Okay, so we've had one vote on what I'll write, so that is what I'll write about. Tomorrow. For now, it's very late. I have been cleaning my apartment for 2 days straight. Well, I call it cleaning, but it was much more like excavating. I literally had layers of junk in my bedroom. The drifts came up to my knees in places. It was truly horrible. But now my apartment is almost completely spotless. I had to go out and buy some bins to help keep peace and order, but it all seems to have worked out. It almost didn't, though.

I knew I had to buy something to put in my closet to hold my non-hanging clothes. I got out my tape measure and measured my closet's dimensions, carefully noting the size of the door in my notebook. Then I measured my bedroom door and my front door just to be sure that whatever I bought could fit past both, and I entered these measurements in my notebook as well. Right, ready to go. I went to the store, found the storage bins, and compared the dimensions to my notes. I finally found the perfect plastic container - it was a little plastic storage bin with 3 drawers, and it was just a little smaller than all the measurements I had taken for my doors. It would fit through them all without a problem. Yea for measuring. So with a little bit of struggle, I got my new storage bin on the shopping cart, got it up front, got it out the store, then got it to my car. And here is where I encountered a new problem.

Measure closet: check
Measure closet door: check
Measure bedroom door: check
Measure front door: check
Measure car door:

...


oops

Yeah, that was a slight oversight on my part. So at 9pm in the parking lot of a store in a strange city in Japan, I had to play around with geometry, physics, and other sciences. I'm fairly certain the theory of relativity went in there somewhere. I picked the box up, shoved it in sideways, which didn't work. I turned it on its side. Didn't work. I turned it upside down, shoved it optimistically, and it still didn't work. "Ah ha!" I thought. "The Trunk!" Didn't work. Meanwhile, I had around 5 young guys watching me from the front of the store. They weren't even disguising that they were laughing and talking about me and my struggles. Brilliant.

So hoping against hope, I dragged the thing out of its box, using my keys to cut tape when necessary. Sadly, it wasn't much smaller out of the box, but it had less inconvenient corners. I set it down, lowered my passengers seat all the way back, rearranged my car about 8 or 9 times, then pulled and shoved as hard as I could. It stuck for a few moments on something, but with a creak and groan, it eventually went in my car. After it was in, I got in and realized what it had been stuck on. Yea for flexible rear-view mirrors! Mine almost fell off, but proved to be made of stronger stuff than I thought. Woohoo! The door closed without so much as a hard shove, and I was finally ready to go. Good thing it was clear plastic, too, or I couldn't have seen out of the left side of my car.

Anyway, I just spent the last hour trying to shove the thing in my closet, which required quite a bit of rearrangement. And now I'm tired and going to bed. But I'm half-way finished with a long blog update. But this is all I'll write for now. Stupid cleaning. I was going to relax today and write my blog and catch up on emails; instead, I ended up doing laundry, washing all my floors, rearranging my tv room and bedrooms, and teaching an Adult Conversation Class. So much for my relaxing 4 day weekend. But I found a Laundromat that actually had hot water to wash clothes in (all the washing machines I’ve encountered so far only use cold water). I couldn’t pass up the chance to actually get my laundry really and truly clean-ish. Was it worth it? We’ll see how I feel when I wake up tomorrow.

Right, I hate to fall into that pattern of "Oh, I promise I'll update soon", but it happens. This coming weekend, I have a 4 day weekend, so I have promised myself that my blog will be massively updated and my apartment will be massively cleaned.

Here are some things you can look forward to in my next updates:
On Bladder Infections and the Ankle Injuries that Cause Them
On Horrible Lunches
On Swearing and Why Its Okay for My 12-year-olds to Dance to Sex Songs
On Musical Interpretation

Let me know which one sounds the most promising so I can be sure to actually write that one this coming weekend.

Haha, you thought this was going to be an actual update, didn't you? Psyche! It's late, so I just wanted to post info. about my Christmas plans. I just bought my tickets, and I'll be home December 23-January 11. Some of that time will be spent in Indiana, but I don't know exactly when that will be yet. Probably sometime around Christmas?

Fun story - you know what's worse than find half a bug in your apple? A student finding half a bug in their school lunch! School lunches are made in one big vat, then dished out to smaller vats for each class. Everyone in the school will eat the same thing on a given day. So today, one of my students found half a large bug in her salad as lunch time was finishing up. That gave wonderful pause to everyone in the school as we all had to wonder - who had the other half and didn't notice? Yum. I guess mushrooms and cabbage AREN'T the worst things in school lunch after all...