We had a party after school with some of the ESS students. At first they just wanted a party, and so I steered them into the idea of throwing a party for the other teacher responsible for ESS, Matsubara sensei. <\/p>\n
Matsubara sensei is going to leave our school in a couple of days to have her baby early next year. She’s going to take two years off on maternity leave, and then come back. I was a little surprised that you can do that. She gets paid for the first year, but the second year is on her dime. At least she’ll have a job to come back to when she’s ready. Very interesting.<\/p>\n
We gave her a card and joked around with her for a while, but the classroom was so cold that we couldn’t party too long. I got the students out of there after about an hour, and in that time they had consumed an incredible amount of food. Those girls can eat!<\/p>\n
Now I’m home getting ready to cook up a pot of nabe. Kuniko took her car in to work today so that she could drop off the vegetables that we got from her father yesterday. I’m not sure when she’ll be back, so I’ve got the house warmed up and dinner at the ready. <\/p>\n
These days life has been pretty good to me. I was thinking of the harder times after I left the winery and took off to join the internet revolution down in Silicon Valley. From that point until I walked off the job at RealCapitalMarkets in Carlsbad in 2002 things were pretty tough – financially, emotionally, you name it.<\/p>\n
Soon after leaving RealCapitalMarkets I took a who-cares part time job at Barnes & Noble to try to make ends meet as long as I could. At one point I interviewed for a web job at an auto parts place, got the job, and then told them that I would need three weeks to travel across the country with my good friend Brian Haven. They told me that I couldn’t have the job after all, so I ended up spending a month with Brian Haven on the road – driving all over the map from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic That trip was a defining point for me and somehow really opened up my ideas of what I could and couldn’t do with my life.<\/p>\n
My aunt and uncle helped me by putting me up at their place for most of a year while I sweated the interview for a job in Japan, and plugged away at my part time job. In my off hours I hiked like a maniac – covering all the major mountains in San Diego and east towards the desert. Each night we would eat big dinners and drink lots of excellent wine, tequila and beer. Once I found out I got the job in Japan I spent time getting ready tying up loose ends for what I expected to be just one year in Japan.<\/p>\n
Since I arrived here, it has been non-stop adventure and I always feel like I’ve got the best job in the world. No stress, but definitely a challenge. I’m constantly working my brain over studying Japanese. <\/p>\n
I was thinking the other day that someday I might look back at these three years on the JET program as the best of my life. Then I wondered to myself – why does it have to end once my JET contract ends? Maybe this is just the beginning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We had a party after school with some of the ESS students. At first they just wanted a party, and so I steered them into the idea of throwing a party for the other teacher responsible for ESS, Matsubara sensei. Matsubara sensei is going to leave our school in a couple of days to have […]<\/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-890","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-em","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890","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=890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}