Well, not really. But I did manage to get my paperwork into the immigration office, meaning that I may be able to pick up my new visa in the beginning of April, which would be perfect for me. If they aren’t ready by April 4th, then I’ll have to wait for Golden Week in May. Let’s hope they are able to get it done quickly!

Yesterday I shuttled back and forth between the Kobe immigration office and the Akashi city office. Luckily there is a satellite city office inside of Akashi station. That meant I could take the train there, get off, and get my paperwork done quickly. Unfortunately the immigration office is a bit of a hike from Sannomiya station, so I got some good exercise yesterday.

After all of that I spent some time in the bookstores looking at textbooks for the next term, and also doing a little bit of shopping around Sannomiya. Kuniko and I had dinner at Com Coka, and as usual the steamed spring rolls were awesome. We also had some fried rice, some pho, and fried soft shell crab. Yum!

Today I’m headed back to work, and Friday will be the last day of the term. We’ll do a final presentation next week on Tuesday, but I’m pretty happy to be closing out this course this week.

I must be some kind of glutton for punishment. Along with all the paperwork that is required at Kawasaki, my visa will come up for renewal in June, and so I’ve got to start getting the paperwork together now. The only time to apply for the visa is during normal business hours, and that means that I must take two days off to take care of it (one day to turn in the papers, one day to pick up the visa). According to “the rules” you cannot apply for a renewal until two months before expiration. My two months begins April 6th. Until April 6th I have about 11 days off, so this would be an ideal time to do it. After April 6th I have one day off only.

So, my job today is to go to the immigration office and try to convince them to do the visa paperwork a couple of weeks early. Flexibility? In the Japanese government? I don’t know what I’m thinking.

Anyway, after they turn down my request I’ll spend time in Kobe today doing research on textbooks for my future students, and doing some shopping for some other stuff before I meet Kuniko for Vietnamese food in the evening. I already planned the cheer-myself-up party – that’s how confident I am about how things will go with the government officials today.

I spent a big chunk of this weekend working on paperwork related to entering Kawasaki as a contract employee. Actually, Kuniko did a lot of work, too. I can write in Japanese, but to write down, for example, my street address it takes nearly 60 seconds. For Kuniko to do it, it takes about 5 seconds. I had tons of paperwork to do, so we kind of teamed up to do it. But Kuniko did most of it.

It is not done yet, however. I need to get some documents from my current and soon-to-be-former employer, OTC. Tomorrow I have a day off, so I’ll head to the immigration office to get some more paperwork from them. You wouldn’t believe how much paperwork is involved here.

Today is a regular day of classes, but starting tomorrow my schedule gets weird. It will stay weird until the beginning of April, so I expect blog updates to be intermittent for a while. Maybe when my parents arrive at the end of this month they can do some guest blogging.

This morning I got up at the usual time and opened up my last box of imported American cereal – Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Maybe when it is easy to buy breakfast cereal any time you like the attraction is hard to understand, but one box every five years… delicious.

Today Kuniko has another day off of work, and this weekend is off for both of us. Three days off in a row? Unprecedented. Kuniko promised to make Italian food for dinner tonight, and I can’t wait to open up a bottle of wine to celebrate the end of the week. We’ll go catch a movie this weekend, maybe visit her parents, and I am going to get some rest and get ready for my last week of classes. Looking forward to it…

These days I’m working hard wrapping up all kinds of paperwork, and now and then some translation jobs come in which I have to do on top of my teaching work. Translation is interesting, and I think as long as it is going from Japanese -> English I enjoy it. Going the other way is much more difficult, and my skill level is not quite high enough to do it professionally.

In addition to this work, my classes are entering the end phase, and I’m doing interview tests and trying to measure the improvement of my students’ English skills (or lack thereof). So far there has been some pretty good students, and some that haven’t quite improved as much as I would have liked. I’m very proud of some of my students – especially one that has come a long way over a year. I think he’s ready for an overseas business trip to see how he does in a real business English situation. But right now there is nothing on his schedule.

This weekend should be more paperwork, this time at home. I have tons of application forms and documents to fill out for Kawasaki, so I’ll be confined to quarters this weekend until I can get it all done. Ugh.

