Free falling

So fall is just around the corner, which means a few classic things in Japan: rice harvest, kaki (persimmon) everywhere, and the leaves changing. But it's also 'earthquake weather' as I've heard it called before, and around here that puts people on edge. Last year the big earthquake hit in October, and so these days people are a little sensitive to it. The other night I was woken up by a tiny shake, and someone said they were freaked out by it because it's just on their mind more these days. There have been a couple little shakes since I've been back and I looked them all up on the earthquake map...they are centered right in our town...

It's a 3 day weekend coming up and I should take advantage of it. But I'll be busy before then, I'm covering for someone tonight at the community center by teaching 3 weeks straight every wednesday for two hours to a group of random people. I don't know what to teach or what their level is but I guess I'll find out when they open their mouths. Schools are continuing to pile on the expectations and increasing classtime and workloads to the point where I can't even try to talk to them about it anymore cuz it's just useless...but I'm better able to handle each class at each school now, and I even taught a few classes completely solo on my own which was cool, but I was forced to do some of it in Japanese because the English only version was going nowhere...

Japan is conducting a national census, which includes me so I guess I'll get to be a statistic this year. "One tall, skinny, white American teacher dude"...check!