hey all,
A few days ago I was contacted by another recruiting/head hunting company, and they asked me to come in tomorrow and "see what they do." So, even though I'm not too interested, I figured that I have the day off, and I might as well give it a shot. I'd probably only futz around anyway.
My vacation is quickly, oh too quickly rushing to an end. I was offered one extra day as a substitute teacher this Wednesday, so I'll actually be getting up around 6:30 or so, instead of my recent 9:00 or 10:00, or even much later. I anticipate lots of resting this weekend, as my body reels from adjusting to the day starting so early.
I've officially entered my "hard-up" phase: I will not be paid again until October 25th, so I'm stretching my money out as much as I can. Things will be tight, but there you have it. With careful spending, I figure I still might have enough to do one rock climbing trip in late September, but that is contingent on my shoulder getting better.
Which, it seems like it is slowly, slowly, doing so. I've been dosing myself with ibuprofen, and I've looked up how you say ibuprofen in Japanese, so I'll be starting to look for some generic brands soon. Why my shoulder got like this is still something of a mystery, but my parents insist that it is probably just part of getting older. I don't have the job security, self-confidence, or even much of the wider experience which seem to be bulk of the benefits of aging, but I'm getting saddled with the slow recuperation times and tendency toward injury all the same.
Michi has been pretty supportive of resting, insisting on me resting when I still wanted to swim. But it is clear that she chaffs at me not being able to go rock climbing with her, whether because of my lack of funds or my shoulder injury. I even find myself worrying what I'd do if I couldn't return to rock climbing or swimming someday. (It has only been a month since the injury.) A touch melodramatic, but after watching that movie where the Fingerless Wonder Couple still achieve a First Ascent on a 3000m high mountain in Finland, it is hard not to.
Time to scrounge something for dinner.
Cheers,
Monday, August 30, 2010
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Summer Vacation
hey all,
Summer vacation is almost over. I start up work again on my brother's birthday: September 3rd. Those jobs I was hoping for never really materialized. I can't say I've been scouring the internet for work, but I have put in a few applications. My search has somewhat narrowed and broadened at the same time. I've started looking for jobs in the neighboring prefecture of Kanagawa, but I've stopped applying for eikaiwa positions.
Given my background in high school with CAD (I won several prizes at the Michigan Industrial Fair), I've also been looking at CAD jobs, but a good number of these seem to require native or at least business level Japanese.
Last week, I was able to make a root beer cake in our house rice cooker, which turned out a lot better than the half batch I tried to make in our toaster oven.
The last couple days have been somewhat interesting. I met up with my girlfriend's father to help him move a table and some firewood up to their second house. The table really would have been easier to handle with 4 people, for instance, but we still managed to move it into the house by resting a lot. Yes, it was that heavy. When we first got it into the truck, my shoulder gave me a twinge, but actually moving it at their house seemed to be no problem. They also now have a 6 foot tall, 5 foot wide, and 2 foot deep pile of winter firewood, stacked by yours truly. Since Michi had to work, we had to get by with my Japanese and his English.
That's all for now.
Cheers,
Summer vacation is almost over. I start up work again on my brother's birthday: September 3rd. Those jobs I was hoping for never really materialized. I can't say I've been scouring the internet for work, but I have put in a few applications. My search has somewhat narrowed and broadened at the same time. I've started looking for jobs in the neighboring prefecture of Kanagawa, but I've stopped applying for eikaiwa positions.
Given my background in high school with CAD (I won several prizes at the Michigan Industrial Fair), I've also been looking at CAD jobs, but a good number of these seem to require native or at least business level Japanese.
Last week, I was able to make a root beer cake in our house rice cooker, which turned out a lot better than the half batch I tried to make in our toaster oven.
The last couple days have been somewhat interesting. I met up with my girlfriend's father to help him move a table and some firewood up to their second house. The table really would have been easier to handle with 4 people, for instance, but we still managed to move it into the house by resting a lot. Yes, it was that heavy. When we first got it into the truck, my shoulder gave me a twinge, but actually moving it at their house seemed to be no problem. They also now have a 6 foot tall, 5 foot wide, and 2 foot deep pile of winter firewood, stacked by yours truly. Since Michi had to work, we had to get by with my Japanese and his English.