Today Kuniko has a day off from work, while I have a regular work day. Right now the term of her school is winding down, so she’ll have some chances over the next few weeks to rest up here and there. I’m glad she has the opportunity – she deserves it.

Getting ready to enter KHI as a direct hire employee, and I’ve got a huge laundry list of paperwork and documents that I need to provide. In addition I have a lot of paperwork wrapping up the current term, so that means that I’m going to be a desk jockey the next few weeks. Maybe I can sneak in a hike this weekend to get some exercise.

That’s it – gotta run…

The heavy rain is continuing today, and although the crappy weather is no fun to walk through on the way to work, some of the optimists in my class say that it is a sign of the changing of seasons. If that’s the case, I guess I can deal with a week of rain.

Last night after work I attended an unofficial meeting with my OTC contact, and I told him about jumping ship to Kawasaki. He took it well, even with a sense of admiration, and I guess he’s going to tell the rest of the company tomorrow. Hopefully it’ll go smoothly.

After a relatively normal week this week things will get surreal with lots of strange scheduling as we wrap up the current term at work. A day off here, a block of empty time there, and by the end of that week I should be pretty much done until April. The ends of the terms are always a scramble to get everyone’s classes in and most students finished at the same time. Something to look forward to…

What a weekend – a lot of things happened, and I finally can blog about it.

First, last week I wrapped up negotiations with Kawasaki, and from April 1st I will now work directly for them, effectively cutting my staffing company out of the loop. Negotiating with a giant company like Kawasaki was not easy – they are very comfortable playing hardball – but thanks to some good conversations and some well-placed people I am very happy with the contract that I signed. I’ll be under this contract for the rest of the year, and we’ll discuss a new contract towards the end of the year as we evaluate how 2012 goes.

This month I will have to ease out of my former employer’s grasp and move into Kawasaki’s (hereafter shortened to KHI for Kawasaki Heavy Industries). Hopefully my current employer isn’t too pissy about the change. My contact person at the company seems cool about it, though, so it should work out OK.

Now that I have a job lined up for the rest of the year I could go ahead and pick some holidays. Part of my contract was a ton of paid holidays – I get 22 days a year. I signed up for some time this summer, and we’re already booked for a trip to Hawaii to visit my cousin and her family for a week or so. Then I got some time off for the winter holidays, and we’re planning to spend the time in Bali doing the relax thing. 2012 is the year of the beach, I guess.

Not only did I wrap up the new contract, but today we picked up our new car. We decided to take it for a spin to the new Costco in Tarumi, and it did great! Kuniko really seems to like the car – it is a lot more comfortable than the old Mazda Demio that we had. As for Costco, we were pleasantly surprised. It is a nice one, and despite being there in the middle of the day it wasn’t completely swamped. We’re hoping to visit more on weekday evenings when there are fewer people.

After coming back we also had a visit from Mr. Tojo down the street. He and his wife had attended an oyster festival near Himeji, and he brought back a bunch of oysters still in the shell for us. We already had dinner cooking, but we still fired up the grill in a slight drizzle and grilled those oysters up. Yum! With our dinner we also opened up a nice bottle of champagne to celebrate the new job and new car, and now we’re just taking it easy this evening getting ready for the work week ahead. It was a big weekend…

Because Kuniko is sick today. She’s going to call in sick to work, which will be the first time in her entire life to do so. There are a lot of sick people around, and the other day I narrowly avoided a nasty bug that I thought might bring me down. Kuniko will have some time to rest today, and think that is just what she needs to get over it.

As for me, I’m off to work as usual. Friday feels good, though. I have a little bit of a lighter schedule today, but most of the gaps will be filled with paperwork and reports. As we come to the end of the teaching term, my workload goes up quite a bit as I write about student progress, and take care of lots of minor tasks. There’s actually an interesting story about this but it will have to wait until next week.

I don’t have any plans this weekend, but with Kuniko sick it is looking like a stay at home and recharge weekend. Maybe that’s a good thing.

