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Had my first full day at an elementary school today (I usually only get to visit and elementary school about 5 times a month). It turned out being a pretty kickass day. The teachers were all really nice and I was able to find quite a lot things to talk about with them, surprised me even. They even invited me out for dinner sometime! I haven’t gotten that offer from any of the schools I visit once in the 5 months I’ve been here. Sometimes I began to wonder if these kids were really having fun with the alphabet and simple introductions (most of them seemed to know it before I taught) but they all seemed to get a kick out of it. Teaching the letter V is always fun because they don’t have that sound in their syllabary so it always comes out like a B or Bu-i. So I get to teaching them about holding their upper lip so they can’t make the B sounds. Always gets a lot of laughs. (more…)

Today I received a firm flight schedule for the week long trip to Korea I’m taking at the end of February. With that achievement, a new category of ‘travel’ has been spawned here on the blog. I plan to post pictures and stories of my travels of course. Since I will be there for a limited time, I hope to keep the blog updated pretty regularly during my stay. Could daily photos and writing be possible? Well I’m sure there will probably be a least one night where I’ll be too drunk “to be arsed with it,” as my British friends here in Aomori would say, but I plan on being as diligent about it as I can.

Why Korea? Well 1) it’s where my friend since high school, Big B Willi, will be getting married to a lovely Korean lady, GK. (Keeping all names relatively secret for now just in case…:P) And b) because it’s there! (and I love their food too!)

Finally got around to editing the default WordPress install to make it look not so ugly. I love the abilities that CSS provide as far as layout and keeping visual style seperate from content, but it is still feels a little painful editing it in Dreamweaver. Big props go to EditCSS and Mozilla Firefox for once again making life easier. But as for Dreamweaver, I am pissed that they still don’t have an SSH/SFTP way to syncronize your local editing with your live website. Jesus, only people who are looking to have their site hacked still use FTP.

Anyhow, I hope that now that I’ve begun the process that I will have more time to devote to playing around with the sites design until it ‘feels like home’ Feel free to tell me what you think.

Just for a little added bonus to people interested in web development, a couple of my fav CSS related links:
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Finally got to taste some snowboarding action in Japan. Second time ever snowboarding and first time ever on powder. Took me a while to get used to not being on ice but glad to not end up so black and blue from falling by the end of the night. It was a 3 day weekend in a cabin …I’ll have to add more to the story later as I’m out of time now.

Another quick note, after a week of getting worse on my speed skating times, I finally made a new 500m personal record of 1′ 16′’. Yay me.

Everyone rejoice!! The Year of the Cock has arrived! 2005! Let’s hope it’s a good one!

*Anyone not thinking of a Rooster should be ashamed

So Christmas Day while Beau, Lorraine and I were hanging out watching movies the subject of organizing a cooking party of some sort came up. This time Lorraine mentioned that she had found an easy looking torilla recipe she was dying to try but she didn’t have the iron skillets with which to do it. Well I hit this road block about a month or two into my term here on JET when I was dying to make cornbread. “As luck would have it” I told her, ” I received 2 lovely iron skillets in the post from dear mommy for Christmas!” After a bit of “You did not!” / ” Yep sure did” banter, we made an open ended resolution that “we must have a Mexican food cooking night” and then the subject was changed.

A couple days or three later my night was looking to be a boring one so I thought I would start the calling and see how the other two would be interested in the Mexican cooking night. Beau was only interested if Lorraine was. Lorraine didn’t answer so I left a message that went something like this: “Beau and I were wondering how you felt about having a Mexican Cooking night tonight…call me when…blah blah” And thus the story began to unfold….
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