That's all for now.
Cheers,
Monday, August 16, 2010
Waterfalls
hey all,
The weekend ended up being pretty fun. Michi invited me up to the second house again, and we went hiking basically all day Saturday. During the hike, we got to check out a couple waterfalls.
The second one was very popular, but for some reason Michi was more impressed by the first waterfall. Personally, I agree with everyone else: the first water fall is very much a normal, average waterfall, while the second is interesting. It has a very rare horseshoe shape that is a little hard to see in the picture, but it basically wraps around about 270 degrees, so you can almost turn in a full circle and see the water streaming down.
Dinner for Saturday night was pretty amazing. We all went to a Chinese restaurant called Ken-chan (chan is a diminutive, usually added to the end of names for younger female girls, but can also be used for men). We ordered two Ken-chan sets to be split between the 4 of us. In one set, you get a huge steaming bowl of ramen, which by itself should be a meal, but added to it is a small bowl of rice, a plate of what looked and tasted like chow mein, and a plate of barbequed liver with veggies. And how much you pay for all this is just as surprising as the amount and the high quality of the food: about $10 per set.
Sunday we returned to the swelter of Tokyo. Michi and I stayed in and I helped her clean up her laptop a bit, and she went over some questions with me in my level 3 Japanese study book. When I came back to my place, I used one of my cans of root beer to make my first root beer float since coming to Japan.
Cheers,
The weekend ended up being pretty fun. Michi invited me up to the second house again, and we went hiking basically all day Saturday. During the hike, we got to check out a couple waterfalls.
The second one was very popular, but for some reason Michi was more impressed by the first waterfall. Personally, I agree with everyone else: the first water fall is very much a normal, average waterfall, while the second is interesting. It has a very rare horseshoe shape that is a little hard to see in the picture, but it basically wraps around about 270 degrees, so you can almost turn in a full circle and see the water streaming down.
Dinner for Saturday night was pretty amazing. We all went to a Chinese restaurant called Ken-chan (chan is a diminutive, usually added to the end of names for younger female girls, but can also be used for men). We ordered two Ken-chan sets to be split between the 4 of us. In one set, you get a huge steaming bowl of ramen, which by itself should be a meal, but added to it is a small bowl of rice, a plate of what looked and tasted like chow mein, and a plate of barbequed liver with veggies. And how much you pay for all this is just as surprising as the amount and the high quality of the food: about $10 per set.
Sunday we returned to the swelter of Tokyo. Michi and I stayed in and I helped her clean up her laptop a bit, and she went over some questions with me in my level 3 Japanese study book. When I came back to my place, I used one of my cans of root beer to make my first root beer float since coming to Japan.
Cheers,
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
News of the World
hey all,
Still got the vacation blahs. Too much free time and too little money is never a good combo.
As some of you know, I went to the doctor on Monday. It was a kinda sudden decision, so I didn't have an appointment, and I also showed up late in the morning. Both of which resulted in me spending about 4 hours at the hospital.
They took what seemed like 10 different X-rays of my shoulder and elbow, and in the end the doctor said it was probably just muscle inflammation. Rest for a week, and hey, would you like these root beer scented patches with painkillers that are absorbed through the skin? Yes, they are actually root beer, or more specifically, wintergreen, scented. This is part of the reason why root beer is not popular in Japan: it smells like medicine to them.
So since Monday, I've been waking up, taking a shower, and slapping one of these on my shoulder, and spending the rest of the day doing not much at all. I read a little bit, go through a few pages in my level 3 Japanese study book, cook, and play video games.
Lately, I spend a lot of time getting to know my new house mate. He's from Alabama, and for some reason we share a lot of the same interests: cooking, games, movies, music, books, etc, so we've been cooking some lunches and dinners together (tonight was chili and margaritas) and chatting about random pieces of culture. He is listening to A Song of Ice and Fire as an audio book, so we usually spend a good bit of time going over where he's at in the series, and I dish out the latest piece of news from the author's blog, as I'm frothing at the mouth to read the next book, and also to see the HBO series, and basically can't shut up about it. I even rant to Michi a little about the books, and she's been reading snippets of my Japanese version, and is also looking forward to reading them in entirety once she finishes Holes.
Anyway, last weekend was pretty fun. Saturday, Michi and I made one of our usuals: healthy ramen. I opted to make tsukemen, which...Ok, Japanese people have a large number of types of noodles and several different ways of serving them. Ramen is typically thin noodles served with hot soup, and on a hot summer day that's the last thing I want to shovel into my piehole. So, tsukemen is the same setup, basically: thin noodles served with soup, but the noodles aren't in the soup. First they're cooled down, and then plated separately. You dunk them into the soup, which is still hot, but becomes cooled by the noodles as you eat it. Anyhoo. After that, I received a home made business-level Japanese quiz and got 70% right, and then we went to fireworks in the neighborhood where my elementary schools are. Pretty impressive, but I've yet to really figure out night time photo taking (all of them end up looking like crap), so I didn't even bother to try to photograph them.
If you are really anal retentive about food, Japan is not too bad a place to live, as long as you're anal retentive about Japanese food. As I've said before, Japan is mostly a country for Japanese people, and Japanese people like Japanese food. They don't seem to like Mexican food, for instance, as Mexican restaurants are hard to find, and good ones even rarer. As it happens, what Michi and I did on Sunday was go swimming (which further aggravated my shoulder), and discover by chance a really good Mexican restaurant. The prices were very decent, and the dishes all smelled, looked, and tasted amazing.
This coming weekend is anybody's guess. There was a trip that an outdoor club member organized that I wanted to do, but I also don't want to risk aggravating my shoulder anymore by carrying a heavy backpack around for 3 days. I think Michi might be going to her second house again, but I'm not sure if I'm being invited this time. If I did go, I wouldn't be able to do any chores for them (at least not ones that involved shoulder use), and I'm not sure how well that would fly. If I'm not invited, I might end up making root beer recipes all weekend. I bought 4 cans of root beer today, and I've been fantasizing about both root beer floats and root beer cup cakes.
Anyway, check out this for Japanese grocery shopping woes/info.
Still got the vacation blahs. Too much free time and too little money is never a good combo.
As some of you know, I went to the doctor on Monday. It was a kinda sudden decision, so I didn't have an appointment, and I also showed up late in the morning. Both of which resulted in me spending about 4 hours at the hospital.
They took what seemed like 10 different X-rays of my shoulder and elbow, and in the end the doctor said it was probably just muscle inflammation. Rest for a week, and hey, would you like these root beer scented patches with painkillers that are absorbed through the skin? Yes, they are actually root beer, or more specifically, wintergreen, scented. This is part of the reason why root beer is not popular in Japan: it smells like medicine to them.
So since Monday, I've been waking up, taking a shower, and slapping one of these on my shoulder, and spending the rest of the day doing not much at all. I read a little bit, go through a few pages in my level 3 Japanese study book, cook, and play video games.
Lately, I spend a lot of time getting to know my new house mate. He's from Alabama, and for some reason we share a lot of the same interests: cooking, games, movies, music, books, etc, so we've been cooking some lunches and dinners together (tonight was chili and margaritas) and chatting about random pieces of culture. He is listening to A Song of Ice and Fire as an audio book, so we usually spend a good bit of time going over where he's at in the series, and I dish out the latest piece of news from the author's blog, as I'm frothing at the mouth to read the next book, and also to see the HBO series, and basically can't shut up about it. I even rant to Michi a little about the books, and she's been reading snippets of my Japanese version, and is also looking forward to reading them in entirety once she finishes Holes.
If you are really anal retentive about food, Japan is not too bad a place to live, as long as you're anal retentive about Japanese food. As I've said before, Japan is mostly a country for Japanese people, and Japanese people like Japanese food. They don't seem to like Mexican food, for instance, as Mexican restaurants are hard to find, and good ones even rarer. As it happens, what Michi and I did on Sunday was go swimming (which further aggravated my shoulder), and discover by chance a really good Mexican restaurant. The prices were very decent, and the dishes all smelled, looked, and tasted amazing.
