I'm in Luck

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 29

No classes at Koko today. I did some paper grading and lesson work.

I spent a long time with Mama debating the word “left.” This was actually confusing for me. The sentence “There was one book left” and why the adjective “left” was not in front of book. I eventually determined that it must be part of the verb. “The book was left,” being a passive sentence. Then we got into why you could say that “There were six books stolen” and you can say “the stolen six books” but that you can't say, “There were six books left” and turn it into “the left six books.” It made my head spin. I eventually declared that (1) left could not be used as an adjective, (2) there were two meanings of left: (a) still there, and (b) extra, and (3) if you use “left” in the meaning of “extra” there is an adjective form, “leftover.” Even just typing this all up makes my head spin.

Ottawa-sensei went to the combini for lunch and offered me a choice of packaged bread goods. He called one omlet, but it was not egg, but some sort of fluffy (probably nutrient-devoid) bread substance with a filling of sweet red beans and cream. It was good, if odd.

I spent the afternoon decorating a wall in my classroom. The Milwaukee Brewers now are represented on a narrow wall between the two big sets of windows. I have up the team's picture, their schedule, some stickers, four sets of Brewers bead necklaces, a ridiculous number of pictures of Prince Fielder (they sent me 15!) and the logo, colored by me. I'm not completely done. I still need to put up some more white paper background and finish coloring the logos, as my colored pencils went dull and I have no pencil sharpeners in the room.

I went back to the classroom when I was done and actually got there perfectly at 4:15. And just in time to see a teacher locking the door of the empty, dark teachers room up for the night. I managed to intercept her, dashed in, cleaned up my desk and grabbed my stuff. Then I was out of there. In retrospect, I should have done the classroom work in the morning, and perhaps left earlier with everyone else. Alas, earwax!

At home, I decided to try out my Leia buns for the first time. It actually went pretty smoothly. I had just two issues to fix for the following day. First: it's impossible to put a turtleneck on over the buns. Second: While my theory about how to make them worked wonderfully, none of my hair ties are big enough to stretch across those huge buns, as required by my plan. I tied my rough draft ones with pink string and vowed to try to find some sort of elastic at the hyaku-en store in the morning.

I then rushed over to Elizabeth's for some wine and snacks. We chatted a lot about our schools, snuggies, snuggie parodies, and I showed her the pictures of my hair. We also worried a bit about her boyfriend, Howard, who was taking much longer than his 90 expected minutes to get home. After three hours, Elizabeth was getting quite worried. We were just finishing up when he came in. Apparently he'd ended up taking the wrong train at one point and had to backtrack. They were quite lovey-dovey, so I laughed and let them be. I'd never seen Elizabeth like that before.

I texted Andrew, at Elizabeth's encouragement, to see if he wanted to meet up on the train and walk together to the party, as I didn't want to walk it alone, in the dark, in Kyoto, in a costume, during a typhoon. He texted back that he was meeting people beforehand to put together a group costume so that wouldn't work. Almost on a whim, I texted Jamie, who said I was in luck. He had a bunch of people getting together at his place and I was welcome to come if I didn't mind getting there at four. They were going to then grab dinner in Kyoto. I eagerly accepted.

I worked quite late into the night on my tin foil belt for my costume. It was made out of tape, tin foil, and some cut-up cardboard from packages sent from home.