It is the middle of the week, and despite having lots of time off for the new year holiday, Kuniko is already tired out. It was tough for her to go to work today – and we’ve still got two months before she can say goodbye to her kids and get some closure on this year.

I had planned today to go over to help Nozaki sensei with her thesis, but she had to cancel and so I’ve spent the morning job searching and grocery shopping. The job search is going pretty slow right now – hopefully the next two months will pick up a bit. It is a challenge finding a job anytime, but with the economy the way it is and the prospect of a home mortgage over our heads, I’m starting to feel the pressure!

Last night I had a fun class. Before the class started a bunch of old guys in suits came out of the next office laughing, and one stopped in and chatted with me in English. The group looked pretty relaxed, compared with the rest of the employees in the company who are generally rushing around nervously. As my students told me later, the room that the men were coming out of is a private VIP office, and nobody but top executives can go in there. Rumors of a full bar, smoking room and catered dinners abounded in the classroom for a while, but it was interesting that the company literally had an old boys club.

That’s all the news from mid-week. This weekend is supposed to be pretty rainy, so I’ll probably have to skip the hiking and stay in. Maybe it is time to catch up on some movies and relax.

Over the past month there have been a lot of events where I snapped pictures, but for one reason or another I didn’t get a chance to blog them. So, I’ve uploaded a small sample from the past month. Enjoy!

Over at homestead 2 the house building has started up again, and today we walked over to check out how things were going. There was only one carpenter working today, but he seemed to have made some serious progress since the last time I had seen the site. I’ve updated the pictures over in the gallery, so you can see where we are now.

We took some pictures, chatted with the carpenter (who is a little nervous around me still) and then hit the road. I was pleased with where we are now in terms of progress. The thing isn’t big but it certainly is tall, and we’re only on the first floor.

Today I had the day off – OTC gives all their employees until January 6th off, so I spent the morning working around the house and then went over to Nozaki sensei’s house to help her out with her master’s thesis. The deadline is coming up this month, and she has hired me to check her work and keep her motivated to finish it off. I’ll be over again on Wednesday to keep the pressure on.

Starting tomorrow it is back to work for me. I’ll be back at the usual places teaching English, and in between I’ll be spending time studying Japanese, looking for a job in a pretty tough job market, and cooking dinner for my lovely wife. Oh, and blogging a lot more, too.

It has been a while since I’ve posted here – sorry about that. Wrapping up the end of 2008 has been a little bit busy, but Kuniko and I have been enjoying the extra time off we both have.

Just before Christmas we went to Kyoto to celebrate Antoine and Miwako’s wedding. They really put together a whirlwind of events at the end of the year – within a week they had bought an apartment in Sumiyoshi, welcomed guests from overseas, and got married. That’s a lot of potential stress, but everybody was doing well when we saw them at the wedding.

We didn’t attend the Japanese-style ceremony but instead participated in the reception which was in a more modern style. It was a great reception, including everything from fruit carving to a drunken uncle.

We were able to meet up again with Antoine and his family in Himeji and climb the Himeji castle, search through 100 yen stores, and eat noodles together in the Sanyo department store. We really had fun with Benjamin, Antoine’s 16 month old nephew. He is just beginning to talk, and entertaining him was half the fun of the trip. Once things calm down a bit for Antoine and Miwako hopefully we’ll be able to head over to their place and check it out.

For the New Year we were hanging out at home for most of the day, but we did get a chance to party with Komuri sensei over in Akashi. He does a yearly soba party, but unfortunately we had been out of the country the last two years. He’s got the perfect party location in Akashi, and together with some other guests we made and ate soba, osechi, tempura, and some other traditional dishes that were new to me.

Our final stop for the New Year was the local shrine in Okubo for hatsumode. The line was long just after midnight, but they had built a huge bonfire next to the shrine, and it warmed us up as we waited. On our way out the bartender from Red Spanky came up and wished us a happy new year – I was impressed that he did it in front of everyone.

