Since I hadn't recovered by the time work started on Monday, I was sent home to rest. Sadly, my condition hadn't changed at all yesterday so I ended up having to take another sick day. I went into work today since my fever had finally gone away, but it was still pretty difficult due to the fact that the body pains were draining my energy like crazy. As soon as my last class for the day was finished, I was allowed to go home early, so I took the chance to finally go to the hospital -- something I should have done on Monday but didn't (because I'm a retarded).

As it turns out, all the symptoms I'm currently troubled with -- headaches, bodyaches, etc -- are due to a virus which has caused my stomach to become inflamed. It should take only a few days to make a full recovery so long as I take the medicines that were prescribed, so I'm happy. What also makes me happy is the fact that the powdered medicine I received this time around tastes more like whey than than ass (which is the main reason why I hope never to catch the flu again).

Anyway, I look forward to recovering soon. Constantly feeling like someone has drop-kicked me in the abdomen really sucks.

Feeling horrible and very warm, so I decided to buy a thermometer. Right now my temperature is over 103ºF. (T T)

Man, this sucks.

....did you hear about this?


DETROIT (AP) -- Police in Detroit have ruffled some feathers after they cracked down on an organized pillow fight at a downtown park. The Detroit News reports that police at Campus Martius Park prevented the feathery fight Saturday by disarming pillow-toting participants. The bout was part of a worldwide event organized on social networking Web sites. Michael Davis of Hamtramck says police confiscated the 32-year-old man's pillows but returned their cases. He says he was told that he needed a permit. Scott Harris of Ferndale told the News that it's "not illegal to own a pillow." Detroit police spokesman James Tate says cleanup was the issue.

Find out Which Movie Villain Are You at LiquidGeneration.com!

Which villain are you?

Things have been pretty hectic since the last time I posted, but as of Monday I now have a bit of free time to get stuff done. Or at least, I would be if I hadn't managed to get my hands on a copy of Final Fantasy Dissidia....

Monday marked the end of the second school term, so there's been much to do in order to prepare for it. Nothing that I couldn't handle, but had I been in perfect health, I wouldn't have had any difficulty. With the students catching colds and passing them around so easily, it's been a little difficult to keep my health up. To make things worse, I had an accident about a week-and-a-half ago. I don't know what happened, but I received a bruise on the lower right side of my back, an enormous bruise on the back side of my left leg and sprained my left wrist. The bruise on my back is gone but the bruise on my leg is still in the healing process. My wrist is almost back to normal as well, but I've still got a few days left to go. I've been doing rehabilitation exercises in the shower, so I think that's helping quicken things. I really need to be more careful, though.

At the moment, I don't really have any plans for the break. Everyone has been suggesting that I head to Kyoto, but I think I'll do that another time since I went there in the summer. By the way things are looking, I may just end up hanging around my apartment for most of the vacation. I've been considering going to an onsen in one of the neighboring prefectures, but I haven't looked into it at all yet so we'll see how things go. There are travel brochures in the local train station, so I'll pick one up the next time I'm in the area.

Anyway, if you're wondering how Dissidia is, it's a must-have. Seriously, when they start taking preorders, get yourself signed up for one asap. It's freaking awesome.

Went to tennis camp last weekend in order to work on my serves. Kinda overdid it a little, though, and after about 4-5 hours worth of practice on the first day I pulled a muscle in my shoulder. Since I had played a few games as well (grinding my shoulder to hell and back) I was completely sore throughout my entire body. I had thought I was doing fairly well with my health via gym classes with the students and whatnot, but sadly it seems that it wasn't enough at all.

Thankfully, I had the day off on Monday due to the students going away on a one-day school trip so I was able to take some time and rest after heading out to the store to pick up some medicine wraps for injured/sore muscles. Although my body has recovered quite a bit over the past few days, my shoulder is still not faring too well. I can move it fairly decently as long as I have the medicine wraps and bandages on, but it starts to hurt quite a bit without some sort of medicine applied to it.

