And Sometimes Why

Tag: work

  • My ride to work

    Here’s a video of me riding my bicycle to work. It’s really not all that exciting, but I wanted to try recording with my friend Tomas’s camera just for kicks. (If you’re interested, it’s the GoPro HD Hero2 with fisheye lens housing mounted loosely to my handlebars using an old flashlight mount.)

    It’s “unlisted” on YouTube out of a vague sense of… not privacy concerns per se, but because I’d rather not have directions to my apartment searchable on YouTube, really.

    Anyway, it’s only five minutes long, so even though the mount is pretty shaky, you can probably suffer through it. 😉

  • Kuwabara Apartment

    This is my old apartment in Kuwabara. It’s owned by ALS Matsuyama, my former employer, so when I left the company I had to move out.

    It’s not a bad place, cozy-small, but the kitchenette was hard to work with sometimes. There was only one electric burner, built into the counter next to a sink smaller than most bar sinks, and the fridge and microwave were both dorm-sized.

    I salvaged an unused plastic filing cabinet from work to use as a makeshift pantry because there simply wasn’t any suitable space otherwise.

    The apartment was definitely built for a single person to live in, though at one point I had a 30-something couple and their infant living next door. I always wondered (a, how they kept the kid quiet at all times and b,) how they managed to keep from killing each other in such a small space. Maybe that’s why they moved out.

    If you look closely, you can see four of my five bins for sorting refuse. If you look REALLY closely, you can see that the stereo has a front-loading slot for MiniDiscs.

    If you’re interested, here’s a slideshow of the rest of the apartment:
    http://www.davidhed.com/blog/2010/12/23/kuwabara-apartment/

  • Insect Museum

    Today was an interesting day. I’m teaching summer camp right now, and today was the first outing for one of the office ladies to go out with a class on a field trip. She was incredibly nervous- so much so, in fact, that she worked herself up into a literal fever this morning before we left.

    We went to Ehime University’s annual insect exhibition, and it went really well, even though the end of the field trip found me running to get to the bus so we could get back to school on time. The museum had a “Quiz Rally” that the kids found exciting, involving a quiz station set up in each exhibit room where the kids had to write their answers on an answer sheet to win a prize at the end. The prizes ended up being postcards from the gift shop, but they were colorful closeup photos of exotic insects, at least.

    The problem was they didn’t have any signage about where to take the answer sheets when you were done, and we were already short on time, so I sent the kids (only five) ahead to the bus with my de facto assistant while I ran around the museum trying to figure out where to get the kids’ “prizes.”

    All’s well that ends well, I suppose.

  • Summer Festival

    My school had its annual “Summer Festival” on Sunday.

    We had a variety of games and booths set up in the classrooms, including a fishing game, a dice game, shaved ice, and my paper airplane booth.

    It was pretty neat seeing the kids dressed up in all their summer livery- all these little yukata and jinbei running around made me want my own, so Yuko and I went to Jusco and bought a jinbei for me yesterday. =)