We are truly in the rainy season.  Every day is cloudy and threatening rain, and now and then the rain just shows up.  Right now it is pouring rain outside, and I think we are going to drive to work.

I don’t mind – that saves me about 20 minutes of walking outside in the rain, but I’m sure Al Gore wouldn’t be too happy.  Especially since the train is a viable alternative.  But it is hard to argue with a dry car, air conditioning, and a comfortable ride to work.

This week I get rich.

Well, not really rice, but today is my pay day – the 25th of each month.  On top of that, at the end of the week I get my summer bonus, which is not insignificant.  It’s like getting several paychecks at once.

Bonuses work differently in Japan.  In many Japanese companies they are more expected than surprising, and people include their appearance in their yearly budgets.  My case is a little different as I am a contract employee rather than someone with a lifetime contract, but the basic thrust is the same.  Bonuses can be quite substantial, too.  When Kuniko worked for her school in Osaka years ago, the bonus made up nearly 50% of her annual salary.

I think companies like the bonus system because unlike base pay they can easily adjust it down citing business conditions, whereas any decrease in base pay means a confrontation with either the union or the employees themselves.  And confrontations aren’t really popular here in Japan.

So it’ll be good to see my bank account topped up, especially after the damage I’ve done to it paying for tickets to Europe and the USA.

Even though the last two weeks we’ve been officially in the rainy season here in Kansai, there has been just a tiny bit of rain.  A couple of hours here, a sprinkle there.  Not even close to serious rain.

Until today.  It’s almost like mother nature is trying to make up for lost time.  I walked home in it tonight, and got a thorough soaking of the lower half of my body.  I guess I need a bigger umbrella.

Yesterday Kuniko and I bought plane tickets for America in December, and we’re officially all booked for trips in 2013.  It feels good to get it done, pay them off, and see the rest of our income for the year as profit.  At least that’s the way I’m looking at it.

One slight bummer was that United Airlines changed some of the rules they had for international flights.  No more free drinks (bastards!), and now they charge for the second bag checked in ($91!).  We’ll have to think long and hard about bringing back the customary case or two of wine at the end of the trip…

Friday and Monday I had two work-related parties. The one on Friday was with some current and former students, and last night’s party was a welcome/farewell event. We said goodbye to a guy in the HR department who was technically my boss, and hello to a new employee who has just started with the company.

I didn’t stay out too late last night (I skipped the karaoke second party) because it was a school night, but still I’m pretty tired out this morning. Based on our busy schedule, Kuniko and I decided to dial back a few events in our schedule. Kuniko is dead on her feet and it’s only Tuesday.

We’re just about ready to pull the trigger on plane tickets for a Christmas trip to Glen Ellen. This time we’re bringing along Kuniko’s family to make things more interesting. Time seems to be flying – it’ll be the end of the year before we know it.

For the last couple days hot winds have blown through Kobe, offering a preview of weather that normally would appear in July or August.  High humidity, burning sunlight – it’s just like the middle of summer.

For us that means cranking up the air conditioners in both the living room and the bedroom.  Since we both work all day our poor house traps the heat inside as a present for the first person who gets home.  Once we get into summer officially I’ll set up the timers to automatically cool the place down before we get home and when we wake up, but for now they are on manual.

Tonight after work I’m joining some students for a dinner party at an Okinawan restaurant.  The students are all from last term’s group lessons of new employees.  They invited me out since we don’t really have a chance to meet that often.  Last term I had them twice a week in class.  I’m hoping they are able to relax and not be stressed about speaking English the whole time.   My unofficial policy is to only speak English with my current students, but switch to Japanese if necessary with people that aren’t current students.  It should be an interesting evening.

As usual we are starting to think way ahead and getting our plane tickets to America organized for this Christmas.  The details are still being negotiated, but I think we found a flight that we’d like to take.  We’re excited about the trip, since it will be our first chance to meet Charlie, and also the first time for Kuniko’s folks and Kuniko’s sister to visit California.

We’re also watching closely the situation in Istanbul.  Apparently things are still pretty lively there, but short of a revolution I think we’re still on for our trip.  Like Kuniko said, “Wouldn’t that be a great way to die?”  Better than dying in bed wearing adult bladder control diapers, I guess.

For the last few days we’ve been worried about an incoming typhoon, called “Yagi” that was due to hit the main part of Japan on Friday.  Luckily today it kind of fizzled out over the ocean, and that means that our plans for the weekend can proceed without interruption or cancellation.  Woo-hoo!

A long time ago when I first worked at Kawasaki, I was dispatched from another company.  Since I was a “dispatch worker” I wasn’t issued any kind of security clearance.  In fact I just had a goofy name badge that I was supposed to wear all day.  I think I wore it for the first year I worked there, and then I became familiar to everyone there and it was no longer necessary.

At that time I always walked in the front entrance because I lacked the security clearance to go through the employee entrance.  Actually, this was kind of nice.  The front entrance is reserved for customers and that’s it – even vendors have to go around the back.  I would stride in there every morning at 8 a.m. and wave to the security guys, who got to know me well.  Then I flashed my goofy name badge to the receptionists working the desk each day (which was a little strange because they could certainly recognize me by sight).

This lasted for about a year or so, and then one of the receptionists told me that I didn’t need to produce the badge anymore.  And eventually I started to go in the employee entrance with an actual security card.

But the point of all this is that during this time I made a lot of good relationships with the receptionists and the security guards.  Now everywhere I go in the factory I’ve got a security guard calling out a greeting and being very friendly.  I think this is pretty handy – just about any problem that I might have would involve a security guard showing up.  It’s good to be a familiar face around there, especially considering there are about two thousand workers running around.  Sometimes it is good not to blend in.

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!