blast them out of there.
They must have thought it was strange to have a foreigner inquiring in Japanese about where he could buy air. Especially when I pantomimed the blasting of my keyboard, and tried to explain that it was for cleaning. Eventually they just said no, we don’t got air.
I went over to the music shop, which has not only CD’s and DVD’s, but musical instruments as well. I found a can of air there to clean guitar pickups, and after confirming with one of the employees that it was just air and not chemically treated, I was good to go. The employee was thrilled to talk to a foreigner, and we spent about 15 minutes talking about various things, mainly in Japanese. He had been to the States once, to Detroit. I don’t know much about Detroit, but we talked about music too. He’s a heavy metal fan. We got along well, and I’ll have to drop by next time I’m on the third floor.
In the spirit of visiting people I also dropped by the bookstore to chat with the English-speaking employee there, Megumi. She was finishing up her shift, and we talked for a while. She is planning on joining Jane and some of her friends on a trip to Kobe to go to the Mexican restaurant. I wish I could go – I’ll have to wait until next time, though.
Finally I headed home with my can of air and cleaned the computer thoroughly. The typing is much smoother now. Cleaning up the computer has got me thinking about backing up some of the important stuff I’ve got on here. I’m going to shop around a little for either a DVD burner, a new hard drive, or both. It would be good to take care of some of these things in case something dies.
This weekend I’m headed into Osaka to spend some time with Kuniko, and we’ll both go to meet Antoine and his new girlfriend in Takarazuka, as well as take in a bridal fair at one of the hotels there. I’m going to be interested to see how that is – lots of interesting questions to be answered there.
