I keep having dreams where I go back to the US for one day and say hi to friends, play a game or two, tell everyone to come visit, and then return to Japan. That would be really fun…

This was a pretty busy week, due to all of the extra Nova students, so I was really tired at the end of the week. We also got 2 new teachers, who have started coming in for lesson observations and training, and they’re fairly interesting (and in some ways, “interesting”).

On Saturday night, I went out to dinner with my manager after work, as we were both exhausted from the week, and we had a pretty good time. Actually, the most amazing thing was that the whole time we spoke about 95% in Japanese, as she doesn’t speak much English. I didn’t think about it at the time, but as I was going home I realized it was one extremely long conversation in Japanese… granted, my Japanese really wasn’t good or anything. I didn’t know a lot of words, and I made a million stupid mistakes, but the fact that we were actually able to have the conversation was amazing (to me, anyway). I guess the subject matter too — I described Scientology in Japanese to her, and I think she pretty much understood it. She laughed really hard, anyway, so I must have gotten pretty close to a decent description. We were going to go out to karaoke, too, but all the places nearby were booked solid — the weather has been really rough lately; sporadic hailstorms and cold rain. Cool, but not so good. Continue reading →

Just a quick post to say that I fully fixed the computer last night, and just in time to watch the finale of section 2 of Heroes! Holy crap that show is good, and I’m really psyched for the next chapter. If you haven’t seen it yet, now is a good time to catch up, as there are no new episodes for a little while. It’s started airing in Japan this season, too, and it’s quite popular over here.

Anyway, I’m knackered. Time to hit the hay. (Oh, it’s the 7th now! That means… HAPPY BIRTHDAY BABY LYDIA!!! )

Bah… this weekend was a big waste.

I have a very special painting that I want to finish soon, and I had planned to get it done this weekend… but just as I sat down to start it yesterday, Windows completely asploded. Actually, all the files are fine and there, and it would be a 15 minute fix, if I happened to have a Windows CD. However, like most suckers who bought Windows PC’s, my computer didn’t come with a Windows CD… and for some mysterious reason I left my spare CD’s in America.

Fortunately, I have linux on my machine too, so nothing was really risked… but, well, too make a long story short, I ended up installing 4 different operating systems (I’m now on my final one) as they kept also asploding in various different ways. (Damn you, KDE! Those of you who convinced me to want to try KDE, I want my 36 hours of my life back!) So the end result is that it’s now midnight, the day before going back to work, and I’m still reinstalling my OS in order to download a Windows CD so I can use a 15 KB file to “repair” my harddrive’s MBR so that Windows is the first OS… ugh! All this trouble because Windows is a mechanical turd! And if my soundcard worked in linux, I’d drop Windows altogether… but sadly I’ll have to remain dual-booting for the time… at least once I download a Windows CD I can return to dual-booting. The one consolation is that the weather was crappy this weekend, so there wasn’t really anywhere for me to go… I just would have liked to have a relaxing, artistic weekend, instead of a frustrating system administration weekend.

So this past week was *really* busy! With all the Nova refugees, my schedule has filled up to the brim! It’s nice to have lots of students, and the manager is happy, but it’s a lot more tiring for me, and I have to skip lunch sometimes. Additionally, we’re getting 2 new teachers, so I met one of them on Saturday. She did a homestay in Oklahoma, and had a lot to say about her Mormon host family! Also, it was still Open House week, so I had to have parents in all my kids classes. Oy!

Ah man, what else… just lots of drama this week — nothing bad, but it’s been eventful to say the very least. I’m glad I can finally get my computer working again now… but I really wish that I could have painted! :’( Oh well… next weekend.

Back to installing!