let's see if i can make a post without firefox crashing more than three times

so blog,
it has been a few days since my last post. i thought i would keep you up to date this morning.
everyone, and by everyone i mean roughly more than half of the teachers and students i work with, is wearing white cottony facemasks that simply can't do much fo anything against any kind of airborne infection. as paranoid hypochondriacs, they seem to have mastered the art of the self-induced placebo effect. since japan is a country where people rarely touch and instead opt for the bow, in terms of swine flu, which they call "new type influenza", they really have nothing to worry about. but all of this worrying keeps them healthy anyway. i can't take anyone wearing the mask seriously, so i wont be donning one myself.
let's see. i didn't win a single game last monday at badminton, and only four women came to my english discussion group last night. this is okay though, because 3 days will mark the third full month that i have been here, which is exactly a quarter of a year. this means i almost half way done with half of my job here. i decided a while ago that i don't want to recontract for another year, because thinking about american food makes me delirious even now, and i miss too many other people and things.
today he first graders have a speaking test, and it is my job to grade half of them on pronunciation, volume, fluency, and accuracy. it is going to be a rough situation since most of them prefer to talk to a point an inch in front of their face while looking at their own feet. but english is crazy and sounds mostly like nonsense, and they dont have any choice at all in learning it because it is on every high school and college entrance exam.
it has been getting quite cold since autumn started. my house has, in addition to no central heating of any kind, no insulation of any kind, so i have to heat my bedroom with a space heater a few hours before i go to bed, and i can't leave it on all night because i don't want to burn down the house, so it is always very cold by morning.
if my left leg feels at tight and achey as it does right now, i will be skipping karate tonight to let it heal up more. i think it is still bruised from last wednesday's karate where all that leg did was kick people and get kicked.
in better news, today there is yaki soba for lunch.
i took a few pictures the other day, i will try to get them up by this afternoon.