It's Ume season! And the supermarkets are suddenly filled with the little fruits as well as large glass containers to put them in.
Yes indeedy! It's that time of year again when more than a few Japanese set out to make their own Ume-shu (Plum Liquer).
I have decided to try my hand at making this as it seems to be amazingly simple if somewhat time-consuming.
The entire process consists of five basic steps:
1) Buy plums
2) Place plums in large glass jar.
3) Put rock sugar crystals in same glass jar.
4) Pour large quantities of Japanese Shochu over the two.
5) Wait three months.
Of course, the longer you wait, the better it becomes.
Hmm ... perhaps I should point the kitchen cam to my Ume Shu and let all you people watch the maturing process. I'll be set once this becomes drinkable. I've made about 3.6 litres of the stuff. w00t!

Holy Cow! A whole week went by without me noticing. I popped by my website and saw that I hadn't blogged for a week! Good grief!

School-wise, everything is going well. The kids are still the same which means that I occassionally take on the role of the walking jungle gym. The boys want to arm-wrestle with me and some of the girls sneak up on me. I strongly suspect the inferred title of 'teacher' actually translates into 'class entertainer' which actually suits me to a T. There's something to be said about the enthusiastic shouts of 'Aeric-sensei!' whenever they catch sight of me. Ah yes ... this is Aeric on an ego trip.
It's also more than a little strange how much the kiddies like bingo. Not the song, but the game. The week's topic was numbers primarily focusing on the different inflections of the -teens and -ties.

The weekend itself has so far proved to me quite enjoyable. I cycled to LalaPort yesterday to do some shopping and chilling. The weather is a lot warmer now, as you might have surmised from the blog's title, and quite nice for a bike ride. LalaPort isn't that far being only about 10 clicks one way and takes me round about half an hour to get there. The layout of the shopping mall pisses me off though. It's constructed in a way such that you inevitable have to backtrack more than once if you want to look at the entire complex. Luckily enough, the the combination of my patience coupled with the sheer number of cafes with their copious amount of cold beverages was enough to see me through the ordeal. Absolutely perfect weather to sit outside with a cold drink and do a spot of people-watching. (Sneexe and Pat: Sorry guys, forgot my camera this time). I bought some nice summer clothes from GAP and Eddie Baeur after much investigating; a very nice linen shirt, a couple of mesh undershirts and a pair of light cotton cargo pants. Yup! I'm all set for the onset of the Summer months.

That night, my presence was requested at Sala for a couple of drinks. Met up with Manami at about nine and sat around marvelling at how noisy the local gaijin populace had become. The fact that it was also someone's birthday didn't help matters. Apparently, I'm 'a little strange' (but I'm sure you all knew that already). When I asked how I was a little strange, the answer I got was: 'Sometimes you're a serious and sometimes you're funny'.
And this is a good thing! Apparently.

Did I mention how hot it was?
It's not quite Malaysian weather but it's still enough to make me perspire just by hanging up the laundry. Oh well ... it's a good chance to clean up the apartment a little and do some studying. If you look at the kitchen cam, you'll see approximately half a squillion juice cartons in front of the bin by the fridge. They are all Nick's. ALL of them! I wash mine and tear them open and place them in the bin bag the moment I'm done. Someone tell Nick to do his! Agh! What if a woman was to see this?

ok ok ... rant over ...

I'm going to have a cold drink, chill out for a bit and then get started on my studying. I'll be on MSN pretty much all of the time should anyone want to distract me.

zap kaboom!

Rudely awoken at 7 by a savage banging on my door this morning, it turned out to be Nick who having had only four hours sleep was still in a fit enough state to make quite a din. After a series of non-committal grunts, the banging ceased only to be resumed with greater vigour 20 minutes later. This time with an ultimatum: 'We're leaving in 10 minutes!'

Oh shit!
Best get up then.

[intermission]
(Think of your own music. We are too cheap to provide it for you.)

