Howdy y'all
Things have been busy around here. On Thursday Chie's car broke down, so that's pretty much dominated our weekend. The timing belt gave out while we were sitting at a traffic light. I managed to put it into neutral and get it off the road, but the garage reckons it'll be really expensive to replace. The timing belts flicked around in the motor and all that, so it would probably cost more than the initial price of the car just to fix it. We wouldn't need a car, if it wasn't for Chie's job. She really needs a car to get up into those mountain schools, so it's all quite lame. We've been borrowing a car from the garage in the meantime, which is a bit too hardcore. It doesn't have a key... You have the beeper thing in your pocket and then you can just press the button on the door to open it. To turn the engine, you just press a button. The headlights also have a light sensitive auto function.

Anyways, so the end result of looking around and talking to the garage and all that is that we'll be buying a a new car. The cheapest one the garage could find is a 1995 Toyota Curran. It seems in pretty good nick and the reason it's cheap is that small kei-cars (660cc) are all the rage now. You pay a lot less in tax for them, so they're now more expensive than a lot of the bigger cars, such as our Curran (1800cc I think). We'll be picking that up next week and using the borrowed car in the meantime.

Other than that, we had a drink or two with Caroline and her recently arrived boyfriend on Friday. They went off to Osaka later that night but he seems really cool. On Saturday we had band practice and looked at cars. Sunday, we went to the onsen and did stuff forms and stuff for the car. In the evening I managed to get to Sakura's apartment for the last five minute of the All Blacks game and then we hung out and talked.

On Tuesday we went to an awesome gig. I only knew the opening guy but the main band plays festival in Aus, the States and the UK. Very cool multi-instrumentalist stuff. They had a bunch of musicians playing a big pile of different instruments and the guitarist/ singer was awesome. On the CDs he apparently plays all the instruments.

So yeah, other than the car stuff, it's pretty pretty good. My alarm didn't go off this morning so I flew out the door within ten minutes of waking. Bit groggy at the moment.

Oh, also my father-in-law said yesterday that he's keen to come to NZ for a few days when we go in January. He's pretty buys so it would really be 2-3 days or so. He wants to say hi my folks and also see my Grandparents. I've told him about how my Grandad is doing, so he really wants to come over and meet him. I haven't actually mentioned the wedding yet though. So yeah, I'll try call my parents about that tonight, but I also need to get onto finding a ticket for him sooner rather than later.

This week looks busy as. I've got English play practice after school today, plus I need to book Chie's dad a ticket. On Tuesday I've got English Conversation class after school, so I need to put together a worksheet for that. On Friday I've got band practice and also need to put across money for Chie's ticket to her credit card. We'll be buying a car in a weeks time, so I need to put stuff for that together. I also have uni finishing up at the end of the month, so I really, really need to get onto that. I've also got the weeks classes to plan. The band is practicing for a gig at the end of November, so we've got a bit of time there. We've got two new songs though, so I need to work on them. I'm also playing at couple of songs at the Tsugi junior high school festival, so I need to decide what songs and practice them soon.

This morning when I got to school, I found that the local cops had decided to hand out bike locks to everyone. Very nice of them but when you look on the back, you can see that it's from the 100 yen shop. I already have a lock on my bike, so that's alright, but really? $1.50s worth of bike lock? Awesome...

A bit all over the place at the moment. Best get to it.
Hope all is well
Cheers
J