Today Kuniko and I are spending the day at home, doing laundry, maybe taking a walk, and relaxing. We’ll be spending lots of time with the family in the next couple of days. Hopefully I’ll be back to blogging more often in 2009….

Some pictures of the house building process over here if you are interested….

I’ll try to post more as I take them….

Lately I’ve had some weird noises emanating from the primary laptop in our house. The fan needs a little work, apparently. I took the computer in to be cleaned, but it continued to make noise after a thorough cleaning, so it may be that I need to replace the fan itself. Not an easy job on a laptop, so I may ship the computer off to Toshiba after the new year to solve the problem. It makes it tough to enjoy jazz music playing on the stereo when your computer sounds like an espresso machine.

On the work front I’ve been covering for teachers that have either been sick or taking winter vacations, which means that I’ve been busier than normal lately. Wednesday I was at Mitsubishi Electric studying with students one-on-one. Unfortunately I only was able to meet these students the last two weeks of their class – I would have really enjoyed working with them longer.

While walking to the classroom last night I walked by what looked like a bar. It was Western-themed – the sign was made out of a barrel head, there were two female bartenders waiting around for customers inside wearing cowboy outfits (with short jean-skirts) and even better than that – a swinging door right out of a spaghetti Western. The place was empty when I walked by on my way to work, but on the way back it was filled with younger guys (maybe college students?) getting their drink on with the cowgirls laughing at their jokes and serving drinks. Seems like a place I’ve got to check out sometime. I’ve always wanted to enter a bar through a swinging door like that.

Today I didn’t have time to drop by the new house, but I did need to do some thinking about what kind of mortgage we want to get. A lot has been written on the web about variable rate mortgages vs. fixed rate mortgages, and Japan’s situation is pretty different. Luckily there is a lot of flexibility with the bank, and we can even mix the two different types until we’re happy with risk vs. security. We’ll have to figure this out soon.

Tomorrow I have a full day traveling all over Kobe with lessons in three different places, and Saturday I’m on deck to help out a friend with a kids’ Christmas party and then we have our own Christmas party with Chiemi, Ai and Chu-chu on Sunday. Last night we did some shopping at Carrefour to stock up our wine cellar and get some cheese for the party. I hope there is something left of me by the time I head back to work on Monday.

I have a few new classes as well as a couple of substitution classes these days keeping me busy. This week I go almost every morning to Wadamisaki to teach classes at different departments of Mitsubishi. One class is for high skill level executives working on a project that is apparently top secret. For a top secret project, however, they sure do talk about it a lot.

Some of these classes are morning classes, which means that I arrive with everyone else working for Mitsubishi, and it is a pretty amazing sight to see everyone walking in from the nearest train station like ants on a mission. The people are Mitsubishi that I work with are really friendly, and so I am always looking forward to working there despite the crowded commute.

This weekend we spent some time at the office of the real estate company reviewing the loan details. Not only have I never bought a house before, I’ve never bought one in Japan, so there are plenty of surprises. The crazy market doesn’t really help clear things up much. Kuniko and I are automatically insured through the loan so that if Kuniko (as everything is in her name) should die before finishing paying off the loan, the bank eats the rest of the loan and I (or any remaining family members) aren’t stuck with a house payment.

One of the benefits of a “one job for life” culture is that getting loans once you have a job is pretty easy. Kuniko was given a “lifetime contract” at her school, which means that she is a pretty stable bet for a bank. Compare this to the job-hopping reality of working in the United States and you can start to see the importance of culture in things like banking and finance. The loans we can choose from are low rates from large banks, and that made things pretty easy for everyone.

We didn’t pick a loan yet – we want to consult with a few people first, but things are looking good. We don’t start paying on the loan until they hand over the house key, maybe sometime in March or April.

As for the house itself, the foundation is pretty much done – they are giving it a good long time to dry out before continuing on to the building. We took a few pictures of “the shoebox” while we there. It is going to be a tiny little place, very much “Japan-sized”, but Kuniko and I both are not hung up on having big stuff – living in Japan I’ve become a little more functional-focused I guess.