10 minutes later, we are on our bicycles looking dressed to kill. As in, we look like terrorists; masks, fingerless gloves and shades. We did attract a lot of unnecessary attention. Perhaps for future stealth missions, we shall adopt more subtle attire.

Dressed thusly, we proceeded to make haste towards the tallest bridge in Tokyo (that we know of). There is a reason. And it's not to pee off it (although I was sorely tempted). Nestled on the far side of the bridge lies the Isle of Dreams. Unfortunately, we saw neither Isles nor dreams. It just looked like a big, hulking marina to us. Nevertheless, we battled forth and successfully used the smallest set of chopsticks this side of Lilliput to consume one excessively-priced cup noodles. Whilst there, we met Tomoko and her husband, Makoto who had previously invited us to join them on Makoto's father's boat.

After meeting the rest of the family and not being introduced to several other people (we never established whether they were friends or crew), we bundled ourselves into the main cabin and made sardonic comments about random points of interest.

Makoto's father took us around Tokyo Bay ... not once, not twice ... but THREE times! Just to make sure. After making sure, we dropped anchor in a small inlet and checked the compass.
No, seriously, we dropped anchor and set up the barbecue pit on the rear deck. This is not entirely true. We were forbidden to help so we stood about, watching everyone else do the work, and occasionally getting in their way whilst making sardonic comments. It was quite a unique experience having a barbecue on a boat made of plastic. The boat was constantly rotating and everyone wondered why. Oh well ...

After that, we headed past a big cutter that was apparently due to set sail at two o' clock. By three, we were bored and thought 'Sod the cutter, we're going home!' Going past Odabia (again), we witnessed the most insect-like boat we have ever seen, apparently designed by anime god, Hayao Miyazaki. It looked like a floating bug but nevertheless strangely futuristic in nature.

I discovered, whilst sitting on the wind-swept front deck that if my jacket was positioned just right, I would inflate quite dramatically (photo to be posted soon) and appear to be approximately 400 pounds in weight and mildly resemble a hunchback. Like some sort of deformed sumo wrestler.

Return to terra very firma and significantly warmer genitalia we briefly reviewed our photos and bid farewell to everybody not before Makoto kindly imparted us with 20kg of manga which made the bike ride back all the more interesting.

I'm now going through the quantitative section for the GMAT and combined with the two cups of coffee I've had ... the coffee is making me jumpy and the numbers are making me hysterical.
I mean, imaginary numbers. What the hell?! You're having a laugh. Did someone just pull them out of his arse?! Is that why they're imaginary?
Oh wait, it's not going to be in the test. Crisis over.

A school cancelled on me today which mdans that I have to wait in Chiba for the best part of 3 hours.
Luckily, I'm right in the middle of Chiba City and almost next to the station. As such, I've parked myself at a conveniently placed Starbucks to do a combination of people-watching, studying, and contemplating the varying lengths (or lack thereof) of Japanese Schoolgirl Skirts.
I suppose it could be summarised to people-watching with the aim of studying Japanese Schoolgirl skirts (^.^)

Today was a good day.
Mondays are usually fairly relaxed what with only one class in the morning. After I was done at about 10ish, I met up with Yumi for lunch. It's been quite a while since I saw Yumi last and she had some time today to do some catching up.

After being stood up by Nicole and Jai, I thought I would still be able to go to Sala with Dave and Jon to have a few drinks. However, it turns out the Dave didn't call Jon to let him know and Dave was uncontactable. So for all intents and purposes, it looked like I was all alone tonight. I decided to go to the Crazy Cactus to have dinner since I hadn't been there in quite a while. Halfway through dinner, I got a call from Sean wondering what I was up to. I thought that Sean wasn't going out since he had to be somewhere at 0630 for a baseball game tomorrow morning. But lucky me, we ended up in Sala after all.
After polishing off my dinner at the Crazy Cactus, I made my way down to Sala where Sean and I had a few. And my luck kept getting better. Sean spotted a friend and we ended up sitting with her and her friend. Woohoo! Having drinks with a couple of cute Japanese girls is always a good thing.

