August 1st 2004
I've not had a very exciting week, so I suppose I could talk a bit about the weather; always a popular topic of conversation here, just as in dear old Blighty. It's been hot. Thirties centigrade (nineties) every day, with a brief break yesterday when a typhoon just missed our bit of Japan, so we had rain and wind but nothing truly violent. Today looks dry, and a little cooler than it has been.
In the Japanese summer the cicadas sing in the trees, which sounds terribly romantic and peaceful.
They're louder than the traffic. Seriously. OK, not on the main trunk road through the centre of Okazaki, but on most of the smaller roads, including fairly busy ones. Maybe this is why the Japanese people don't seem to mind city noise; the countryside isn't much quieter.
I'm in a busy stage of the year at the moment, with a writing deadline in under two weeks based on material I received a week ago. On the down side, that means I don't have much time to write a diary entry. On the up side, it means that there isn't as much to write about.
Most days this week have followed this pattern: Get up. Shower, dress, eat, do a small amount of Japanese. Go to school. Come home from school. Write/revise. Eat. Deal with email (mostly business stuff). Go to bed.
Note the very small allowance of time for homework. In that context, it might have been unfortunate that we had the first of the major tests of the quarter on Thursday, but it's already well established that revising has, possibly, a negative effect on my test marks. So I'm not worried about that. The test seemed to go well enough, although we haven't had the results back yet.
And that really is about it. Not a very exciting week.
Mind you, I've almost certainly got a contract to write another book. I remember when that, all by itself, would have made the week really exciting. It's a little sad when these things turn into an ordinary job; I occasionally forget a couple of the books I've written when I'm adding up my number of credits, as well. Ah, how quickly we become jaded...