Yesterday in an unusual move, they decided to let everyone go home at 3 pm, in a bid to get everyone home before the brunt of the storm hit.  For me it wasn’t a big change in my schedule – I could leave two hours earlier.  But for some of the other hard-working employees it was a big deal.  They usually leave between 10 pm and midnight, so they got a lot of extra time.

I still had to walk through a lot of wind and rain, but I got home around 4:30 in the afternoon, which is pretty much a world record.  The typhoon itself passed to the south of us, so we didn’t really experience much but a lot of rain.  No problem!  The next typhoon should pass near the end of this week, but it is much weaker than the previous one and shouldn’t cause any issues.

On top of that, Kuniko got home from her baking lesson early, and so we could enjoy sandwiches on fresh baked bread last night.  It was nice to have a full evening to relax together for a change…

It looks like the typhoon will end up coming through today, with the center arriving around 3pm this afternoon.  I’ll be holed up at work, but hopefully everything will survive around here while we’re gone.  Because of the timing, I don’t think anybody will get a holiday.  Bummer!  Other than the wild wind and rain, it should be a regular day at work, though.

Once again we are entering the typhoon season, and after three misses so far this year, typhoon #4 seems to be aiming at Japan.  It looks to be a big one, but it is still about two days away.  That leaves plenty of time for it to weaken and turn away from Kansai.

If it does come, I’m going to have to go secure all the stuff outside – something I haven’t done in a long time.  We’ve been lucky on the typhoons the last couple of years.

The weekend was good – mainly just relaxing at home.  Have of it was raining, and Kuniko had to work both days as usual, but other than that it was fine.  We made a run to drop off a father’s day present at Niro’s place, but nobody was home, so we had to leave the present with a note instead.  On the way back we tried to find a park to see some fireflies, but unfortunately we couldn’t figure out where it was.  I may try to check it out on my own depending on how much time I have during the week.  Unless they all get blown away during the typhoon…

Last night after work we finally got our mittens on a couple of glasses of half frozen beer.  The experience was pretty interesting.

First of all, drinking it was hard.  They pile on the frozen beer on top, and it is pretty hard to avoid that with your nose while drinking deeply.  Inevitably, you end up with a little dab of frozen froth on the tip of your nose, which is fine for romantic comedies but doesn’t really go with the atmosphere of a blue-collar izakaya.  I think the best approach is to kind of attack from the top and suck up all white foam off the top.  It keeps your nose clean, but I don’t think sucking off the white head of the frozen beer looks all that cool either.

Once you get past that obstacle, the beer was quite good.  The frozen foam stayed on top and the beer did remain very, very cold.  The foam itself didn’t really taste that great, though.  Maybe they make it from flat beer?  It had a strange taste.  Overall, the beer was good, but it did feel a little strange and the cold temperature wasn’t enough to offset the weird taste of the foam.

So I don’t think we’ll be investing in a machine to do it at home.

Still, that is the fun kind of experience that I came to Japan to get.  Hopefully I’ll have more chances in the near future to try another strange experience…

I find myself strangely excited about the prospect of enjoying some semi-frozen beer after work today.  Kuniko and I will meet after work in Motomachi and check out an izakaya that is supposedly serving the special beer.  I hope it lives up to my expectations…

Last night Kuniko came home on the later side, so that left me plenty of time to sip red wine and watch the Tigers game on TV.  The Tigers aren’t doing so well these days, and it was a little like watching a car accident in slow motion.  I did turn down the sound and listened to music instead, which bumped up the entertainment factor a bit.

It should be a normal day otherwise, so we’re off to catch the train and see how it shakes out.

Recently in some of my classes we have been discussing this new invention by Japanese brewer Kirin:

http://www.news.com.au/technology/sci-tech/japanese-brewing-company-kirin-invents-frozen-beer-foam-l/story-fn5fsgyc-1226324652159

Frozen beer foam is poured over a cold beer and served to customers during the summer months.  It looks great, the frozen beer foam is also made of beer so it won’t water down the beer, and it will be served all over Japan this summer.

It makes for a good discussion topic as we move into the summer season, and my students seem to get a kick out of the topic.  In fact, tomorrow I’m planning to go to a restaurant that has one of these machines to try it out for myself.

Yesterday, one of my students brought in a flyer that he picked up at a convenience store.  Apparently, if you collect 96 stickers from Kirin beer cans, you can have one of these machines (what they call the “home version”) delivered to your house.  I’m eager to do some field research tomorrow – if it passes the test it’ll be time to switch my beer brand to Kirin for a while.  96 beers is a lot of Kirin…

Last weekend also marked the end of a two year project to rate each and every one of the songs on my hard drive.  It turned out to be around 35,000 songs, so a couple years ago I decided to try to knock it out gradually.  I ended up rating about a hundred songs a week, and to take the weekends off.  Just like any project this size, it started out fun and ended up feeling like work. So it felt great to finish it up.

There are a lot of benefits to having everything rated.  I can do all kinds of things with smart playlists – for example, having the DJ computer choose to play only songs 4 stars or higher that I haven’t heard in the last month in whatever genre I choose.  Another benefit was discovering some songs that I had no idea were so good.

My master playlist includes about 5% of the three star songs, just to double check once in a while and see if I missed anything.  Probably there is no reason to go back to the one and two star songs… they are essentially dead to me, now.  My computer is also set up to automatically choose the next song if the music ends, and sometimes it will dig into the one and two star songs if they were popular and related to the previous song somehow.  So I guess those may appear again in the future.

But for now it feels great to press play and have only my favorite songs playing, all the time.

