The Whole Erk Catalogue Tales of a Geek Abroad

Yesterday was a hell of a day, so I've decided to consider today my "real" birthday, as today's the 24th in Canada anyway. Yesterday, right on my Japan-time birthday, was the first day of the ALT mid-year conference. I've been preparing since November to present at this conference, with my JTE (Japanese teacher of English) coworker Rie. We were both pretty nervous about our presentation, and we were assigned the very first time block. I actually consider that a small blessing, since we got it over with right away, and didn't have to deal with being compared to the class before, although we also got a classful of people who were tired from a heavy lunch, while second period was warmed up from the exciting games played in 1st. Oh well. The presentation was all right, with a few glitches. I wanted to play a segment from Monty Python's Meaning of Life, but that was scuttled by my laptop: it's running xubuntu linux, and I forgot to install video player support. My bad! The classroom was hot, and everyone was tired, so participation was a little quiet, but everyone still got going and had some good discussion. I wish I could be as genki teaching my peers as I am teaching 12 year olds. Oh well, I got to make my trademark Elephant Sound, and that's all that really matters.

After my presentation, things went a little downhill. We were hit with extremely strong winds and no small amount of snow while we were inside for the conference. All my friends had to head home in case the trains were cancelled, so my birthday party was a no-go. Jen and I decided to go out for a romantic dinner, since we live close enough to Sendai that a delayed train would not cause serious upset; then, when we went to get out more money to pay for it, we found that my bank card has some kind of error on it and won't let me withdraw money. Fortunately we had enough left to get home, and I have a Japanese bank book here: they work like bank cards, so I should be ok. To make sure everything rounded out, as I got off the enormously crowded and delayed train home (luckily for us we not only managed to slip into the only uncrowded space on the train, but we also got on right before it departed after 20 minutes of delay), I must have dropped my ticket in the crowd. That, thankfully, was the end of the bad day... also right around the time it turned midnight in Canada, by amusing coincidence.

Walking home in the windstorm was exciting, and a little cold for Jen with her lack of body fat. The wind was strong enough to nearly bowl us over a couple times. Fortunately it wasn't snowing too heavily, although everything was covered in a fairly dense windswept covering. It was quite pretty.

That's where things turned for the better, I think. Specifically, as we got out of the train station we found a nice old lady trying to reach her hat, which had blown off and got stuck just on the other side of a fence. People were walking by staring at her struggles and not helping! Being the friendly, wacky individualists we are, we stopped and I grabbed her hat for her. The good deed was enough, I think, to turn the tide! Despite the cold, we kinda had fun for our walk home after that, and when we got back we had a romantic curry dinner and watched romantic fart joke cartoons until we were ready to head to bed.

With any luck, today we'll get to hang out with our friends and make up for the aborted plans yesterday. I've got, as usual, high hopes!