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My week off was great. I'll tell you more about it when I manage to get the photos sorted out. I'm guessing somewhere will allow me to get CD copies of my Holga pictures...
Gideon left on Saturday morning and since then I've been moping about. Saturday was particularly miserable as I had to go back to my empty apartment and remove traces of him from the place. I've washed everything and hoovered, but I keep finding his long curly hair about. Sunday was better, but sitting on trains allows me too much opportunity to sit about festering about things. So it's been a little rollercoaster of having enough to do to forget about things, and then lengthy periods of making myself angry and upset. We had a really nice week together, and only got grumpy once (we both had hangovers). In fact, it was rather like old times, which probably had made the transition back to normality even worse. At least he was always far far away in England and I could get on without him, but now he's been here to visit, it has rather spoiled things, in that it has dragged up a lot of old feelings, which I thought had been nicely buried. I recall writing a poem a year or two ago about him and using the old gardening, digging/burial metaphors to express what I was really trying to say. I think I even sent it off to a competition, but it didn't get anything but a nice rejection letter.
I've had a few things to keep me busy though. Yesterday I went to a teaching workshop in the west of Tokyo, which took my mind off things for about 6 or 7 hours. One thing I really miss is having contact with other teachers who have different experiences to me. It's a great opportunity to share ideas and make contacts. I was quite pleased to see people scribbling down my ideas for a class exercise on numbers and prepositions while I was talking to the group and going red in the face (as someone pointed out later whilst complementing me on what lovely eyes I have).
Today I took my Powerbook to the Apple shop in Shibuya to get it looked at. Last week it started playing movies covered in green pixels. It seems it's only the DVD program causing the bother, as VLC works fine. The guy in the store told me it was the first time he'd ever come across this problem, and diagnosed it as a problem with the video chip in the computer not being powerful enough or something (this was all in Japanese so I'm not 100% on this). He suggested I get the logic board replaced, and when I balked at the number he quoted me for the repair he wrote it down just to confirm what I'd heard: 51000yen. I figure seeing as this is one quarter of the way towards a new computer, I'll just stick with VLC and pray nothing else goes wrong until I've accrued 200 000yen for a MacBook Pro.
I did finally get round to getting another external hardrive (the emergency money fund took a significant hit for this) and after spending an hour installing and partitioning it, it seems to be working fine. Now all I have to do in consolidate my iTunes into it and I can free up nearly 30GB of space on my internal hard drive.
This afternoon I met Kate for lunch and coffee in Yokohama. I had a bad hankering for tempura, so I had tempura and soba for lunch and Kate amused me for the afternoon. I think I'm very lucky to have made some really good friends in Japan. Alas, they're too far away - Rachel's in Gifu, Brooke's in Ina, and Kate is (actually not that far away) in Hon Atsugi. Still, they're all brilliant and do a good job of keeping in touch with me despite the distance. Rachel was around on Friday and Saturday (having returned from her 6 week holiday) and did an excellent job of keeping my and Gideon's spirits up until the bus whisked him away to the airport. Then she stuck around in Shinagawa with me until I felt better, and then she went home. But she's been emailing and calling me to check I'm not moping too much. They're all great. I'd love to get them all in a room together. It would be excellent.
After sorting out the HD I had to do the whole bento lunch-making thing. I cooked up a batch of dahl (which is probably one of the best foods in the world) and some pumpkin samosas, and a huge pan of dashi for soup etc. I've decided to start up the food blog I mentioned, and I think they'll be one of the first things I'll post on there. More info on that when I post something.
Right, well there's more Supernatural to watch now, so I'm going to lust over hot angry men...
Gideon left on Saturday morning and since then I've been moping about. Saturday was particularly miserable as I had to go back to my empty apartment and remove traces of him from the place. I've washed everything and hoovered, but I keep finding his long curly hair about. Sunday was better, but sitting on trains allows me too much opportunity to sit about festering about things. So it's been a little rollercoaster of having enough to do to forget about things, and then lengthy periods of making myself angry and upset. We had a really nice week together, and only got grumpy once (we both had hangovers). In fact, it was rather like old times, which probably had made the transition back to normality even worse. At least he was always far far away in England and I could get on without him, but now he's been here to visit, it has rather spoiled things, in that it has dragged up a lot of old feelings, which I thought had been nicely buried. I recall writing a poem a year or two ago about him and using the old gardening, digging/burial metaphors to express what I was really trying to say. I think I even sent it off to a competition, but it didn't get anything but a nice rejection letter.
I've had a few things to keep me busy though. Yesterday I went to a teaching workshop in the west of Tokyo, which took my mind off things for about 6 or 7 hours. One thing I really miss is having contact with other teachers who have different experiences to me. It's a great opportunity to share ideas and make contacts. I was quite pleased to see people scribbling down my ideas for a class exercise on numbers and prepositions while I was talking to the group and going red in the face (as someone pointed out later whilst complementing me on what lovely eyes I have).
Today I took my Powerbook to the Apple shop in Shibuya to get it looked at. Last week it started playing movies covered in green pixels. It seems it's only the DVD program causing the bother, as VLC works fine. The guy in the store told me it was the first time he'd ever come across this problem, and diagnosed it as a problem with the video chip in the computer not being powerful enough or something (this was all in Japanese so I'm not 100% on this). He suggested I get the logic board replaced, and when I balked at the number he quoted me for the repair he wrote it down just to confirm what I'd heard: 51000yen. I figure seeing as this is one quarter of the way towards a new computer, I'll just stick with VLC and pray nothing else goes wrong until I've accrued 200 000yen for a MacBook Pro.
I did finally get round to getting another external hardrive (the emergency money fund took a significant hit for this) and after spending an hour installing and partitioning it, it seems to be working fine. Now all I have to do in consolidate my iTunes into it and I can free up nearly 30GB of space on my internal hard drive.
This afternoon I met Kate for lunch and coffee in Yokohama. I had a bad hankering for tempura, so I had tempura and soba for lunch and Kate amused me for the afternoon. I think I'm very lucky to have made some really good friends in Japan. Alas, they're too far away - Rachel's in Gifu, Brooke's in Ina, and Kate is (actually not that far away) in Hon Atsugi. Still, they're all brilliant and do a good job of keeping in touch with me despite the distance. Rachel was around on Friday and Saturday (having returned from her 6 week holiday) and did an excellent job of keeping my and Gideon's spirits up until the bus whisked him away to the airport. Then she stuck around in Shinagawa with me until I felt better, and then she went home. But she's been emailing and calling me to check I'm not moping too much. They're all great. I'd love to get them all in a room together. It would be excellent.
After sorting out the HD I had to do the whole bento lunch-making thing. I cooked up a batch of dahl (which is probably one of the best foods in the world) and some pumpkin samosas, and a huge pan of dashi for soup etc. I've decided to start up the food blog I mentioned, and I think they'll be one of the first things I'll post on there. More info on that when I post something.
Right, well there's more Supernatural to watch now, so I'm going to lust over hot angry men...