Anyway, I decided to take a break from participating in gym classes until I've managed to fully recover and, instead, watch the classes from the sidelines. Quite heartbreaking, really, considering the fact that the boys are practicing judo right now. I'd love to practice judo as well. For the girls, they're doing hurdles, which I figured would be fairly doable since my injury is in my arm and not my legs.

The goal was simple: Run the 50m hurdle dash as fast as possible.

The only problem that lay ahead was the fact that I've never run hurdles consecutively before. I learned the jumping technique last week, but due to the fact that it was raining we had to practice in the gym. Since the gym isn't that large, the most we could do was practice jumping over one hurdle. So, for today, it was a learn-as-I-go type of situation.

Things were looking fairly decent as I crossed the start line, but a problem arose as soon as I went over the first hurdle. The muscles in my arm began responding strangely to the movements of my body and threw my balance off. Luckily, I was able to recover fairly decently, but there was still the problem of the six more hurdles in front of me. Although it probably didn't appear that way to the students (since most of them were also doing this for the first time), for me it was a total awkward mess; completely off from what I had practiced.

In the end, my time was 9.6 seconds. Not bad considering what had happened, but I think I could've done better. Oh well.

Dunno if there'll be gym classes tomorrow or not, but I think I'll be taking a break from the gym classes to rest a bit more. While I don't think the students saw it (at least, I hope they didn't), my arm started to spasm a bit after the class ended. Definitely a good sign that I need to take it easy for a little while longer.

今日、三年一組女性達と高飛びをやった。いつも道り楽しかったのに、本当に上手くできなかったんだ。女生とやったら、できそうだろう。でも、男性とやるなら、全く違うよ。本当の高飛び方を使えないので、前向きでやらなくてはいけない。その飛び方で、１３０センチだけ飛べる。（T　T）

もっと運動しなくてはいけないナァ、僕は。

A fun little game on one of the forums that I frequent:

============================================================

Your Debut Album

1 - Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Random quotations: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

If you want to do this again, you'll hit refresh to generate new quotes, because clicking the quotes link again will just give you the same quotes over and over again.

3 - Go to flickr's "explore the last seven days" http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Put it all together, that's your debut album.

============================================================

Here's mine:

Band Name: Mandeville v. The Union Bank of Georgetown

Album Name: "Revoke At Any Moment"

Album cover: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23886502@N07/2929540923/

Although I enjoyed the storm the night before last, it really messed the trains up quite a bit yesterday. Most trains were so off schedule that they'd go 20-30 minutes over the original posted arrival times. Since it's continued to rain since that night, I wouldn't doubt things are still pretty messed up with the train lines. Because of that, I've decided to cancel my plans for today and try to get things done around here just in case things get really bad. Hopefully the weather will be better tomorrow.

In other news, I finally decided to get myself a new DS. The one that I have was starting to annoy me quite a bit since the touch screen's calibration has degraded to the point that I end up quickly failing any games that require accuracy, so I went out yesterday in order to buy myself a replacement. (Why it degraded like that, I haven't the slightest idea. I did what I could to keep it protected and used only the required amount of pressure for stylus recognition.) I had wanted to get one of the black models, but due to the color's popularity it was sold out no matter where I went so, in the end, I bought a white one just like the previous. While it sucks spending so much money like that, it feels good to be able to successfully play my games once again.

Not sure what's going on, but there's a siren going off. Not an emergency vehicle siren but a building siren. Dunno if it's for a break-in or something happened, but I can hear it pretty clearly going off in the distance. It's not very loud, though, so it's probably relatively far from where I live. (Meaning, I'd like to go over and take a peek to see what's going on, but with the storm still going on and how far it'd probably take to bike, it's too much of a hassle.)

A storm rolled in about an hour or so ago. Probably the best one all summer. It's been raining pretty hard, but what really makes the storm enjoyable for me is the magnitude of the thunder. Some are rolling sounds, but quite a few have boomed like you wouldn't believe.

So happy right now. d(=^w^=)b

I need help. I'm trying to run an MMORPG, but every time I start it up, Windows blocks it from running and shuts it down. I've been playing around with the firewall and security settings (as well as the software's properties) to see if I could find a way to get it to allow the program to run, but haven't had any luck. If any of you guys are running Vista, can you explain to me how to get Windows to acknowledge that it's a game? I'm thoroughly confused.

