next friday hiro will have sports club. the friday after he and sasha will be on their third day back to school. i can hardly wait.

tonight yoshi has a drinking party for work (he has been transferred back to our city) so it's just me and the kids. all day. they even fell asleep (when i had to make a quick run to the store to get some mayonnaise. *sigh*) which means right now they are bouncing off the walls and i don't think we're going to see bed for at least another hour.

tomorrow we have a neighborhood party, which yoshi has been planning (not on his own, but he is a kind of neighborhood association president for this year, so he's pretty much in charge). so far i've had two people ask me questions (or tell me their family isn't going) and asking me if that's ok. uh, i have no fucking clue, thank you very much, i've been too busy with the kids to even be any kind of involved with this ridiculous thing. i mean the presidency. i guess i appreciate the whole idea, but i am so not impressed with yoshi doing it this year. oh well, i guess it's good that he's been transferred back to munakata. i'm just taking names and hoping that whatever it is they want is ok. :P

i'm also starting to feel melancholy so i think shark week is right around the corner. lucky me.

today at japanese class we didn't really study anything. there were fewer teachers and students than usual so we were all grouped together. for the most part two of the other students were about the same level as me (or a bit further along) but another was an absolute beginner. i felt a bit bad for her because she seemed to depend on the other students to help translate (they were all either taiwanese or chinese) but you could tell that she wants to learn japanese! we talked about food and cooking (although, we usually end up talking about that in the end because most of us in the advanced class--including the teachers--are married women with families!) mainly because we're going to do a kind of cooking class in november. also, a representative from the city hall stopped by to talk to us and ask us questions about being foreigners living in munakata. in the end she decided to 'interview' two of us, one of the taiwanese women (who is in my class usually) and me. eek! she talked to the other student first and they spoke for nearly forty minutes! that meant that she didn't have time to interview me, which was just as well since i was wearing my sports bra (mono-boob!) and my hair was crap! lol i won't be going to lesson next friday (because of hiro's sports club) but the first class in september....well, we'll see what happens, right? maybe they'll change their minds in the end. lol

ok, enough rambling from me. wish me luck getting the ragamuffins to bed....

**edit**

i thought i should add that the person from city hall was there to ask us about life in munakata, and then it was going in the leaflet (more like a mini-newspaper) which is distributed through the city once a month. it comes in your mailbox. everyone gets one. so, with the interview she was also taking a picture, which is why i mentioned the mono-boob and crap hair!