Well, it's the weekend, so I guess I will update the site again. So what's going on this week? The weather is getting really crazy. Most of this week I have had to ride to school into very strong wind, and sometimes pouring rain. This has lengthened my trip from 25-30 minutes to more than 35. The reainy season is going to start really soon and I am not looking forward to it at all.

Tomorrow I have another Judo trial. Right now I am a third level brown belt, which is actually the first and lowest level attainable by anyone who is not an adolescent. So tomorrow I will try for the second level. As before, i will need to win three or more out of five matches against people of the same rank as myself, who should for the most part be junior high kids and such. I believe I have the potential to win, but we will see how it comes out tomorrow. It can really depend on a lot of things. And it is not at all to my advantage that it is so early in the morning.

The last two days of this week I worked in Koshigaya Board of Education offices instead of at my school. My school was closed because all the teachers get a holiday as compensation for participating in the Sports Festival on Saturday. But of course AETs don't get this priviledge, because we are not really employees of our schools; instead, we are employed directly by the city BOE. Of course, sitting in the office is really boring, because there's nothing to do. But one cool thing was that I got to see the profiles and photos of all the new JETs who will be coming next year. The didn't look too bad, but of course it is impossible to tell too much from the profiles, and even the pictures have proven to be wildly misrepresentative of peoples' actual appearance and demeanor. But they are fun to look at. This year, we won't be getting many people from the USA, which is a marked contrast to this year when everyone new was from the US. This year there are some people from the UK and Canada and England of course, and also one person from South Africa and one from Trinidad and Tobago. The new CIR is the only guy from America, unless you count Hawaii as part of the US, which most of the Hawaiians who show up here don't seem to. It's really strange, but the introduce themselves as Hawaiians and not Americans or whatever. I guess if I had the option I would do the same thing. Anyway, it should be interesting. We'll see. I should take this chance to say bad things about the new AETs based on their profiles, but I don't remember too much about them already. Me and the CIR made up funny nicknames for all of them, but I already forgot all of them too. There's really not too much point in thinking about them yet, so they have basically slipped right through my mind. It doesn't seem like they even know their placements yet for the most part, so maybe we'll be hearing more from them in the near future.