This week I decided to move my blogging time from 4:45 am in the morning to a more reasonable 6:45 pm in the evening.  Hopefully it will yield more interesting results.

I’m back home after a fairly busy day at work.  I taught a production employee class in the morning, and then had regular classes the rest of the day.  I started my day without coffee (which is a big change) and found myself tired pretty much all morning.  I can’t tell if that was from a lack of coffee or the simple fact that today was Monday.

The rest this week should be much more sedate.   Friday night I’m going to go out with some ex- and current students after work, and the following Monday I have a party with the HR folks to welcome our new employee (Ms. Kikuchi) and say goodbye to an employee that will be transferred to the company head office (Mr. Matsumoto).  The party is on Monday so hopefully it won’t be a wild one.

Tonight maybe I’ll sit around watching TV, read a book, and get dinner ready for my lovely but exhausted wife.  She’s been working hard again.  Hopefully this time she’ll stay out of the hospital.

This weekend the neighborhood participates in an annual ritual to clean out the storm drains alongside the road.  The storm drains catch whatever debris floats along, and over a year it can add up.  The way our neighborhood is laid out is that there is a storm drain located in front of each house.  So every year they circle around a memo, give us bags to collect the debris, and on a certain day we take the wet dripping bags full of debris out to the main garbage collection area outside our neighborhood.

The first year we moved here we didn’t really notice the memo, and the day after our neighbor said that he went ahead and cleaned out our drain because it was almost clean anyway.  Thanks, dude.  I gave him a couple of cold imported beers from our fridge and told him we’d get on it for next year.

The second year I got my act together, went outside, opened up the drain, and there was about one half of a handful worth of dirt.  I picked out a couple of rocks, but it wasn’t really worth wasting a bag on – I just pitched the dirt into our front yard and called it a day.

The third year was much the same, with the same results.  The houses around us have a big bag full of dirt each year – they are out there scooping and scraping to fill their bags.  So last year I played around with the water hose and found something interesting.

I live on the end of a cul de sac, in the southwest corner.  Already that cuts down on the potential for dirt because no cars drive by our storm drain.  Using the water hose I discovered that whoever designed the road had it graded so that rainwater from the main road either flows down away from our house to the Yagi’s storm drain next to us, or in a diagonal path to the Nishizumi’s drain on the other side.  The only water that gets into our storm drain is what falls directly on it, and in a year that doesn’t bring in much dirt.

So lucky us, and I think I’ll sleep in next year (or maybe the next two or three years).  It’ll be nice to hear the scraping away of the neighbors while I’m in bed relaxing next time.

This week Kuniko is getting home late every night, and since I have advance warning I am able to throw together something unusual.  Tonight I cooked up some couscous with caramelized onions, tomatoes and olives along with a green salad.  Tomorrow night I think I’ll put together some enchiladas with leftovers, and Friday is still up in the air.  It is fun to be creative with plenty of time to cook.  Unfortunately it is hard to get up the next morning since we’ve been getting to bed so late…

At work yesterday I heard that our department is organizing a farewell/welcome party for the new employee joining and the former employee that will leave.  Strangely it is scheduled for a Monday.  That is a great way to keep the party under control, I guess.

In other party news, I’m hoping to arrange another party (on a Friday) with some former students.  It will be my first time to go out with them, and I’m hoping it turns out to be good chemistry.

Suddenly the work parties are heating up!

Last weekend I had a lot of time to myself. Kuniko was away on business, so I had plenty of opportunity to catch up on my TV shows, read books and work around the house. But two events made things interesting.

The first was that an espresso machine that we had ordered from the US (and shipped on to us thanks to my folks) arrived. This is our first coffee machine ever, so we spent a lot of time fooling with it recently. I ended up being on a caffeine buzz most of the weekend.

The other event was a goodnight call from Kuniko from her hotel in Himeji. She called to tell me about her day, ask about mine, and she invited me over if I was willing to sneak into the hotel without being spotted by her coworkers who were all over the place. Challenge accepted! It kind of reminded me of the late night trips into Osaka to spend the night before we got married – drop everything, turn off the lights, and run to the train station.

I made it to Himeji pretty quickly, found the hotel, and with the “Mission Impossible” theme song playing in my head I made my way to room 416. I think I made it without being spotted, and we could spend the night together on the tiny bed made for one.

It was a very good weekend, and now I’ve got a pretty easy week ahead of me.

This has been a very busy week.  Last week I was busy planning two big lessons for the new employees at the company, and today I finished the second lesson.  The first lesson that I did yesterday went OK, but not great (I didn’t plan enough to keep them talking the whole time) but the second lesson today went very well.  After finishing up this lesson I won’t have another class with these students until we start weekly small group lessons in October.

So this means that things will be considerably less stressful over the next four months.   I always enjoy teaching my one-on-one lessons, and now I can concentrate on them alone.  I have some ideas that I’d like to try out with some of my students, and it should be a good chance to carry out the lessons without distractions.

