Lately I’ve had some weird noises emanating from the primary laptop in our house. The fan needs a little work, apparently. I took the computer in to be cleaned, but it continued to make noise after a thorough cleaning, so it may be that I need to replace the fan itself. Not an easy job on a laptop, so I may ship the computer off to Toshiba after the new year to solve the problem. It makes it tough to enjoy jazz music playing on the stereo when your computer sounds like an espresso machine.<\/p>\n
On the work front I’ve been covering for teachers that have either been sick or taking winter vacations, which means that I’ve been busier than normal lately. Wednesday I was at Mitsubishi Electric studying with students one-on-one. Unfortunately I only was able to meet these students the last two weeks of their class – I would have really enjoyed working with them longer. <\/p>\n
While walking to the classroom last night I walked by what looked like a bar. It was Western-themed – the sign was made out of a barrel head, there were two female bartenders waiting around for customers inside wearing cowboy outfits (with short jean-skirts) and even better than that – a swinging door right out of a spaghetti Western. The place was empty when I walked by on my way to work, but on the way back it was filled with younger guys (maybe college students?) getting their drink on with the cowgirls laughing at their jokes and serving drinks. Seems like a place I’ve got to check out sometime. I’ve always wanted to enter a bar through a swinging door like that.<\/p>\n
Today I didn’t have time to drop by the new house, but I did need to do some thinking about what kind of mortgage we want to get. A lot has been written on the web about variable rate mortgages vs. fixed rate mortgages, and Japan’s situation is pretty different. Luckily there is a lot of flexibility with the bank, and we can even mix the two different types until we’re happy with risk vs. security. We’ll have to figure this out soon. <\/p>\n
Tomorrow I have a full day traveling all over Kobe with lessons in three different places, and Saturday I’m on deck to help out a friend with a kids’ Christmas party and then we have our own Christmas party with Chiemi, Ai and Chu-chu on Sunday. Last night we did some shopping at Carrefour to stock up our wine cellar and get some cheese for the party. I hope there is something left of me by the time I head back to work on Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lately I’ve had some weird noises emanating from the primary laptop in our house. The fan needs a little work, apparently. I took the computer in to be cleaned, but it continued to make noise after a thorough cleaning, so it may be that I need to replace the fan itself. Not an easy job […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-oO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1538\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}