Today at work they had to cut the power for about three hours in the morning. I had come in at my regular time, that is, early. I managed to get a lot of electronic studying done in the air conditioned well-lighted room, and so when they cut the power around nine o\u2019clock I was already ahead of the game.<\/p>\n
The room stayed cool for a surprising amount of time. I took a seat near the window, and studied by sunlight. I had a few visitors – the vice principal came by to ask me how many classes I had in a week. I saw the paper he was filling out and it was a board of education evaluation. Even though I\u2019m scheduled for 15 classes a week officially, I skip three of those classes by teacher request, and I have ESS and three other periods marked off for meetings and for teaching English to other teachers like Miyake sensei and Mori sensei. I made it sound like I\u2019m slammed with classes, in the hopes that my successor catches an easier schedule next year when he\/she arrives. In reality I have the easiest schedule ever, and I\u2019m taking advantage of it to hit the books hard. <\/p>\n
Another visitor was Kobayashi-san, the cute office lady that I\u2019ve rarely spoken to. She tends to avoid me, and if I catch her looking at me and smile she turns away quickly and rushes off. So, I was surprised to see her show up at my desk. <\/p>\n
She had some mail for me, since the regular mail lady wasn\u2019t in today. It was just junk mail but I confirmed it was for me and said thanks in Japanese. She smiled and left – a much calmer exit than she usually makes. Later I was in the office and I talked to her a little more, admiring the lunch bento that she had brought. It wasn\u2019t half as cool as mine, but I didn\u2019t mention that. She actually seems pretty nice; I think she\u2019s just a little gun-shy because of all the attention she gets from certain male teachers. <\/p>\n
In the afternoon I went over to Tsuji-san\u2019s place and we talked. I paid careful attention and found that most of our discussion was held in English. I\u2019d like to use more Japanese, but either I can\u2019t say what I want in Japanese or things fall quickly back into English at the first sign of miscommunication. I might have to think about getting a little more strict, maybe cutting the session in half and trying hard to speak only one language at a time.<\/p>\n
You\u2019d think that since Kuniko and I are living together I\u2019d have a lot more chances to speak Japanese, but we\u2019ve got a weird kind of communication scheme going. I speak my mind freely in English, Kuniko generally speaks in Japanese for small daily things, and English when we\u2019re talking more in depth. If Kuniko is talking in Japanese, I tend to respond in kind, but not always. It\u2019s hard to explain, but it works well for us. Anyway, I think we\u2019ll get the chance to use more Japanese once Kuniko\u2019s exam is over next week. I want to make sure that she\u2019s in an English frame of mind these days.<\/p>\n
Tonight I\u2019m heading into Akashi to meet up with Struan. It\u2019s been a long time, and we need to catch up and see what\u2019s going on. Struan is starting his third year of his JET contract, the same as me. He was pretty hesitant on whether to re-contract, but in the end he decided to stick around. I don\u2019t know what we\u2019ll be up to tonight, I\u2019ll report more later.<\/p>\n
Kuniko was feeling better last night, and she seemed OK this morning. She cancelled plans to go meet her co-workers in Umeda tonight, but I\u2019m not sure if she\u2019s going to uncancel them or not. I was happy to see her feeling better though. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today at work they had to cut the power for about three hours in the morning. I had come in at my regular time, that is, early. I managed to get a lot of electronic studying done in the air conditioned well-lighted room, and so when they cut the power around nine o\u2019clock I was already ahead […]<\/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-775","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-cv","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775","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=775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}