Apparently ...





I am Rumpelstiltskin!

Find your fairy tale character at kelly.moranweb.com.


Good ol' Rump.

What's there to say about you? You're a deceptive drunkard who has no life save harassing poor, beautiful women... oh, and stealing their children. God loves you, son. God loves you.

Anyone agree with this?





I'm completely down-to-earth!

Find your soul type at kelly.moranweb.com.

After much fiddling, I've managed to fix the webcam feed. It turns out that my webspace provider doesn't like direct links to images. It will only display images if it's linked from a locally stored web page (ie. the web page has to be stored on it's server). So to go around this particularly annoying attribute, I've worked an inline frame into the page. This inline frame is stored on the provider's server which in turn references the webcam feed. What is so cunning about it is that the inline frame is actually part of my blog template. It's not a particularly elegant way of fixing it but hey, it works. Quite stupid that I actually have to pipe the webcam feed through two sources.

Specifically Japanese technology. And in particular, the tech that enables emails to be sent from mobile phones.
I'm at one of the schools I work at waiting for class. I have another 10 minutes to go so I thought I'd take advantage of my phone's email capability and Blogger's 'blog-by-email' functions. Pretty cool.

Hey everybody. I've revamped the site. Hope it looks better. It took me a couple of hours to tweak things and arrange them but truth be told, the hard part was done for me. I used a skin for the basic layout but tweaked what I wanted on it.

In other news, work is getting better. The kids are starting to warm to me and it's a lot of fun. I was actually quite surprised today since I was really tired but still managed to pull off some good classes. Nicole and her husband came to visit on Saturday and the four of us, Nick included, stayed up until 2am last night chatting despite the fact that I had to get up at 6ish for work. Operating on four hours of sleep is something I rarely do purely because I know what happens if I don't get my eight hours. Still, it turned out pretty good in the end.

Due to some rescheduling and various school events, I actually finish by lunch time every day this week which is nice. I also get a three-day weekend in a couple of weeks which is amazingly convenient as the Saturday of that particular weekend has already been reserved by Jin for his nuptials in Kimitsu. It should be a good time for all. I get to play the part of wedding photographer which should be an experience in itself. w00t!

Oh boy ... it's always a little strange going back to work after a holiday of any significant period. No matter how enjoyable your job may be, there is always that initial feeling that it would be so much better to stay on holiday perhaps under the guise of being sick.
Good boy that I am, I went to work and was rewarded by pretty good weather and some really good classes. Had a great time with the kids today and lost whatever shame I had. I tells (sic) you, teaching kids will do that to a guy. The more you teach, the less self-conscious you become. After all, you have to do stupid things to get them to laugh. And if they enjoy themselves, you have a good lesson and you kind of feed off each other in that respect.
In other news ... I am the TAINTED BEER


The Tainted Beer
You are the tainted beer that Stifler unwitingly drank. Your mind is tainted with the kind of thoughts that would make most people ill.

Take the quiz: "Which prop from 'American Pie' are you?"


I blame Pat for linking this from his site.

has been very uneventful. Or at least that's my reason for the long silence. I really didn't have much to write about. I DID receive word yesterday that I have a brand new cousin in England! Kirstie Sarah Swan. And my lucky sis gets to see her and play with her.
The Golden Week hols have been very relaxing so far. I only have a day left though and it's back to work on Thursday. The plan was to cycle somewhere crazy again but I had a cold on Friday and spent Saturday recovering. Then general cleaning up and errands kinda sucked away the rest of the time. Well, that's not entirely true ... I was pretty free today but it was supposed to rain all day thereby preventing any sort of outdoor expedition. Grr ...
Oh yes ... I've added a comment thingie underneath so people can add comments to my posts. Go crazy.