This coming weekend is anybody's guess. There was a trip that an outdoor club member organized that I wanted to do, but I also don't want to risk aggravating my shoulder anymore by carrying a heavy backpack around for 3 days. I think Michi might be going to her second house again, but I'm not sure if I'm being invited this time. If I did go, I wouldn't be able to do any chores for them (at least not ones that involved shoulder use), and I'm not sure how well that would fly. If I'm not invited, I might end up making root beer recipes all weekend. I bought 4 cans of root beer today, and I've been fantasizing about both root beer floats and root beer cup cakes.
Anyway, check out this for Japanese grocery shopping woes/info.
Friday, August 06, 2010
Crazy Neighbors
hey all,
My arm seems to be recovering. I went swimming the other day, and it only hurt a little. So I'll rest until Monday or Sunday until swimming again. I tried stretching a little before swimming and in between laps, and that seemed to help.
Today is the anniversary of the first nuclear attack on Hiroshima, which seems really eerie, considering that Japan's unstable neighbor to the North has been spouting crap about nuclear retaliation for the joint US-S. Korea military drills in the Sea of Japan.
Not too much going on. Been reading A Game of Thrones, translated into Japanese. I even spent a couple hours in my level 3 study book. Otherwise, just goofing around and relaxing. I broke down and bought a used PS3, so that has been eating up a bit of my free time, as well as trying to avoid heat death. Temps have been around 90-100 lately, so staying indoors and/or submerged in cool liquid is a must.
Speaking of which, time to go swimsuit shopping.
Cheers,
My arm seems to be recovering. I went swimming the other day, and it only hurt a little. So I'll rest until Monday or Sunday until swimming again. I tried stretching a little before swimming and in between laps, and that seemed to help.
Today is the anniversary of the first nuclear attack on Hiroshima, which seems really eerie, considering that Japan's unstable neighbor to the North has been spouting crap about nuclear retaliation for the joint US-S. Korea military drills in the Sea of Japan.
Not too much going on. Been reading A Game of Thrones, translated into Japanese. I even spent a couple hours in my level 3 study book. Otherwise, just goofing around and relaxing. I broke down and bought a used PS3, so that has been eating up a bit of my free time, as well as trying to avoid heat death. Temps have been around 90-100 lately, so staying indoors and/or submerged in cool liquid is a must.
Speaking of which, time to go swimsuit shopping.
Cheers,
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Resting
hey all,
So I've been resting the last couple days. Last Friday, I seem to have pulled a muscle or aggravated something in my right shoulder while swimming breaststroke. Any other stroke and it didn't hurt at all, but do breaststroke and it felt like hot needles jabbing into my shoulder.
The weekend was also quite strenuous. I went to Michi's family's second house near Karuizawa, and ended up doing chores all weekend. Chop those branches away from the antennas; scrap the moss of the roof; trim those dead branches; cut down that mighty tree with a herring; remove that tree stump.
I can't complain too much, though. It made me feel like I'd gone back home; since whenever I go back home, I always have a bunch of chores to do there as well. Besides, the air was so cool and refreshing: just getting out of the Tokyo swelter for a few nights was worth it. And we always eat really well, and I did get to eat for free, plus I had my return train ticket (we drove up there, but came back by train) paid for as well.
Tomorrow, if I'm feeling recovered, I'll probably go swimming again.
Cheers,
So I've been resting the last couple days. Last Friday, I seem to have pulled a muscle or aggravated something in my right shoulder while swimming breaststroke. Any other stroke and it didn't hurt at all, but do breaststroke and it felt like hot needles jabbing into my shoulder.
The weekend was also quite strenuous. I went to Michi's family's second house near Karuizawa, and ended up doing chores all weekend. Chop those branches away from the antennas; scrap the moss of the roof; trim those dead branches; cut down that mighty tree with a herring; remove that tree stump.
I can't complain too much, though. It made me feel like I'd gone back home; since whenever I go back home, I always have a bunch of chores to do there as well. Besides, the air was so cool and refreshing: just getting out of the Tokyo swelter for a few nights was worth it. And we always eat really well, and I did get to eat for free, plus I had my return train ticket (we drove up there, but came back by train) paid for as well.
Tomorrow, if I'm feeling recovered, I'll probably go swimming again.
Cheers,
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