Today at work I have my monthly production group lesson with about 40 new employees that started working in the factory this year.  They get all kinds of training, including English, although most of their work will be here in Japan. The class is always fun to teach.  It kind of reminds me of teaching at the high school level, in that the students are a little more inhibited and shy.  On the other hand, they are more willing to have fun in class and joke around.  Too much seriousness can be drag on language education.

So today I’ll teach that class this morning, and then go back to my regular schedule for the rest of the day.  The production classes make for a nice break in my routine – I’m looking forward to it.

Day by day the summer has been heating up, and today will be the hottest day yet.   We’ll be toting along our hand towels to mop up the sweat on our ways back and forth to work.  It is a hard season to be outside in Japan.

Meanwhile work is going smoothly.  I’m starting to think about the next course, the students that will attend, and it looks like it should kick off in October.  I can’t believe there are just two more months in the term.  It seems like I just started.

OK, off to march through the heat and get to the air conditioned train as soon as possible!

This weekend we indulged a little bit – Friday night we had a yakiniku dinner, Saturday I grilled up some sliders that we had before going to see the latest Batman movie, and then finally we went off to my workplace yesterday to enjoy a festival.

The festival was pretty interesting.  They held it during one of the hottest days of the summer so far, and there were huge fans blowing air and mist all over the place to keep the guests from passing out.  Only employees and their families were allowed inside, but we could walk around (almost) anywhere we wanted, and see some of the parts of the factory that we normally don’t have a chance to check out.  I wanted to see the port area, where they occasionally load train cars onto barges to ship to Kobe Port for loading on huge ships to go overseas.  I could also show Kuniko my office, and see where I spend every day.

This week is the last full week of work for us before our summer holidays – just about ten days until we blow out of here and head to Hawaii.  Can’t wait!

It is Friday morning, and after a week of vegetarian healthy meals we are starting to see some results.  I’ve lots seven pounds this week (probably due to sweat in this heat), and we’ve been diligent about eating low-fat foods.

But enough is enough!  Tonight we decided to go to a yakiniku restaurant for a meat infusion.  Tomorrow we’ve both got the day off, so we picked a restaurant that is Korean style – lots of spice and garlic.   Can’t wait – it’ll be a good reward for this week, and maybe we can gain back all the weight we’ve lost in one night.

Last night after work I waited around my classroom for one of my coworkers to come pick me up and take me to tachinomi.  Tachinomi is kind of a casual drinking place, where people have a beer or two and then head on home, without ever sitting down.  During a recent party I promised this coworker that I’d join him for a beer at tachinomi someday, and so we arranged to grab a drink after work.

But it didn’t turn out like that at all.

Through a little bit of scheming and switching and rearranging, I ended up having a sushi dinner on the company with the coworker and two of the receptionists from the ground floor.   I guess my coworker used “English with Bryan” to get the two receptionists to come along, and then figured that a restaurant upgrade was in order.  But all this was a surprise for me, and since it was the first time drinking with any of these people, there were plenty of surprises to go around.

Still, it was fun to talk to some new people, and we had some pretty good sushi, too.  I’m not sure who exactly is going to sign off on the bill, but it was a strange situation.  And strange situations are what attracted me to Japan in the first place.

So part of the deal with eating healthier is to watch our weight every day.  We’ve been using the same scale since I had arrived in Japan, and the other day Kuniko mentioned that she thought it wasn’t weighing correctly.  She had weighed herself in the nurses office at her school, and the number was quite different.

Last night we bought a new scale, calibrated it, and sure enough, when I stepped on the scale it was 3.5 kg lighter than the older scale.  That’s around 8 pounds difference.

So I love the new scale.  Never has weight loss been so easy.

We’ll keep at the diet and see how things go.  Unfortunately tonight after work I have to join a small drinking party, so I’ll probably be eating greasy food along with cold beer.  Bracing myself for bad news tomorrow morning on the scale.

Last night I changed our dinner menu at the last minute and made a Vietnamese style harusame noodle salad.  One of the ingredients I wanted to add was a hot pepper, and I’ve got some Thai peppers that I keep in the freezer for just this kind of thing.  The peppers are really hot, and you have to be careful while cutting and preparing them.  I was careful to use a plastic bag to protect my hands while cutting, but even after washing my hands afterwards I got a little heat surprise when I rubbed my eyes late last night.  Those peppers have some staying power.

The burn lasted about five minutes – long enough for me to spend scrubbing my hands again to try to remove any traces.