It was a pretty straight-forward, relaxing weekend.  Kuniko had to work both days, but I had plenty of time to read, clean house, do laundry, and cook.  Last night we were craving curry after all that turkey, so we snuck over to Swaad for some Indian food.  I asked the cook to recommend a curry that was a little unusual, and he made up a chickpea and onion curry that was really spicy.  Yum…

After that we did a little bit of shopping and then headed home to relax and get ready for the week.  It is a pretty standard week for us, although I do have a drinking party on Friday to look forward to. Should be a fun week…

After three weeks of working without a holiday, Kuniko is starting to show some signs of finally getting tired.  After dinner last night we went for a walk to do some shopping, and she was moving pretty slowly.  She still has a couple of weeks to go before she’ll have a day off, so I’ll do my best to make sure she’s got nothing to do when she finally gets home each night.  It is a seriously tough schedule.

Tonight I’m planning on cooking up some meat to give her some stamina.  I pulled some steaks out of the fridge, and despite the rain on the forecast I’m going to cook them up.  I want to try cooking a steak on a cast iron pan to see how that works.  Hopefully the smoke isn’t too thick in the kitchen…

Yesterday I taught the new production department employees, our future factory workers, and I was surprised how much more relaxed they were.  The last time I taught them they were fresh from high school and plenty nervous about not only studying English but also about working at a new company.  This time I could feel the difference of two months of training and coming to the factory every day.  They had started making friends with each other and they seemed more comfortable in general.

And that made my lesson that much better.  It felt like they did a lot more in class, they tried hard to answer my questions, and the class went very smoothly.  I’m already looking forward to teaching them again in one month.  The only downside is that their classroom doesn’t appear to be air conditioned.  Gotta remember to bring a towel next time to wipe up the inevitable sweat.

This morning I will be teaching the new employees in the production section for the second time.  It is a really interesting class because they are completely used to the traditional Japanese learning style, which is to sit at attention, take notes, and memorize whatever is written.

And that is obviously not a good way to learn how to speak English.

Last time I let them off easy with some simple warm-ups and lots of practice.  This time I’ll try to get them off their seats and into conversations.  I’m not sure exactly what the reaction will be, but I hope it goes well.

Saturday our washing machine crapped out on us, and so after checking the error code I was on the phone with Hitachi customer service.  They told me that we’d have to wait until Monday for a repair guy to come out.  Yesterday I came right home after work, and the guy was patiently waiting for me outside our house.  He got right to work on the washing machine, and within five minutes had it apart and had found the problem.

According to him, this small circuit board fan had died.  The fan looked exactly like what you’d find inside a PC to cool the inside, so I was pretty happy that it was such a small, cheap part and not the entire motor of the washing machine.  The repair guy said that he’d replace the fan, and also he’d have to replace the circuit board that controls it.  I was instantly suspicious, however.  Why not just change the fan and see if that works?  But the price he quoted me for the repair was really cheap, about a quarter of what I expected, so I didn’t complain too much.  He fixed it all up in about 15 minutes, and we are now good to go on laundry. Hooray!

Laundry is one of those critical things that you don’t think about until your washer dies.  Luckily this time we didn’t need to make a trip to the laundromat.  But we were thinking about it…

One of the new programs at Kuniko’s school, called Waku Waku English, is designed so that the students in the courses are speaking a whole lot more English than before.  The teachers are using more English in their classes, too.  Kuniko, as head English teacher, has to really push the other teachers hard to use English, though.  Teaching English using English is a bigger stretch than you might think.

Anyway, yesterday I helped out at an event to try to attract new students and introduce them to this new teaching style.  I worked with a couple of other native English speakers, and many Japanese English teachers, and we taught for about half the day to 14 students.  The lessons were well organized, and I had a good time with my students.  Some were a bit shy, but after a couple hours they warmed up and started to participate a little more.

I think the event was a success.  It was interesting to see the different styles of teaching from the other teachers, too.  After the event wrapped up and we cleaned up a little, Kuniko and I went home to grab some yakitori and beer at Komedori and then headed home for an early bedtime.  I think I’ve decided that working on Sunday is not my cup of tea.

It should be an interesting weekend.  As usual Kuniko is working both days – on Saturday she’ll have to stay overnight with students, so I’ll be on my own tomorrow.  Then, I’ll head to Kuniko’s school to help her out with a special lesson for prospective students.  I’ll join a couple other foreign teachers to show off the school’s English program.  I think it’ll take most of the day, so I had better get in all my relaxation on Saturday.

I don’t have any big plans this weekend.  I heard the weather will be crappy on Saturday, so I think I’ll probably stay indoors, and maybe go out and get a haircut.  I’m reading a new series of books that is really good, so maybe this is a good chance to make some progress…

A month ago the Vivre in town was remodeled and opened to the public.  At the time I was so happy to see so many gourmet foods on the shelves.  There was (and still is) a shop selling imported foods, and other shops carried some pretty rare items.  At the time Kuniko and I both wondered aloud if Okubo was ready for this kind of thing.

As it turns out, the answer seems to be “not quite yet”. Gradually over the past couple of weeks the shelves have quietly shifted away from imported items, and bit by bit are moving back to “normal” Japanese items.  The change is gradual, but enough that I really noticed yesterday.

One of the big differences is in the bakery.  The first week of opening they had lots of rolls and breads that were made for sandwiches and things – but now most of the breads are sweet and more popular with kids.  I asked if they would make some of the breads from the opening for me if I special ordered, but they flat out said “no”.

Luckily the import food store seems to be holding up, and the booze corner is still stocking lots of imported and craft beers, so we should be OK for the time being.  Still, it is a little sad to see things starting to return to the products that every other supermarket in Japan sells.