Alright, let’s get back on to blogging. Geez, I have been busy lately. Let me quickly give you the scoop without going into the boring details. The lawn is greening up nicely and Tom’s deck is an on going affair but will be a masterpiece of craftsmanship when it is finished. We had the tail end of a typhoon this week and have been dealing with really high winds and pouring rain but it cleared up for most of the weekend. It was hot and sunny and beautiful. It gets you going even when you are severally tired from the work week. Although we have been having exams and I have had more spares than usual at my base school, elementary school has really been kicked into high gear. I had 10 lessons with them in two days. I proposed a textbook be used for grades five and six and three of our area schools have agreed to use it. There is no real curriculum document for elementary school so I wanted to get some uniformity for our school board and district. There are still two more schools I would like to approach about using it so that no matter where the kids end up going for junior high school we can have approximately the same standards in terms of reading and phonics. I planted a load of things from seed this weekend and Tom and I are considering the logistics of some in ground water feature like a kiddy pool. We found on at the Cain's Home Centre that we may purchase as soon as the deck is complete for the inevitable deck christening party. We did some events on the weekend as well. Gisela and I worked at the Easter event in Hirooka. I know that Easter is pretty much long past but we can do these things when we like. Friday night we got together to produce about 60 hot crossed buns for the kids. They turned out like hot crossed scones actually but they still tasted good. We all dressed like rabbits for the whole weekend including the baking and trips to the store. I started a little earlier than most when I visited Rachael at the City Hall to pick up my costume. I had left work a little early that day to fill out paper work on my stolen wallet. I put on the costume just for fun and went over to see my supervisor at the board of education office across the street. I left her office and came around a corner to go to my car and ran into my principal from the school I should have been in at that time. He almost ran into me but then came to a dead stop. His mouth was slightly open in surprise. I was a bit worried at that moment but he just laughed, smacked my ass and walked out the door without saying a word. I was a bit stunned but it was a pretty funny scene. Only in Japan I tell you! After the bun making sessions, we had pretty much the worst karaoke session I have ever been a part of and then headed home for the night. I was pretty tired from school that day so I just went straight to bed. We were going to watch the Da Vinci Code on Saturday night but we didn’t manage to leave the house on time so I went out for dinner and drinks instead and a very late night ensued. Then I had another early morning on Sunday to drop Dec off at the train. By early I mean 9:30 but it was still too much for me. I haven’t been awake on both a Saturday and a Sunday morning in some time and there is a whole world of activity that is going on at that time. Tom and I were both up so we got to work on the yard. I finally got my bike picked up from before Golden Week and because this is Japan it was still there after forgetting about it for three weeks. I also finally paid some bills I had been neglecting and got gas put in the car. I felt very productive.
One of the kids broke his nose in some gym class accident on Thursday. It is always interesting to try and speculate as to what happened when you don’t really know what people are saying. It is like watching a silent movie where you guess at the subtitles. The gym teacher who came in with the kid was carrying a wooden mallet. So it looked very much like the teacher had hit the kid in the face with the mallet. I imagine no one but me would have read the situation that way but that is exactly what it looked like. There haven’t been many kids at school lately because a school trip so I have been spending a lot more time in the special ed class and the first year classes. It is good to get to know them all a little better. I taught them in elementary school but not as often as I do here. I think I will get to go to an English camp soon too which sounds like fun. It is for high school kids which is great because I never get to work with them. I love working with high school kids. They are so much fun and they can have actual conversations about things. Junior high kids are great but they really can’t say that much to you. I want to really know what Japanese kids are like. There is a lot of misinterpretation and presumption that goes on by foreigners, I think, about what Japanese people are like or what they think. We can only work on observations a lot of the time so we end up thinking we understand why things are the way they are but really we don’t. For this reason, I have really enjoyed having Emi live with me. She gives me a lot of insight into my school and my daily life. Plus, she is an incredible cook and the meals we have when she stays are an event onto themselves. This week we had this great spanish food.
That’s pretty much all I can think of in my Monday morning fog so I will try and post again later in the week with pictures of the easter event. For now, I will include some more pictures of Golden week because those are the last ones I took. The first one is of me looking down from out 9th floor karaoke room in Shibuya, Tokyo. The the next is Gisela and I sitting on the river bank in Kyoto. Then there is a little girl putting on her toe socks on Constitutional Memorial Day at the temple in Nara. The next is me fighting a deer, also in Nara. I know it looks more like a masage but thats not what I was going for. Then there is a little restaurant entrance in the Gion district of Kyoto and the carp pond at a dessert bar we ate at. The last picture is of the wysteria. I know th e spelling of this word is wrong but they are those purple flowers that hang down from a latice work. This is a picture of them in Nara hanging from the corner of the temple.