Dinner was great, though, and it was also one of the healthiest meals we’ve had in a while.  I made enough to eat tonight as well, so we’ll be hitting the leftovers instead of making something new.

Today I’m headed back to work after a productive and relaxing holiday.  I accomplished all the tasks I wanted to get done during last week, including wiring our living room with the internet, cleaning our sofa, getting our house cleaned, and seeing the doctor.  On top of that, there was plenty of time to relax at home and at the beach, see a movie, and celebrate our anniversary.  Mission accomplished…

This week I’ll be trying to put together a healthy menu during the week.  Both myself and Kuniko are trying to lose some kilograms before our trip to Hawaii.  Although we got some pretty good exercise during the holidays, back at work I’ll have almost no exercise during the day, so we’ll try to eat healthier to see if that helps.  Tonight, salad and hiyakko.

Yesterday I had a completely free schedule all day, so I ended up walking to the beach to enjoy the weather.  First I made sure to cover myself head to toe with sunscreen, and then left the house around 11 a.m.  Although it was hot out the weather was just beautiful.  A strong breeze was blowing to help keep the temperature bearable.  I walked along my regular route to the train station, and then decided on a different path to the nearest beach, and traveled through some neighborhoods that I hadn’t been through before.

Since I was approaching the beach from a different direction, I wandered along the hillside above the beach among the houses there, and sometimes I found myself skirting rice fields and people’s yards.  There wasn’t really any delineation between people’s property, which was kind of refreshing.

I spent about an hour at the beach, wading in the water, drying out on the sand, and even looking for shells.  The water temperature turned out to be warmer than I expected.  Next time I’ll bring my bathing suit.

Some pics from the day are here.

Previously the weather forecast for this week called for showers and clouds all week, but the last few days have been bright, clear and hot.  Brutally hot, actually.  I had imagined spending time hiking in the morning, but by 10 am it was clearly not going to happen.  Instead, I settled for a walk to the supermarket to buy stuff for dinner, and settled in at home to enjoy the AC and read some books.

Today looks like it’ll be much the same schedule.  I’ve got some parties coming up, so I need to save my money (and my calories) for Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.

The retirement home that they have been building behind our house looks to be near completion, at least from the outside.  The parking lot was finished yesterday, and they put up lights and painted lines yesterday afternoon.  I’m looking forward to seeing when they turn on the parking lot lights – hopefully the ambient light won’t be shining in our windows.  Unfortunately, it looks like our neighbors the Yamaji’s will bear the brunt of that.  The only good point of all this is that the number of bugs flying around in our backyard has decreased dramatically.  They used the come in waves off the farm back there, and it was always a trick to get in and out the backdoor to the BBQ without some squeezing into the house.   These days – not so much a problem.

Well, back to reading some books and relaxing.  Hard to believe I’m awake at 6 a.m. on my day off.

Long time no talk!  We ended a pretty hectic period of work last Friday.  It had been about two months since I had any sort of holiday beyond the weekend, and a month and a half since Kuniko had a day off at all.  So we were pretty bushed at the end of it.

The last days of last week I joined two work parties.  The first was with my new department, in an izakaya in Sannomiya after work on Wednesday.  The group of people I met were really nice, and it turned out that the party was more like a welcome party for me and two other employees that started last April.  It was good for me to meet the people that are technically my department coworkers.  By chance the attendees also included the receptionist and support staff, which meant that I knew a few more people than I expected to.

At first everyone sat in pre-arranged seats, and I was lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it) to sit with the older men of the department.  They were fill of bad jokes, deep questions, and they used some pretty difficult Japanese.  Luckily during the party the organizer had us rotate a bit to mingle, and so I had a chance to talk to everyone.  I even met the company president’s staff driver, who plays roller hockey.  We talked ice hockey for a while.

I didn’t drink so much being that it was on a “school night”, and got home around 11pm – not so late for these kinds of things. The party the next night was with two of my former students, one of which is going to transfer to the Tokyo office.  She wasn’t thrilled with the idea of the commute, and so we talked about her future life there.  She’s hoping to finally settle down in one place – she grew up in Kyushu, has worked for a couple of years here in Kansai, and I think she’d like to end up somewhere, be it Tokyo or another place.  I think she’s the kind of person that will enjoy Tokyo life, though.  We ate of Mikaen, an authentic Chinese restaurant in Sannomiya.  The food was good, and my student even had a chance to practice her Chinese with the staff.  I think it was a good send-off party for her.

