Today, I tracked my bicycle ride to Akashi shimizu with an iPhone application called runkeeper. I think I have talked about using it for jogging before, but I wanted to check how far the ride to school actually was. Turns out, it's about 4.4 km, and the route I took there (first) and home again in the afternoon (bottom) and stuff are shown below. Don't ask me what the difference in distance between the morning and afternoon rides was - there really is no 60 metre difference in the routes I took. Chalk it up to sketchy GPS signal.
 |
| There... |
 |
| And Back Again. |
At Shimizu today, the mid term exams started! Which means that I basically had no classes today. I spent most of the day preparing a Halloween lesson, and finalising my exams for Akashi kita. It was a bit boring, and the day did drag a little, but honestly it was nice to have time to do a little lesson planning without feeling too rushed. It was cool to watch the rush of teachers as each exam period ended as well. They all hurried into the staffroom with their big stacks of papers, and raced to get into line to use the hole punching machines and tie up their class papers. It was interesting to see the logistics behind organising the volume of tests - something I had never considered as a student. And it's always interesting to see people doing the funny petty little things that they do to try to get ahead of other people in lines (particularly when you aren't in the lines yourself).
Today was also a good opportunity to start some of the work on an outstanding science paper that I have been putting off for a long time. I want to get the ball rolling, and kick my brain back into science mode. Since today was my
first day off teaching since August, I wanted to make the most of it. My lack of progress in this work has really been preying on my mind, but my energy reserves just haven’t been able to stretch that far. Yay for an hour and a half with nothing else to do!
Over lunch, I trialled calling Dad on Skype via my iPhone. It worked pretty well, and it was really great timing, because he spotted
whales breaching off the beach in Wollongong just after I called. Made me a little bit sad to be missing the view, but it is cool to know that home is just on the other end of a (free) call.
Not too much more eventful stuff for the day, because I had a long bath (I have a new found appreciation for the Japanese-style "relaxing bathe early in the evening"), and then accidentally fell asleep by about 8:30! I asked Sam what the time was while I was in the bath, and I swear he called back to me 10:30. I had been reading, figured I had totally lost track of time, and thought I had better get out and get to bed. He actually said 7:30, but I didn't realise until I was tucked up in bed at the ripe old time of 8:15. My brain apparently wasn't interested in registering that it was still ludicrously early, because instead of continuing to read my book, I was totally asleep within about
Food Highlight of the Day: Dinner tonight was takeout from Hokka Hokka - the bento place around the corner. Today's highlight was another lowlight - while most of the meal was really nice, they put dried fishy stuff in the otherwise blameless white rice, and then hid it with a layer of seaweed. Those sneaky bastards. Didn't eat more than a bite, but Sam liked it OK, and polished the rest off for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment