Today was kind of a booky day... First, I walked down to the library to refresh my book supply, and also pick up a copy of Olivia for teaching with on Saturday - she's such a cute little pig, I hope she goes down OK! It's a pretty good foreign books corner, I had a closer look at it this time, - there's lots of selection, and a pretty modern cross section of fiction...good stuff!

On my way out of the library, I was surprised to see a car just like mine, I think it's the first cavalier I've seen here and it happened to be 2dr and the same color (I think every cavalier made in 97 is the same color as green pea!), but it was really weird, because it was branded as a Toyota cavalier (as opposed to chevy). Very odd!

Then, since I was in the area anyway, I had lunch at this tiny Mexican restaurant/shack thing I'd noticed before near the big Ralph Lauren shop. I had 'taco rice', which was pretty good, entertaining use of sticky rice as the base though! I ate outside since we are having great weather this week, cool but not cold at all, lovely!

After that I decided to go to the Kanda bookshop area, which is just a road with tons of used bookshops on it I'd read about. I'm not entirely sure why I thought that I'd have any success with doing this, although I guess I was hoping for art and design books where the language wouldn't really matter, but it didn't quite work out that way. I'm sure if I could read Japanese, it would have been amazing, since there were probably 10+ used bookstores within a block, and some of them were pretty big, but I just didn't have the energy to wade through and see if there was something relevant I could pick out. I almost found some good art books, but it was weird, because they were actually all exhibition catalogues this store had somehow acquired, as far back as from the late 80's. There was just a bit too much text to make them worth getting for the pictures alone, but they had some interesting artists represented...

After that, I headed up to Mejiro since it was just as easy to get to as home, and since it was still pretty early, got a drink and finished up The Time Traveller's Wife. I really enjoyed this book, despite its element of fantasy. I think, because the rest of the book was realistic, that that's why I was OK with it... Same sort of thing with Harry Potter or the Robert Sawyer books (even some Douglas Coupland like Girlfriend in a Coma) - they are rooted in enough modern day normalcy to let me believe that they 'could' happen...

Walked around the back streets a little bit, and found (I'm pretty sure), the building we lived in last time, but everything was dark, and I'm not exactly sure... Next I headed to the office at around seven, and settled in to alternate between three things (I'm such a spastic worker!) I started reading The Google Story, which is pretty much as described in the title - very interesting! Written almost like a memoir of the company, its detailed without being boring, and very accessible...

I also started trying to figure out what we could do with Olivia, so I started to make up a little lesson plan, (and then got distracted and started drawing Olivia and a rainy day as an example!), but anyway... Hopefully she'll like the activities and they'll be at vaguely the correct level, and useful... I feel better at least appearing to be prepared though!

And finally, I wrote three pages of randomness about ASL. Again, for that common ties blog, which I'm still hoping to submit to, but have been mulling over possible story ideas for. Today I thought it might be interesting to talk about talking ASL classes, or possibly zeroing in the deaf experience project we did, but for some reason everything seems tainted with a thin veneer of schlock. This tends to happen when I decide I want to write 'well' and instead over complicate everything... That tongue in cheek phrase 'why use a big word when a diminutive one will do', is one that I would do well to keep in mind! Anyway, I have a few pages of spewage now, which can sit and by typed in tomorrow or the next day, with a heavy edit on :)

Interestingly, I discovered I still know a surprising amount of ASL! If anyone had walked in on me in the kitchen, they would have been fairly confident I'd lost my marbles (who knows, perhaps I have), but anyway, I was seeing if I could still remember anything, so I tested it out by 'discussing' my weekend and some other random stuff, and a surprising number of signs just came completely naturally, without having to think about it at all... I'm pretty happy that I haven't forgotten it all, that would be a shame, because I really did enjoy learning it-the whole idea of Deaf Culture still absoluely fascinates me!

Luckily I'd stopped that nonsense by the time I saw anyone, and surely if I'm admitting to it that means I'm not crazy and just talking to myself, right ;) At 8:30, Peter realised that his watch had stopped at 7, so he decided to get going with wrapping up his evening, and finished up at 10ish, but as it turns out, I ended up helping Jordon out with something until nearly 11 anyway, so we didn't exactly get home early - lucky Venuppi had company for most of today! I made spaghetti, and then we watched the first two episodes of season seven of friends, and now I'm just blogging this and then about to go to sleep...

If I feel like dealing with bureaucracy tomorrow, I may go and attempt to get my reentry permit on my visa...

D.