After all the partying, Friday night was a nice calm affair.  I walked home in a torrential downpour, laden with groceries for the weekend, but it was a relief to walk in the door and start nine days off.   I made up some Greek wraps for a healthy dinner, and Kuniko and I dined in while the rain poured down outside.

Saturday was my day to zone out.  I read books, watched some movies, ate leftovers, and killed time before Kuniko got home from a school event.  Once she got home we had cocktails and celebrated the end of her work week.

Yesterday we both had off, so I went to the doctor in the morning to complain about some back pain (lose some weight, he said) and then Kuniko and I went for a three hour walk around town.  It was pretty hot outside, but after we climbed the hill to the home improvement center, everything else was downhill or flat.  No problem.

At the home center I bought some of the tools I would need to work on my major project this week, and once we got home I got it kicked off.

The big project was to run LAN cable to behind the TV in our living room from the router upstairs.  Back when we were designing the house, I felt like just using wireless throughout the house would be enough bandwidth for day to day usage, but recently I have been streaming TV and movies to the TV in the living room, and WiFi wasn’t cutting it.  Half the work was already done for me – there is an ethernet jack across the room about 30 feet away.

So the trick was to remove that jack, run cable down inside that wall, drill a hole to the crawlspace high basement, run the cable across the basement to under the TV, drill up into the space between the inner wall and outer wall, push the cable up, and wire it to a jack behind the TV.  It was even more tricky than I thought.  Luckily, I caught a couple of big breaks and was able to split the project over two days.  The only major problem was my colorblindness causing difficulty in wiring the RJ45 jacks.  The brown and green wires looked pretty much the same to me, causing several do-overs.

Now things are all hooked and working perfectly.  I saved big bucks, and the wire is invisible beneath the floor.  No trade-offs, just some sore muscles from crawling around under the house on my belly.  Hooray!

…demand a 3-4 day break from blogging.  I’ll be bushed the next few mornings thanks to work parties in the evenings.  I’ll be back blogging by the weekend, though!

Yesterday we enjoyed a brief moment of cool weather.  Most of my day was spent inside in the office, but the morning was a pleasant stroll to work in a cool breeze.  By the time I headed home at the end of the day, the humidity was just starting to come back.  This morning summer is back – hot and humid already.

This week I have two parties – tomorrow night with the HR department, and the next night with a couple of former students.  It’ll be interesting to see how the HR department parties.  Are they wild and crazy?  Stiff and formal? We’ll find out tomorrow night.

Friday night after work I came home and made a huge roast beef sandwich for dinner, opened a bottle of rioja, and played video games all evening.  Kuniko arrived home after her party, and then we both headed to bed because we had to get up early the next day.  However we didn’t sleep long – a huge thunderstorm came through and dumped water for hours.  The thunder was loud, but the sound of sheets of water hitting the side of our house was the noise that kept us up.

Saturday I spent the day cleaning the house, and thanks to the bad weather Kuniko could come home and help out from the afternoon.  We were able to completely clean the house and still have enough time for a nap before our guest arrived.

The guest was an old friend of Kuniko’s, who is running a bakery and cooking school nearby.  Kuniko has gone to baking lessons a couple of times and always comes back with good bread.  Saturday she came with a couple of bags full of goodies for us, and we had burritos for dinner.  It was her first time to try it, and I think she enjoyed the dish.  She even used the extra-hot hot sauce… that’s a good sign!  We even did a traditional shot of tequila that kicked the party into another gear.  Luckily she drove to the party so she was able to stay in our guest room upstairs instead of trying to find a way home.

Sunday was completely free for me, although Kuniko had to mark exams half of the day.  Still, we could relax at home and do next to nothing, which helps recharge the batteries.  Just one more week before I get a week off!

Yesterday I had a good class with the production department employees.  They had lost a little energy due to the heat and humidity, but overall they did their best on the lesson.  I had been hoping for all the students to be speaking English during the lesson, but actually we ended up at around 50%.  When I walked near the practicing students they would use English, but I have the feeling that as soon as I left they probably switched back to Japanese.  Still, it was a fun class and everyone seemed to enjoy the lesson (break?)

We’re getting close to the weekend!  On Saturday one of Kuniko’s old friends will drop by for a taco party in the evening, and she’s already planning to spend the night.  Break out the tequila!  We’ll be spending tonight and tomorrow evenings cleaning house and getting ready for the party.  It has been a little while since we’ve had someone over.