brrr!

A brief commentary on my current weather situation:
- starting this weekend, sunset occurs before 5pm. This means that if I stay at my school the slightest bit beyond my work hours, I'm riding my bike home in the dark... awesome.
- the "real feel" right now (its the middle of the night) is below 40 degrees, and its only mid-October!
- the weather center that AccuWeather uses for "Kiryu" is obviously not in our area. On Monday, the AccuWeather forecast was for a mostly sunny day... in actuality, it rained all day from mid-morning through the night. I had to borrow a rain jacket from a teacher to ride my bike home in 15 minutes of downpour. Today's forecast was cloudy, with a better chance of morning frost than rain... in actuality, we had an apocalyptic thunder storm, with rain so heavy that you could barely see 15 feet out my front door. I'm glad that my 2 loads of laundry from this afternoon are hanging on the clothesline outside... grrr.
- on an up-note, the leaves will begin changing soon and the rolling mountains of Kiryu should be ablaze with beautiful autumn colors (I hope that saying something pretty and poetic might lighten the tone of this cranky post).

I'm enjoying a quiet weekend in Kiryu--catching up on laundry, cleaning and watching a bunch of movies. Last night I went to a cooking class and "learned how to" (read: chopped some onions and watched other people) make chicken curry from a Bangladesh recipe. Yummy. Tomorrow morning I'm going to help out at the KIEA: Kiryu International Exchange Association "International Festival." The other ALTs and I are going to help with face painting and operation of the American Hot Dog cart, which is rumored to have real kosher hot dogs and buns (which, from what I've seen so far, don't exist in Japan). Hopefully the rain will be over and people will come out for the event.

Finally, since I'm not sure who is keeping up with me and reading this, I'd like to ask that you take a minute to post a comment or email me to let me know how you're doing and what you think of the blog. My intention is to share as much of my experience as I can with people back home, and I want to make sure that the information and pictures that I post are things that you want to know about. I'm starting to wonder if the little pieces of my everyday life have been successfully expressed here... if there's something that you're curious about, or want to see, please let me know! I miss you all and hope that you're doing well... you know what I'm up to, so please get in touch and let me know how things are going with you.