One of the options at the car dealer while we were buying our new car was listed as “Premium Floormats”, and the price in yen was 22,100 yen ($272). We said that we would rather buy them from another source, and a few minutes on Google and I found some floormats for the new car and ordered then for 50% of the price. They arrived last night and they look good (although it must be said that the range of excitement generated from floormats can be quite limited). We are supposed to get the new car tomorrow, so if it isn’t too freezing outside I’ll install them before our first voyage.

Today I have another full schedule at work. Recently I have been pretty busy with classes and also negotiation about the future at the company. Hopefully today after work we can get some things settled, contracts can be signed in blood, and other arcane ceremonies performed. I’ll be happy to concentrate again on teaching my students.

At work I have been having meetings and meetings about the next term, and things are finally starting to clear up. There is at least one major change, and a couple of minor ones that I’ll be able to write about soon. Until then, things are starting to look good.

One of the things I have learned over the last week or two is that I should really start to work on improving my Japanese speaking skills. While my listening remains pretty strong, some of my vocabulary (especially business-related) has started to fade away. Time to get back into the routine of studying Japanese. The only problem: when?

Yesterday after my regular classes I sat down in a meeting to try to figure out the next step for the courses I’m teaching. The meeting was brief, and mainly I listened carefully, and I took home some documents with more questions than answers. I had pictured in my mind that this meeting would resolve a lot of stuff, but instead it made for more questions. Mysterious!

I’ll do some thinking on it this week, and hopefully things will be clearer.

Meanwhile we are going through a cold snap around here. This past weekend I was starting to think spring was coming, with warm temperatures thanks to the clouds and rain. Unfortunately it didn’t last, and we are back to frost on the ground in the mornings. Ick!

This was a big weekend for the new Costco, which had its grand opening on Saturday. Few people are more excited about it than we are, but I think we are smart enough to stay away until things calm down. Actually, we had planned on visiting the other Costco over in Amagasaki instead, hoping to take advantage of smaller crowds, but something came up and we postponed the trip for later.

Saturday we had Yoshi and family over for dinner, and we feasted on monster spare ribs and drank plenty of red wine. Actually, too much red wine. We kept on talking and drinking and listening to music until well past the last train back, and so we put them up in our guest room for the night, and we all slept off the wine (except for Akira – he was sleeping off grape soda). We had a really good time with them, and I’m hoping we can do it again soon.

Today we’re back to work. I had the last three days off, so it will be a little hard to get back into the routine. I’ve got a weird schedule to look forward to in March, with the first two weeks looking like a normal schedule, but the last two weeks filled with question marks. Hopefully today I can get some more information about those questions.

Wrapping up a short week today, but I don’t really have any exciting plans for tomorrow. One possible event is to go to the doctor for an annual checkup, or perhaps going into Osaka to explore a little bit. Maybe I’ll stay home and read some books that I’ve wanted to catch up on. I’ll stop in at the grocery store and pick up two racks of pork ribs for a BBQ with Yoshi on Saturday. Maybe have breakfast out.

Not exactly burning down the house with excitement, I know.

This is one of those holidays I had to reserve about a year ago, and I had no idea what the situation would be like at that point. Turns out I could use the holiday, so I am looking forward to it. So I’ll take a little blog break and try to do something mildly interesting to write about next week.

Because of all the calories we consumed last weekend thanks to a wedding and Kuniko’s birthday party we decided to eat a little healthier this week. Anytime we want to eat healthy in the winter time, we make nabe. It is a simple, delicious soup cooked in a clay pot, and there are a lot of varieties. Kuniko made a chicken soup version on Monday, and a tomato and oregano based one last night. We were able to kill a lot of vegetables in the last couple of days, too.

Since I get home a little earlier today, the menu swings back to the unhealthy – I’m planning on making panini sandwiches tonight. I managed to get my hands on some Italian ciabatta bread, and I’m going to try to press together some yummy sandwiches tonight. Should be interesting.

The weather has turned suddenly warm today, pushing up into 7-8 degrees this morning. I think there is rain in the forecast, and I can only hope that things clear up before this Saturday when we have Yoshi and family over for dinner.