Stupid Blizz

Today was my first day back at Kogane Kita JHS, and it was nice to be back. Given, I thought that when I returned to Icchuu as well, but it was actually nice to see everyone again. Also, it's nice to get back to finishing up at 2 instead of 4:30 every day.

The summer speech contest is coming up, and so the day to day load I have at work is steadily increasing as I morph from regular old teacher guy to full fledged speech contest judge, advocate, advisor and coach. I've gotten a pretty resounding "you have absolutely no choice but to immerse yourself in this 100%" from my company, probably as it's the closest thing to work a JHS teacher ever gets, but that doesn't mean I'm stuper stoked about it. I mean, ya, this will be the most English I will have ever heard from any of my studets, bordering on the best English I've ever heard from them either, but, I can't stop this kind of odd resentment in the back of my mind at being forced into it without ever really volunteering. What gets me to comply is that the days I have to come in and coach are still technically contract days, so even though I feel like I ought to be on vacation since there are no more classes, I suppose it's only fair I have to work. Both the coaching and the contest itself are days that are included in my contract. Oh well.

Since there are only three weeks of classes in July, all my elementary school visits are crammed into the span of a week, starting tomorrow. That means I have to kinda think fast, a la my ES sub days, and come up with something viable for each school every night before I go to bed, much like tonight. I have a 15 minute segment during tomorrow's lessons where I have to teach something of my own, which realistically is a piece of cake since it's not the whole lesson, just 15 minutes, so it's really not so bad.

It's Tuesday night tonight, server maintenance, so in my boredom I started looking around for a solution, and decided to see if I could get a copy of Diablo II to play since I really do miss a good single player game and don't really have a console to mess around on. But, after several failed attempts to purchase the game online from the Blizzard store, where it's available for direct download, I gave up. I'm guessing it's something about me living in Japan, and attempting to make the purchase from here, as my credit card transactions wouldn't go through. Ugh. I hate when I'm forced to try to do something productive with my evenings. I'd rather just go to bed, except at the time it was like 7:30pm and that just won't do for a bedtime. I could go online and download the games via p2p, but it would take a long time and I just cbf to do it anymore. There was a time I would, probably still would, but I was kinda looking for instant gratification so meh, whatever.

Saki and I are going to America in just over a month now, and I'm excited about it. I'm really looking forward to showing her around. I'm also looking forward to providing her with a whole week off work, something she hasn't had since she started working at the hospital. I know the stress weighs on her, and I'm glad being with me has given her this chance to take some time off to relax.

Other than that, I'm typing this on my new desktop, which kicks ass. I'm happy, essentially have all my bases covered, and things are going well for the moment. Yada yada yada