This weekend was too short.

Friday afternoon, I was sitting around a table in the staff room with a couple other teachers. We were all sitting over cups of tea and enjoying some buttered and salted sweet potatos that we'd picked a few hours earlier with the kids. We were also exhausted. Everyone's been pitching in a little extra since Tokushige sensei had his car accident (he still isn't back, although there's a substitute covering his classes), and there's been some bug going around my school which has managed to get everyone. Our Thursday afternoon staff meeting was a sad chorus of sniffles, sneezes and coughs. So all the teachers were talking about how beat they were, and how they were just going to go home and rest all weekend.

Lucky bastards.

Sam and I had a union meeting in Tokyo in the evening (more on that later), which required me to speed, weave through traffic, and run more than one red (in America, yellow means four more cars - in Japan, red means the same thing) to get us to Narita station in time for a 5:30 train, getting us into Tokyo by 7. The meeting lasted until 9, when we finally got to eat dinner and go home.

Saturday morning I woke up at 8, briefly celebrated Fitzmas, then ran to the store to get things for pumpkin pie. Luckily it's not something that takes too long to bake. At noon, Sam and I left for a Halloween party organized by Ms. Suzuki, the nice lady who helps us get help when things like our stove break. We played with little kids for a few hours (Sam and I helped them bob for apples - mainly holding back little girls hair), then cleaned up and went back to Ms. Suzuki's house for a little dinner party with the other area english teachers who had been helping out at the party. We had a nice time, but again, got home really late.

Today, our friend Ben woke me up with a phone call at... 1:30pm. Usually if I'm still in bed at that hour, I'm mostly awake, and just too lazy to actually move. This time, I was actually woken out of a dream by the phone ringing. We spent the afternoon running last-minute errands to get things for our Halloween parties tomorrow, and then I spent the evening making dinner and another pumpkin pie (this one is for the staff at my school). Now it's 11:30 and it feels like neither of us had any free time all weekend. Damn.

At least this week should be comparatively easy. After the Halloween parties tomorrow (they were fun as a kid - I promise you they're stressful for the teachers organizing them), we get Tuesday off (I think it's the town's birthday or something), then Thursday is a holiday, and there are no classes at my school Friday afternoon because of some large meeting. Yay.