Let's see...what happened today that was interesting? I looked up some chik's dress on the streetcar. She was some young married woman sightseeing with her husband wearing an extremely short skirt and frumpy pantyhose who was sitting opposite me. She apparently was not aware that she was flashing her underwear for people on the streetcar.
We got new material in class. Finally, something I didn't already know.
The rain stopped early this morning and my shoes dried out sometime during the afternoon after being inside overnight. My feet were cold and wet most of the morning. Because it had been cloudy for so long, naturally, the school building was nice and cold today.
Another Friday. That means that next week is the halfway point. Feels like months I've been here. It also means Hamutaro! Yay.
Well, I watched Hamutaro. It's so fucking CUTE. I gotta find more.
For dinner, host mom made spaghetti for the first time ever. It was strange. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't all that good, either. In fact, when I asked her what she thought about it, she said "it's not bad" ("but it's not good, either"). She made it from a book and for tomato sauce she used ketchup. I was thinking it had mayonnaise in it as well, but I watched her make another batch and she didn't put any in. She started by putting rather large pieces of onion and mushroom in a pan and cooking them for a bit. The she ground some meat by slicing it with a huge knife and put that in the pan. When that was done, she put in a couple of unidentifyable liquid ingredients and then the ketchup. She gave me a shaker of "basil" which had some really nice ground basil and garlic salt and other things in it to sprinkle onto the spaghetti. (Don't worry, I told her it was tasty.) We ate alone because hosts dad was late and Hiroshi still hasn't shown up yet.
I was a little offended by hosts dad's refusal to eat any. After all, I've been eating stuff I don't like for 4 weeks now. Instead, he ate boiled fish heads and daikon. Now that's an improvement.
After dinner, I watched some more inane tv with them and host mom showed me the book for learning English phrases she bought today. She bought it at BOOK OFF! (Which reminds me, there is a chain of OFF stores here, with the most notable being HARD OFF. Your guess is as good as mine.) Anyway, I was kind of touched that she cared enough about me to study English phrases.
Tomorrow is that stupid picnic. It's supposed to be cloudy but not rainy although lots of other places are supposed to get rain. I wonder if the planning committee managed to get anything together. I heard that they'd done nothing by today and today was their deadline. All they managed to do was decide to have another meeting. There are 3 mandatory committees: event, stuff to do in Hakodate, and newspaper. I was on newspaper and we are already done. Yesterday I typed my article and told the layout people they could have it. I was under the impression that they'd actually do some LAYOUT so I didn't fuck with margins or graphics or any other shit. Today, I discovered that they'd merely printed out my article on plain paper and stuck it in the paper. It was surrounded by white space and took up about a third of the page. Then they told ME that the white space needed to be used up. I was about to tell them to go fuck themselves when, miraculously, a graphics person got the brilliant idea to use the white space for photos related to the article.
I'm pretty sleepy. I think I'll have a Flintstone and hit the sack.