I’ve got a very busy week this week – actually I’ll be busy right up until next Monday, and then I should have a little down time. Antoine’s wedding is coming up – something to look forward to during the year end break.

On Sunday Kuniko and I made the trip out to Osaka to visit with Tomomi, Kohei and their new baby daughter Arisa. It had been a while since we had visited, and they had moved into a new home in the same town a few stops away from Umeda. Their place was nice, their hospitality was great, and Kuniko and I really enjoyed spending time with their baby girl.

Arisa was just starting to move herself around, and doing plenty of babbling so words shouldn’t be too far off. I was able to read “The Hungry Caterpillar” to Arisa in English – she just looked at me with a puzzled expression on her face. As for Tomomi and Kohei, you can tell already that they are going to be great parents – plenty of patience and lots of smiles for their baby. We had some nabe for lunch, and sat around and talked through the afternoon with the sun streaming into their living room. Kuniko mentioned more than once that it was nice to just relax and enjoy a slow paced day.

We went home in the early evening and took the time to rest up for the week ahead – a long bath and plenty of time tucked into the warm kotatsu did wonders. This week I’m starting a new class at Mitsubishi, so it should be a good chance to meet some new students.

Even though I’ve had the last couple of days off I’ve been busy doing some editing work on two different masters’ theses. Nozaki sensei borrowed me for a few hours yesterday, and afternoon and evening were spent on finding unnatural English and making corrections. So soon after writing all my papers I have to fight the temptation to edit based on my opinions and research that I have read. It is surprisingly difficult to restrain myself.

Yesterday afternoon I stopped by the property because I had heard that they would start building that day. As luck would have it, there was a crew there laying a cement foundation, so I stopped by and said hello. They had the outline of the foundation laid out on the ground, and it was hard to imagine that we would be living out our lives in the space of that tiny space on the ground. It was definitely smaller than I remembered. In fact, every time I go to the property it seems to get smaller. At this rate it might not be there next time I visit.

This morning we awoke to a raging storm with lightning, thunder, driving rain, the whole enchilada. Kuniko took off for work in her car (good idea) and I’ve spent the morning editing papers and wondering how a torrential flood of water will affect the still wet cement making up our new foundation.

I’m almost out the door, headed to Kobe for a private lesson and then on to Seishin Minami to teach at Sanyo. Kuniko is going to be home late tonight so I’m on my own for dinner. Maybe something easy like yakisoba tonight.

This week I’ve been busy with several smaller tasks rather than one large one. December is a slower month for me because of the holidays, but I’ve got some things on my plate to keep me occupied. I’ve started teaching a new private lesson twice a week in Kobe, I’m preparing for a new morning class at Mitsubishi, and I’m also proofreading two master’s theses for Nozaki sensei and a friend of hers.

We received a phone call from our representative at the company that is building our house. He told us that they would start building on Thursday of this week. It was a little weird because according to the outline of the process we were a couple of weeks away from starting to build. It may have been simply a case of having a building crew free at this time, or maybe that they want to get started ahead of the New Year holidays. But Kuniko and I both thought that it was odd timing.

I called yesterday to get some clarification, and it was a really weird conversation. The guy we are working with is not very experienced, so he often has to guess at what to do or consult with his supervisors. And I’m speaking in Japanese and working with vocabulary that I don’t usually work with – terms that have to do with the process of buying and building houses. So the conversation is like two blind guys in a sword fight – long periods of flailing around with very little resolution.

In a lucky scheduling quirk I’ve got Wednesday and Thursday off of work, so I’ll be able to drop by the property and check to see if they are truly in fact building our house. More reports after that event.

It’s the weekend again, and Kuniko is off doing an event for one of her clubs. As it nears the end of the year, more and more events like this will pop up as people begin to celebrate the end of the year by drowning their memories in alcohol. Luckily we had a chance to sleep in this morning, interrupted only by a package delivery person at 9 a.m.