This isn't the only program that Vista has been blocking, so any help that I can get in fixing this problem to allow me to run all my programs will be greatly appreciated.

Been watching quite a few movies since the beginning of the vacation. Most good, one laughably awful. Some of the movies that I can remember off the top of my head:

-- The Simpsons Movie (It was okay, I guess. ::Shrugs:: )
-- TMNT (A lot better than I was hearing. Makes me wonder if they'll be making a sequel since it just didn't feel the same without Shredder.)
-- ライラの冒険 (Although this is the movie "The Golden Compass", the Japanese title translates to "Lyra's Adventure". For the movie, it wasn't all that bad, but it kinda felt like it needed more. Hopefully the sequel, if it's made, will do better.)
-- Beowulf (Really good. I liked how the CG was done, but it does make me wonder why they didn't just do it live-action and then add in the CG stuff. Not that it matters, really.)
-- I Am Legend (Pretty good. Would've been better if I weren't watching it while tired.)
-- Gotham Knight (Really makes me look forward to Dark Knight, which comes out this Saturday.)
-- ゲゲゲの鬼太郎 (Live-action movie. Pretty family-oriented so it was a simple and fun watch. What made it really interesting was the fact that the DVD had the option for English subtitles -- something that you pretty much never see in a Japanese DVD.)
-- 魔法にかけられて (The Disney movie "Enchanted". Way better than I had expected.)

There were a couple more, but unfortunately I don't remember what they were. Oh well. Anyway, if you wanted to know, the laughably awful one was titled "Snow Queen", which is a really cheesy B-movie horror flick. Although it wasn't as bad as some of the B-movies I've seen in the past, this one had me laughing pretty good. Some highlights:

> Craptastic story
> Terrible editing (in one scene, you could actually see when they used the green screen)
> Mandatory topless scene (if it weren't for the fact this chick had a laughably horrible boob job, I wouldn't have mentioned this)
> Odd way of emphasizing that it was cold (which was shown by having the chick, who went topless at the beginning of the movie, not wear a bra underneath a very form-fitting sweater throughout the duration of the movie until her eventual death)
> Make-up (which was surprisingly good, so kudos to the people who were in charge of that)

Definitely not worth wasting your money on, but I was really in the mood to watch something crappy at the time.

Next up: Sweeny Todd




-------------------------------------------------

Update:

Watched Sweeny Todd last night. Definitely a strange movie, not that I was expecting anything less from Tim Burton.

Tonight I watched ナショナルトレジャー２：リンカーン暗殺者の日記 (National Treasure 2: The Lincoln Assassin's Diary (Book of Secrets)). Just as good as the first movie, to put it simply.

I also rented ファンタスチック４：銀河の危機 (Fantastic 4: Universe's Crisis (Rise of the Silver Surfer)) but I haven't watched that yet. I'm a bit wary on this one since I wasn't exactly too enthralled with the first one, but I figured I'd give the sequel a watch just to say I did.

I really want to watch Dark Knight, but I'll probably have to wait until Monday or so since it premieres tomorrow in the theaters. Unlike US theaters, they have more of a reserved seating type of arrangement going on (you get to choose where you want to sit from a seat map when you buy your ticket, which is then marked on your ticket to prove the seat is yours), so I'd rather not be stuck down in front like I was with Spider-man 3. (Like US theaters, the seating arrangements are, of course, first-come-first-served.)

Although a lot has happened the past few months, I'll try to keep it from becoming epic.

About a couple months back, I was instructed to teach at the local elementary school while the junior high school students were taking their end of the term exams. It was a lot of fun, and all went pretty well (which was a bit of a surprise since it was my first time teaching elementary students). The first and second-graders, who I was put in charge of teaching during my two-day stay at the school, got attached to me really quick which was quite surprising. The ALT who normally works at the school (he's in charge of the 3rd through 6th grade classes, so the students for 1st and 2nd grade don't have classes with him) got a good laugh out of it since I would get dragged all over the place during the recess periods.

