My goodness, two posts in a row! Am I on the ball or what? So since my big rafting weekend, things have been a little less scary. Last week, I had a break from two of my night classes because the doctors have all gone to Australia for a convention. I just had my little kids class and my ladies class. I had friends over for dinner Wednesday and Thursday. We went out for a goodbye part in Matsumoto on Friday night. Also on Friday night, Gisela helped me do a take no prisoner’s style cleaning of my house. It has never been this clean since the day I moved in. We threw out all the useless books that years of previous JETs had let behind. My recycling area is full. Tom fixed my bed for me which had completely fallen apart. It feels so good to wake up in a clean house. I had no idea. I am used to living in my own little disaster area. Gisela and I also had a small counseling session on how I could avoid it getting like that in the future. I am thinking of getting Gisela on staff.

I drove to Iida and Ina on Saturday morning to collect clothes. Iida is in the far south of Nagano ken so it took about 4 hours round trip with all the stops and a little shopping. When I got home I started getting ready for the BBQ party we were having that night. We had about 10 people over in celebration of Tom finishing the deck. We used our little hibachi grill and stocked it with sausages from the Brazilian store. We even had marshmallows. We stayed up until 5 in the morning watching the soccer World Cup. England got knocked out and there was much sadness in our group. Nothing much happened in the game though. They lost on penalties after overtime. We slept late the next day, went out for breakfast, shopping and went to another BBQ with some private school teachers and some Brazilians. I haven’t eaten that much meat in a long time. I know when I come home for a visit, the food, although delicious, will seem too heavy and there will be way too much of it. One sad point of news, I now have only one ferret. It was bound to happen, I just didn’t know how. I was cleaning the cage and Sally got out. It was dark and I couldn’t find her. I looked for her for four days but she never turned up. I will now focus on making Sweet Pea the best ferret she can be. She strained relations by biting me the other day though.

Now I am getting ready to go camping with the first years next week. This will be my first school trip with my own students. We are going to Kamikochi which is renowned for its beautiful scenery. Also, we are starting to practice for the school festival. The senior English elective classes will be entering the chorus competition with me at the helm, potentially singing along. If you have time, download the song Oh Happy Day from Sister Act 2. That is what we will be singing, it’s very popular here. We should probably watch the movie too. I don’t think many, if any of the kids have ever met a black person in their lives. It will be good internationalizing. I think I will make everyone dress as a nun as well.

Today I went with the English club to the nursery school after classes where finished. We taught colours and body parts. The kids were so cute! I love little Japanese kids. At the end, we had a question period where they could guess where I was from. I told them it was a foreign country. They mainly guessed England, Italy and cities in Japan. One girl got it eventually. I also had them guess my age but they can’t really count higher than twenty even in Japanese so that was a bit of a challenge. The newspaper turned up for this one so I will have to wait and see what glamorous shot they got of me singing head shoulders knees and toes or crawling on my hands and knees. All provided picture perfect moments I can assure you. At the end I got hand shakes and hi fives from everyone. There were about 50 kids so it took a while. After that I did an interview with Hiride sensei, (a co-worker who lived in the states for a few years) and then planned our next club meeting. The next club will be with my mom and we are having a welcome picnic and interview session. Should be fun! Today’s photos were taking with my lovely little action sampler. It is a low tech solution to losing my digital camera. I love the sequence pictures. Unfortunately it has no flash so I have to take pictures in bright light only or they don’t really turn out. The first picture is a kid at the rafting place jumping to his mom. The second is the street near my house from the over pass. The third is Tom and Gisela practising for the circus should it ever come to town. And the last one is Gisela doing a bizarre windmill like dance. I really like that one! Anyway, Thats everything worth writing about right now. My students are emailing me pictures of my recent cooking class. They taught me to make some great Japanese food. I will try it out when I go home. Look forward to fish flakes everyone!