We were both able to chat with Nancy, Lynn and Kinsey back in San Diego. It has been a long time since we had a chance to talk on the phone. They sounded great, and talking to them brought back great memories of living with them between my cross country road trip with Haven and coming to Japan. I’m hoping we get a chance to see them soon.

Last week I finished up my last class at Kobe University. I’m going to miss working with the students there – they really tried hard to communicate in English, and I was impressed with the level of their presentations. If you’re reading this, hi guys, and don’t hesitate to send me a message.

Lastly I pulled the trigger on getting better speakers so we can rock out at home. I’ve got a huge library of music stored on my network, but piping it through my crummy laptop speakers is getting pretty old, so I’m hoping that by next weekend we’ll be able to get some good music going in this place.

No big progress on the house – we have to have maybe just one more meeting and then they’ll start building. Kuniko and I spend a lot of time looking through the schematics and planning what will go where and what we will need. We were dreaming about curtains, blinds or other forms of window obstruction this morning – but haven’t settled on a design yet. It’s nice to be able to use the internet and shop around without leaving the kotatsu.

Today is a national holiday in Japan – worker’s thanksgiving day. The idea behind the holiday is to thank everybody for working so hard, but according to many of my students they end up working anyway. Case in point – Kuniko had to work today doing club activities with her students.

This long weekend has been an eventful one. On Saturday I met Kuniko for lunch in Kobe at Alain Chapel, the upscale restaurant perched at the top of Portopia Hotel. Since Kuniko has some connections with the owner of the hotel so he had flowers waiting for us. The chef came out and introduced himself and gave some personal recommendations from the menu and promised to do a good job cooking our meal. Everything was delicious, and Kuniko and I spent a pleasant afternoon sipping champagne and sampling delicious French foods. My favorite dish ended up being dessert – a sweet Mont Blanc cake with a thinly fried purple sweet potato slice covering a portion of homemade sour cassis sherbert.

Afterwards Kuniko and I spent the day Christmas shopping in Sannomiya, and we got hungry enough to end up at our favorite yakiniku restaurant in Motomachi. It was a day full of eating and enjoying – just what we both needed and a nice way to celebrate our third anniversary.

Sunday we spent an hour or so with our architect and looked at the finalized plans for our new house. Everything is coming together well, and there were just a few areas where we caught some things that the architect had missed. At the end of the session we were very satisfied with the plan, and the next step is to talk more about the loan and then start digging.

Finally this morning I saw the preliminary results from grad school, and I passed my final class. The teacher in that class sure took his time getting the results posted, but it looks like I’m on target for graduation. The results are finalized in four days, and my diploma should be in the mail soon after that. It’ll be nice once everything is official, and here’s hoping it will help me land a better job come April.

That’s about it for now – this week I’m going to finish up at Kobe University, and after that I should have an evening-only schedule for a little while. The job search continues – more news as soon as I get it!

Well, hello there…

Last night I started teaching at Mitsuboshi Belt again. The students had a four week class on English grammar from a Japanese teacher at OTC (actually I know her and she is really nice) and now I’m going to teach them for the next twelve weeks. I’ve got a good relationship with the class… they invited me to a party with them last Friday and I even got to introduce them to Kuniko. They are pretty high level English students so it is a challenging class to teach – which makes it that much more interesting.

Today it is back to Kobe University, and then afterwards I’m meeting Kuniko her friend Jimi and her husband. They got married a couple years back and Jimi is eight months pregnant, so it won’t be a drink-a-thon. They are a cool couple – they are always laughing and smiling. We’re going to go out to the Old Spaghetti Factory in Kobe for dinner. In America I was never much into that restaurant but being away from it for five years does wonders – I’m really looking forward to eating there again. It brings back good memories from college life at Fresno State.

My taxes in Japan this year are going to be pretty confusing. A while back I thought I had made a mistake that would cost us about $2000 in taxes, but now it turns out that we might not have to pay. We’ll only be certain after December – we’ll see what happens. Fingers are crossed… getting a full time job in April would alleviate a lot of the paperwork wrangling though.

