Moena-chan

New first graders will always be cute (look at last year's if you doubt me). This year, though, one of our new students is little Moena, who at 101cm is a full head shorter than the next-shortest first grader, and exactly the same height as my leg.


The lunch lady at my school (and occasionally the first grade teacher) has taken to calling her chibi-ko, which translates as something like "miniature child" (there's a slightly rougher translation that would be more like "midget kid" too). I sit across from Moena during lunch every Tuesday. She has to tear the bread we eat on Tuesdays into little pieces in order to eat. Tends to make things like strawberry jam very messy.

field trip!

I'm lucky. Because my school only has 37 students, there's usually plenty of room left on the bus for an extra teacher who wants to tag along on a field trip. So this past Wednesday, I went with the 1st-4th grades to Chiba City, about an hour and a half away on the local roads we took. The first and second graders went to the Chiba Zoo (千葉市動物公園, Chiba-shi Dobutsu Koen)

I, however, went with the third and fourth graders to the prefectural police headquarters. We visiting a division called the 交通管制センター (kotsukansei senta, traffic control center). It was actually fairly impressive. They had a whole server farm supporting a system that tracks every traffic light at every intersection between state and national roads in the prefecture, and sensors at each intersection detect traffic jams at lengths from 100m to 1km. Here's a picture of the control room:


The left side of that wall is taken up by video monitors from around the prefecture. The control officer can switch around to appartently a couple hundred cameras. The big center panel is the traffic light observation system I described above. The panel on the upper far right monitors all the expressways in the prefecture, and on the lower far right is a video screen that can display whatever the officer on duty feels like. Traffic does suck in Chiba Prefecture, but apparently not for lack of effort on the part of the police.

Anyway, after our fun morning with the cops we went to the beautiful Port of Chiba (a rare English link) for a picnic lunch.


That's a fuel shipping terminal and a steel foundry behind the kids there. After lunch we went up a tower, not visible in the picture, for a "scenic" view. The air pollution was so thick that visibility was only 10-15km, from 300 feet up. Looking straight down, I could see parts of the harbor where the water was red. Seriously. So of course, we went out on a boat.


That's Yuusaku, one of my fourth graders. He was very excited. So jumpy and excited, in fact, that I spent most of our boat ride plotting which shore I would swim to in the event he (or any of the other boys) fell over the side and I had to jump in to get them. Though I also got to make myself useful by reading the names of the various vessels at port, and identifying their flags for the kids. The vessels were mostly large freighters, some bringing coal or fuel for the forges and refineries, others taking away finished steel beams. Lots of boats registered in Panama, followed by Vietnam, Singapore, the Philippines, and South Korea.

It was a fun day, but I fell asleep on the bus back to school. Field trips are exhausting.

hi!

my elbow still hurts.

Other news! We came home yesterday to a dead bird in our kitchen! The door to the balcony upstairs was open so it's difficult to say how it got in, and if by cat which one and how they managed to catch it. But they were both farting rainbows to show us when we got home. Teamwork? Luck? Bird suicide?

When you've gotta go

So this afternoon around 5, I was driving home from the gym, when something amusing and unexpected happened. Before I go into detail, let me describe the route from the gym to our place. The first segment is along a major four-lane highway (a rarity here), which abuts a limited-access motorway for part of the way. When leaving the highway, we exit to the left and take an overpass over the motorway, then continue home on a series of smaller two-lane roads. The whole thing takes about 20 minutes in light traffic.

Anyway, on my way home today, I got up onto the overpass and waited behind four or five cars at a red light on the far side. A car pulled up behind me, and threw on its blinkers. I wasn't sure what was going on, then the driver got out and walked to the front of his car. He then pivoted 90 degrees, and facing the shoulder (and the six-lane expressway underneath it), unzipped his fly and started urinating. Within seconds of him starting, the light turned green. Undeterred, he glanced at the cars lined up behind him, smiled, waved, bowed, and continued pissing. The last thing I saw in my rear-view mirror was a series of cars begin to pull out into the oncoming lane to pass him, all the while he kept going.

I could barely contain laughter the rest of the drive home.

"Which founder was slacking?"

There are precious few things in the world that can make returning to work after four days off tolerable. Book reviews like this fall nicely into that small category. The book in question is "The Joy of Drinking", and the Times really seems to have picked the right reviewer for the job. To whit:

(The author) reminds us that in 1787, two days before their work was done, the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention “adjourned to a tavern for some rest, and according to the bill they drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 8 of whiskey, 22 of port, 8 of hard cider and 7 bowls of punch so large that, it was said, ducks could swim around in them. Then they went back to work and finished founding the new Republic.” Note the 55 delegates and 54 bottles of Madeira. Which founder was slacking?

Needless to say, "The Joy of Drinking" has been added to my Amazon.com wishlist.

neko blogging

We had a two-day workweek (Tuesday and Wednesday) this week, thanks to a string of national holidays that always fall in late April and early May. We've mainly just been sitting at home though, since Sam's arm is still causing her great pain and I'm battling a very nasty head cold.

The cats are enjoying the company though.