One first-grade student was exceptionally amusing. During one of the free periods on my first day there, I went out and watched the first grade students as they were taking part in one of their class on botany. The student called me over and, kneeling down, I listened to her telling me all about her plant. In the middle of what she was saying, she paused and looked up at me. After climbing onto my lap, she continued talking about the plant. When the teacher came over, well, here's the dialogue as follows:

先生：あやかちゃん、何しているの？
あやか：（先生を見て）。。。。
先生：セタ先生はあやかちゃんのパパなの？
あやか：うん。
僕：いや、いや。「お兄さん」だよ、「お兄さん」。
あやか：（また先生を見て）うん、パパだよ。
僕：オイ、オイ。。。。(o_O)'

Teacher: Ayaka-chan, what are you doing?
Ayaka: (Looking up at the teacher) .....
Teacher: Is Ceta-sensei your papa?
Ayaka: Yeah.
Me: No, no. "Big brother". "Big brother".
Ayaka: (Looking up at the teacher again.) Yeah, he's my papa.
Me: Oi, oi.... (o_O)'

After that, whenever she saw me, she'd come up and hold my hand. So adorable. As a result, however, a lot of the other kids in the class wanted to hold my hand as well, and after that I just ended up getting dragged around all over the place. I even got dragged to the nearby 児童館 (Jidou-kan), a child-care center, after school got out on the second day. (Some of the teachers got a good laugh out of this after I got back.)

It's too bad I won't be going back there again. I had a lot of fun with all the students I taught so it's sad I can't go back and visit them again. While I've been told that I'll be going to teach elementary classes again during the exam period in the next school term, I'll be going to teach at a different elementary school in the area.

As for what's been going on in the junior high schools, classes were a little hard to get through at times. With the steep rise in humidity, it's been rough trying to teach just as it was rough for the students to concentrate in class. Since Japanese schools don't have air conditioning outside of the teachers' room, the classrooms were incredibly hot even with all the windows open and the fans blowing. I couldn't blame the students for getting sleepy in the classes; I myself found myself wanting to sleep because of the heat. Although it'll still be hot in September, at least near the end of the month it'll start to cool down and the students (myself, included) will be able to concentrate once more.

For the class scheduling, I had quite a bit of free class periods due to the exams and preparations for the summer vacation, so I would spend them studying grammar like crazy or working on improving my art level as much as possible if I wasn't spending my time checking class papers. Unfortunately, unlike studying where I can bring my books to school easily, I don't take my computer to school so it's been impossible for me to improve on my digital art techniques. Since I have plenty of time now that I'm on summer break, I'll be working hard so that I can *hopefully* improve my working speed and be able to get more done in a short time. However, since it hasn't been long since the summer break began, we'll see how things go. I've got until September to do what I can.

Since I didn't know how things would be if I installed Vista on my Mac due to the fact that I had some customizations done on the computer, I decided that I would buy a relatively cheap PC laptop today at the local electronics outlet store. The computer that I purchased was roughly around $1,300 -- a pretty good deal considering its original price is around $2,000. As much as I didn't want Vista, since all the machines have Vista pre-installed, I bit the bullet and bought it. Anyway, after all day of fiddling around with it, I've found that it's incredibly frustrating to figure out what's going on.

For example, when I install a program, it'll install the program in a place that isn't easily locatable and sometimes won't create a shortcut on the desktop for it. Well, that is if the program will actually install at all (AIM, in addition to a few other programs, won't install at all; it crashes during installation). I've also found that things are much harder to find than they were in XP. What would only take a short time to find in XP takes several times that. Finally, the OS seems to tank on a regular basis. Seriously, you know it's bad when you try to run the Search program -- the freaking Search program that is part of the OS -- and it crashes the system.

I really wish I could use XP. ugh....







(I'll post updates of what I've been doing since my last update after I get some sleep.)

Because I thought this was funny (even though you guys have probably seen it already).


http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd169/roninceta/Misc/pokemon-politics.gif


[EDIT] Kinda sucks when you're half-asleep and don't realize that you forgot to change the BBS tags to HTML tags.... [/EDIT]

This is pretty sweet:



If you liked that, click here to watch their version of "We Will Rock You".

This is also pretty sweet.