That’s it for now – the weather is getting even colder and it feels like winter now. If that is it for autumn I want my money back. Shortest autumn ever.

My teaching schedule has been strange lately, and I’m having a hard time finding a regular time to blog. I usually have some good stories but I end up either tired at the end of a long day or forgetting to post during a free hour or two other times.

Yesterday is a good example. In the morning I had a couple of hours before I had to go in to Kobe and teach a class, but I was so busy with household stuff and lesson planning that I let it slide. So here’s the update.

I’m coming to the final few weeks of my Kobe University course. It has been a great chance for me to get some experience teaching at the college level, and I’ve enjoyed working with the support staff there. The staff consists of mostly single women who are really interested in speaking English. There is a serious lack of testosterone in the department, so when I show up they line up to help me with whatever I need, and treat me like visiting royalty.

Yesterday a professor had a special lecture with a foreign doctor and dropped in to use my classroom during the lunchbreak. I was a little surprised since it meant we’d have to break down the projector and computer and also rearrange the classroom just so he could squeeze in a 45 minute lecture. My staff apologized for the inconvenience, and later told me that the room was signed out to me for the day, so it was a little bit of a jerk move on the professor. Just before my class was to begin my staff grouped up outside the door and as soon as it was time they went inside and like an Indy 500 pit crew put the room in order in minutes. It’s good to work with professionals.

After teaching another course at the Rokko campus I headed back home, and stopped in at my “backup” yakitori – called Ichiban. The master and his wife are really friendly, and I’ve had some good conversations with one of the part timers – we’ve bumped into each other before around town and once shared a train ride to Akashi. The master at Ichiban always sets me up next to some people that are drunk enough to have the courage to speak with me, and it almost always results in a fun time. I ate and drank with a lady about my age and her older male friend (boss? boyfriend?). The lady had two huge warts located on her nose and it was very, very hard to not look at them while talking to her. Luckily she had drank enough to appear not to notice or care. They were fun to talk to, but maybe a little too drunk. Her birthday was in a couple of days, and she very politely demanded a free bottle of shochu from the master to “keep” in the yakitori for the next time she comes. I thought it was a little rude, but I guess she is a good enough customer because the master delivered a bottle for her on the house.

On my way out everyone waved and said goodbye. The master’s high school age daughter said “Thank you, please come again” in English and I walked home fueled by hot sake and a delicious dinner.

Kuniko had a school trip yesterday to see “The Phantom of the Opera” in Osaka, and since she had a drinking party afterwards I was almost sound asleep by the time she got home around 1 a.m. Then she was off to work early again this morning, so I won’t really get to catch up with her until tonight. Everyone is busy in their own way around here.

Tomorrow is my busiest day with Kobe University in the daytime and Sanyo Electronics in the evening. The good news is that there is nothing really planned for the weekend, so I can get some downtime and continue working on the job search.

Because of the time difference between America and Japan I was unable to follow the election returns – I was busy teaching classes during the day at Kobe University. That meant that I didn’t find out until the afternoon that Barack Obama had won the presidency. During the day I subjected my students to a simple picture slideshow in powerpoint explaining the very basics of the election system in America, and because the system in Japan is so different everyone was pretty interested in how it works. I made certain not to endorse any candidate during the day, but it was clear from my students’ opinions and statements who they were rooting for. And it turned out he won.

Being an American expatriate has sometimes been trying, thanks in large part to a sharp diminishing of America’s image overseas. This article does a nice job in articulating that, and meshes nicely with my experiences in Japan as well as other countries.

It’s easy to rattle off a long list of things that I consider Japan has better than the United States, but often it is hard for my to recite more than a few items about the U.S.A.

Yesterday I was proud of my country. I’m not a big fan of patriotism in any sense, but it felt like my country was taking a big step, and moving the world in a direction it needs to go. I’m hoping that this will inspire people in other countries to strive towards a system where anyone can make it.

Because at least in America, you can.