August 15th, 2006

Happy Lefty's Day!

Apparently, it's Lefty's Day or some such...it's sometime in August. It's a day to celebrate people who use the left hand. So I thought I would take a minute to give a "shout out" to two of my favorite left handers, John IV and Christine. Woo! We rock! 6 grandkids, 3 of them lefties. As the older and much wiser cousins, John and Christine helped me find my way in a righty world. John taught me how to tie my shoes. I was a late bloomer. I think it took until first or second grade to get that whole tying thing down (even still, I don't tie them very well. So blame him when my shoes are untied!).

Another interesting Lefty tid-bit, 3 of the 7 new JETs are left handed. There could be more but I know Angelo, Hannah, and Judy are all left handed. Weird! Im surrounded by awesome left handed goodness! Hmmm...what else....oh yeah! Some of you may know that I am not a true lefty *gasp*. I write, eat, bat, etc. with my left hand, but I do most of strength based activities with my right hand (throwing, bowling, cutting). In Japan, this is reversed a lot. Almost every Japanese person writes with their right hand. Its how their writing system works. But the lefties, who have to write like a righty, do everything else with the left hand. Fascinating. Miymi (my co-teacher for Saturday English) and some students from class always write with their right hand but do everything else lefthanded. I know this because one student, Takashi, is ranked number two for his age group in the entire nation for tennis (doubles, not singles). Yay Takashi! He's a lefty tennis player. This spawned the discussion in class. Interesting? I think so.

Personal fact: Since coming to Japan, I have become ambidextrous. I can write with both hands now (of course left is better, but right is still pretty good). I switch hands when I eat, depending on where the food I'm aiming for is at. I switch hands when I brush my teeth, depending on where Chris is standing (we brush our teeth for bed at the same time and have to crowd the mirror). I'm awesome! Yay for ambidexterity!

Speaking of the new JETs, there are many fresh faces around Izumo. In Hirata, we have Eric Newburger (sp?) and Ivy something or other. I haven't met either people, but Chris likes them. Im sure they are good people. Hannah (Wales), Angelo (South Africa), and Judy (America) are the newbies in the Friendship house. Ewan (Scotland/England), Eric (America), and Sam (New Zeland) are the newcomers to Fureai no Sato (our apartment). There is also Tyler and Megan (America) who are another married couple who took the place of Zack. They are both High School teachers here which is cool. It's nice having a lot of new people around. There seems like there is always someone to do something with. It's cool. They are all really friendly. On Sunday, we went to see Superman Returns with a lot of the newbies (in fact, all but Sam I think). It was a really good movie. A fun time was had by all! And yesterday (Monday), Chris and I went bowling with Hannah and Judy and then had some Chinese afterwards. Mmmm...duck is good!

Oh! Tragedy struck our apartment last week. We got back to Izumo on Tuesday night. On Wednesday morning I was COVERED in bug bites. Covered! I am not even exagerating for effect. I had about 37 bites on my torso alone. And they ITCHED. Oh goodness did they itch. Remember how I said we had tatami mites? Yeah...I forgot about the little !@*#$ers (pardon my fake swearing). They were still there when we got home. So I spend my Wednesday fumigating the tatami. I still get bit every once in awhile. But nothing like those first two days. And the bites stay for awhile. They don't itch so much anymore, but there are little brown dots covering my back and front. I look like I had the measles. It's really sad. I still have really itchy bites, but those are the new ones. For awhile, I had about 12 band-aids covering the most itchy places. Chris would giggle when he saw them. Poor me! Oh well. The dani are almost all gone. I sprayed last week and am going to spray today to make sure they are gone. Dani Genocide is the name of the game! :-)

Last but not least, Chris and I are going to tutoring tonight. It's the first actual lesson for us. We met with a teacher on Saturday and she assessed our levels. We will meet her once a week on Tuesdays. Right now its 7:30-9:00 but that's a little late so we are hoping to switch that to 5:00 or 5:30. Im really excited. This should boost our levels so much. Yay! She's a really interesting person, too. She was a Japanese teacher in America for awhile.

So thats that. Long update, but I like being chatty. HAve a good one!