Work--Today was okay. I had to correct some speeches the 2nd year kids wrote about what they want to be in the future. One that sticks out in my mind is from a girl who wrote the first part in English and the second half in Japanese. She wrote about how she likes animals so she wants to be a vet. Then in the Japanese portion, she wrote the same thing, but added that she doesn't actually want to be a vet. She wants to be an animal! The teacher and I cracked up over that and when the 3rd year English teacher came, she showed him the speech and he started laughing as well. I think this is the first time I've ever heard a 13/14 year-old say they want to be an animal.

BPAL--'cause I can't get enough of that, right? *shifty eyes* Joined two decant circles for a lot of the Yule scents I want to try, but would go broke if I actually bought them in bottle form. I think $36 for 9 decants is a lot more reasonable than spending $162 on bottles I've never sniffed before. I am cutting down in purchases, though. Sort of. Unless it isn't available in sample form, I'm trying to stay away from bottle purchases and limiting that to what I REALLY want (too bad that's almost everything). Still, I haven't gone so overboard that I can justify spending more than $25 on a single bottle and even that's pushing it (thinking of eBay auctions that went to $40 and even $200 for a blend). I love BPAL, but I love having money in my bank account as well.

If this is anything like my kimono obsession (which I hope it will be), I'll spend a lot of money the first few months and then it'll taper off quite a bit and go down to one or two purchases a month if even that. *crosses fingers*

It was cold and overcast, but for some reason it felt like a really nice fall day to me. I think it's because it was nippy, but not freezing, and I couldn't smell anyone burning dry leaves (don't really care for the smell of smoke). I didn't find my coat, but I found some other things that made me happy. The store that was supposed to have the long coat didn't have it in stock, but they had two nice blouses in their bargain bin. So for less than $20 I got two nice, slightly old-fashioned blouses I can wear to work. Hurray for Japan's I-love-new-clothes-so-overstocks-get-marked-down-a-lot obsession! Maybe best of all is that one of them is a blouse that I wanted to buy in August, but didn't because it was a little too expensive.

BPAL
Enraged Groundhog Musk, A Lunacy forum-only LE. Yeah, this one is weird on me. In the bottle it smells chocolatey-oatmealish. On me, I get vanillaish cinnamon which makes me think of oatmeal for some reason. That in of itself isn't too bad since I seem to like foody scents a lot. Well when I tried it yesterday night, it smelt fine. Today, though, it's actually making me a little nauseous and bordering on Play-Dough. I hope that's not going to happen every time I put on EGM in the future. I'm going to let the groundhog go back to sleep for a couple of weeks and if it makes me sick again, maybe I'll decant it to give to people and keep the bottle.

I have to say WOW as well!  Your hair is perfect, long, healthy, shiny, everything... absolutely perfect!

BB--Thank you! I owe a lot to LL. I think if it weren't for this forum and the people here, I probably would have cut it short again a long time ago.

Angel Spun--Hmm, I wonder how long her hair is now. I should pop over to the forum she's modding and say hello. And thank you for the compliment! I wonder if there's anyone here who hasn't done the "I wish my hair was ____ color". I know I do that a lot.

Work--Next week is the ALT mid-year conference for my prefecture and I have to do a presentation. AAAGH! Yesterday I got an email saying that the lesson plans we had to submit for the conference were looked through and the most interesting ones will be presented by its creator. So I'll have to do it a total of 5 times in front of groups of my peers and answer any questions they might have about it. I'm kind of flattered that my activity was chosen, but at the same time I'm thinking "oh crap! I have to do a presentation?!" I think I would be more excited if I had put a lot of thought into the activity, but it was something I pulled out of the air because I was getting tired of playing Rock, Paper, Scissors, and telephone games with my students.

Well, my activity is based on a game called karuta. In regular karuta, the kids get into pairs or small groups and are given a set of picture cards. The teacher calls one of the cards and the first person to grab the correct card gets to keep it, and the one with the most cards is the winner. So in my version, the class is broken into three lines. Each group has a set of cards on the chalkboard, I call a card, and the first person to find the right card gets a point for the group. Then the person who just had a turn goes to the back of the line and the next person goes, etc.

And when I thought of it, it went pretty much like this: Well, I don't want to make fifteen sets of karuta cards. How about if I broke the class into teams so then I only have to make three sets of cards? I can put the cards on the board, and when I shout for a certain one, the kids can run and throw themselves against the chalkboard. The boys'll like that! *ponder for a few seconds* Okay! Sounds good to me.

Yeah, so not too much deep thinking went behind the activity, hence the apprehensiveness. Demonstrating the activity should be okay since it went over well when I used it in my elementary schools. But I'm not sure about the Q&A session. I hope the other ALTs will be really tired from traveling to the conference and won't have very many.