The weekend is also here, and it will be a little bit on the lonely side for me.  Kuniko has to do an overnight excursion with her coworkers, and so I’ll be on my own all day Saturday and Sunday.  Depending on the weather it might be a hike, it might be movies, or it might be a combination of both.  I do need to catch up on “Mad Men”, so it might be a marathon complete with Old Fashioneds…  Sounds like something Kuniko wouldn’t want to be around to see.

This was one of those rare weekends when Kuniko has both days off.  We spent most of the time doing odds and ends around the house, and cooking foods we’ve wanted to eat recently.

Friday after work we went to Tajimaya – a yakiniku restaurant that I’ve heard good things about for a long time.  The quality of meat was excellent, and everything we ate was really delicious.  The only thing I could possibly complain about was the karubi cuts were awfully fatty.  We expect a lot of fat in the karubi, but this was way over the top.  We were lucky we didn’t start a fire.

After dinner we walked around the new shopping center south of Kobe station – Umie.  The building used to hold a Hankyu department store, but apparently they weren’t able to make it work.  Now it is filled with specialty shops, and we walked around enjoying some window shopping in an attempt to burn some of the calories that we just ingested. It was a fun night, but we got home pretty early and pretty tired from a long week.

The big project this weekend was putting up some glass shelves in the kitchen to support some of our coffee cups.  We went out to IKEA to buy the shelves, and then I hung them on the wall in a relatively stress-free exercise.  While we were at IKEA we also picked up some LED lights to replace the standard bulbs in our kitchen, and I’m so happy with the lighting in there now.  Things are looking better these days.

We also got our hands on some good food.  Saturday I grilled some pork ribs that we were able to buy at a grocery store to the north of us.  We don’t usually go there, but this time we asked about spare ribs and they sold us a big slab of ribs.  Unfortunately, the pork had a lot more fat than we liked, and the result was that we had to be a lot more careful to avoid the fatty parts while eating.  The flavor was pretty good, though.

Sunday we drove out to Miki to support Kuniko’s friend Kori, who was selling bread from her bakery at a sort of outdoor farmer’s market.  Most of the booths were selling knick-knacks in the style of “farmhouse fashion”, which isn’t really our thing.  But we could eat bread, and we bought a few pieces from Kori to help out.  She was pretty busy while we were there, so that was a good sign.  After relaxing at home during the warmest part of the day we walked out to the beach to enjoy the cold water, and then picked up some groceries for dinner.  It was just salad with mini-tomatoes, some bread from Kori, and some cheese that included buffalo mozzarella that we got our hands on recently.  The buffalo mozzarella was so good I am considering where we can stable a buffalo to keep us in supply.  Yum…

This week should be a pretty standard week.  Kuniko has a party on Wednesday, and I have two large group lessons on Wednesday and Thursday, but other than that it should be pretty normal around here.

Good times on the train ride home today.  For some reason the train was surprisingly empty, and I was lucky enough to grab a seat near the door.  The train has four fold-down seats that people can grab during non-rush hour, and since I was leaving before the peak they were unlocked and available.

Each seat holds two people, and I sat facing another pair of lucky commuters.  Usually the floor is pretty full with standing passengers, so it is rare to actually see the faces of the people sitting across from you.  There was a middle aged guy who looked pretty grumpy, and next to him sat an older lady, also looking grumpy.

Standing between us was a middle-aged plump lady supporting herself by only holding her hand against the window.  The train can be a bumpy ride sometimes, so it was clear to me that sooner or later it wasn’t going to be enough.  The only thing that remained to be seen was if she would stumble forward towards the grumpy guy during braking, or back towards the lady sitting next to me during acceleration.  Either way, I was making sure I had my hands free to get out of the way.

Sure enough, it happened.  Apparently I was the only person nearby who anticipated it, because the rest of the passengers seemed surprised when it actually occurred.  We were braking into Maiko station, and I watched as the plump lady shifted to the tipping point.  She went to her tiptoes to try to reverse the inertia, but at that point it was a forgone conclusion.  She twisted away from the fall, which had the odd effect of making it look like she was trying to sit down on this guy’s lap.  He suddenly realized that something was not right, but by then it was too late to react.  The lady hit pretty quickly, already twisting away into the next passenger to try to get out of a stranger’s lap.  That had her rolling face-to-face across another lady who had no idea what the hell was going on.

Finally the plump lady managed to regain her footing, but by that time everybody on the train was watching to see what would happen.  She apologized profusely to the two people who cushioned her fall, and they gave her irritated looks and showed no mercy.  I don’t know if she had originally planned on getting off at the next station, but she did it anyway, and everyone was watching her go, perhaps wondering what the crazy lady was up to.

Anyway, it made for fascinating entertainment.   If I had been reading a newspaper or book I would have missed it, and perhaps fallen victim to it myself.  Phew!

