It rained pretty good all last night, and pretty much all day today. It’s the rainy season in Japan – but the good news is that it’s nice and warm, so you can walk outside with short sleeves and an umbrella and be fine.
Since I had no classes today, I studied and talked with teachers about classes next week. I also did some interview tests today for students that were absent last week. They did pretty good – some of them did not have materials to study, but despite that they did all right.
There is a teacher that sits two desks away from me, and I won’t mention his name here. He’s not the most hygenic guy I know. He’s got a bad case of dandruff, and today I was spacing out at my desk and when I looked over to my left he was picking his nose. Big time – going for gold – picking a winner – some serious nasal spelunking. He wasn’t bothering to hide the act from anybody else, and it was a little disturbing to see him do that. Luckily I hadn’t had lunch yet.
Around noon I finished up all my work, so I packed up and went home. Since I started with Takasago Minami High School I have had an arrangement where I work a full day, from 7:40 to 5 p.m. every day, even though my official contract states that I only have to work 35 hours a week. I don’t mind working the longer hours, it keeps me in the eye of the teachers, and it makes me study. The tradeoff is during exams. During exams I can leave around noon.
This arrangement has survived several changes in personnel and two principals and vice principals, and so today I took it another step and didn’t really confirm with anybody that I was leaving. I just left. Tomorrow we’ll see if anyone noticed, and if anyone cared. Probably it will be just fine. If I asked somebody, then they would ask somebody else, and in the end they would say that it’s OK, it would just involve a lot more people in a decision that doesn’t really need to be made.
Back home I started moving furniture around my place. It’s only a matter of weeks now before Kuniko moves into my place full-time, and it’ll no longer be “my place”, it’ll be “our place”. I had some ideas to make some space, and so today I moved lots of stuff around in a very particular order. The result is that I built a library/laundry/computer room in the spare room, I reclaimed the kitchen table for use as a kitchen table (instead of a computer table), and I freed up lots of space in the living room and bedroom for storage later on.
Halfway through the project I quit, tomorrow I’m going to go through all the little papers and junk that have accumulated and see what is needed and what is crap. If my work plan goes the same as today, I should have plenty of time tomorrow.