I’m planning a lesson for the new white collar workers at my company this week.  The actual lesson is next week – two 90 minute lessons on consecutive days.  I’m planning on teaching them basic telephone English, writing a simple business e-mail, and how to describe their company in English.  However, a while back I received an interesting request from Human Resources.  They’d like me to work in some material on “diversity”.  Diversity seems to be the key word around my company these days, which is fine by me.  I’m one of the very reasons that company employees should be more open to diversity.

But how to work that weighty topic into your basic business English lesson?  I’m close to stumped.  I guess I’ll let me brain turn it over the next couple of nights, and maybe I’ll be inspired.  Any ideas?

The temperature continues to increase steadily, and we’ve started opening up the house when we get home to cool things off.  We’re not close to air conditioner weather yet, but it is certainly within sight.  I can’t believe summer is coming back around so quickly – spring seems to have just arrived.

Our plan this weekend was to cool it at home and avoid the rain that was inbound according to the weather forecast.  Our only planned excursion was to go eat some Greek food at a restaurant that Kuniko found in Sannomiya, but unfortunately we couldn’t make contact with them, and had to give up on that idea.  Instead on Saturday night we had a garlic festival at home with take-out Chinese food.  The amount of garlic is always pretty intense at Osho, and this time was no different.  We kind of pigged out on several dishes on top of the usual gyoza, and it was lucky there were no visitors at our door that night.

Sunday the storm finally blew in, and we stayed in all day watching movies, drinking mimosas, and celebrating Kuniko’s only day off of the week.  Luckily next weekend she’ll get two days off.

Last night I watched the end of Survivor (finally), and now that I know who the winner is, I can go back to reading news and websites online.  Every so often I do these blackouts to avoid having the end of a show spoiled, and it is usually pretty easy to avoid the information.  Once in a while I get burned, but overall it tends to work.

So I’m looking forward to catching up with all my internet haunts today and the rest of this week.

Yesterday my first production group lesson went really well, so I felt pretty good about that and I’m looking forward to the next time I teach them.  My lesson planning focus now shifts to two long lessons at the end of this month when I will teach the new white collar employees.  Somehow I have to work in cultural diversity into the lesson, as a request from HR.  Maybe it is because there are now a few foreign-born employees now (like me).  If this trend continues this company will soon be dealing with a lot of work culture conflicts I’d guess.  Should be interesting to see.

This morning at work I’m going to teach a new group of students.  It will be a monthly class focused on the new employees training to work in the factory.  Usually my students are the white collar designers, executives, engineers and salespeople.  However, even the factory workers get exposure to English as they work with foreign inspectors, and they sometimes have to work based on English documents.  However, based on previous class experience, most of them have had only junior high school and high school English classes, and those don’t really prepare students for speaking.

Today we’ll kick off the class, and hopefully the students will warm up to it.  Only English, for 45 minutes – it can be a little overwhelming.

I’m taking a moment today to really reflect on the security that I enjoy living in Japan.  Nowhere is perfectly safe – but Japan comes as close as I’ve seen.  Now I wouldn’t leave my front door unlocked, but it seems to me that just about anything else goes around here.  In summer time some people leave their cars running in the parking lot of the supermarket to keep the interior cool while they are shopping.  Very young children walk to elementary school without assistance from adults.  It is normal to walk around with around $500 in cash or more in your wallet.  And I haven’t worried about my car stereo getting stolen.  Ever.

So I don’t want to take that for granted, and I hope it stays like this for a long time.

Last weekend, much like the rest of them, was all about food.  Friday night after work Kuniko and I met in Sannomiya and visited a Turkish restaurant that she recommended.  It was my first visit, and I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the staff were Turkish and the food was very, very good.  We were more than satisfied with the four dishes that we ordered, and it served as a reminder that our visit to Istanbul is just about three months away.

After dinner we stopped in at a different wine bar than we usually visit for a drink and a talk with the owner, and then we were back home to get some rest.  It may have been Friday night, but Kuniko had to get up at the regular time to go to work on Saturday.  It’s a tough schedule for her…

Saturday was raining all day, but luckily Sunday was beautiful.  We made our now-habitual walk to the beach to sit and listen to the (tiny) waves, and then on the way back we did some shopping for lunch and dinner.  I bought some tiger prawns and a filet of yellowtail, and we grilled them up on back porch in the sun while sipping sparkling wine.

We kept the grilling going in the evening, too.  I grilled some new onions that Kuniko’s dad had given us, and also some tiny little erengi mushrooms in a pack of aluminum foil with butter and tabasco.  Yum!

We’re getting started on a regular work week today – should be a pretty normal schedule, though.  Back to work!

Last night after work Ms. Fukumi called to arrange delivery of some goods that they had brought back from their trip to San Francisco.  We invited her to stay for some cocktails and dinner, and so we had a small party of three to look at the photos from their trip and talk about their adventure.  It seems like they had a great time.

The highlight of their trip was the time spent with my parents up in Glen Ellen.  They did some wine tasting, had dinner, and spent one night before heading back to the airport and home to Japan.

My mom sent along some goodies and my dad sent along some wine, so we’re all stocked up for the time being.