Forgot to mention this earlier...
Sunday I was sitting around with Amy, watching the Seahawks nearly blow it against the 49ers, and drinking a beer when the phone rings. "Who can that be?" I thought as I looked at Amy sitting on the other side of the room, her cell phone not in her hand. So I pick it up and it turns out to be one of the teachers at Sundai. Sundai is one of my Tuesday schools, a junior high. Can't remember if I mentioned here that I judged a speech contest for them a few weeks back or not, but I did. Anyway, this is not the teacher I work with out there but the teacher (I know I mentioned this) that asked me to help her correct some of the papers her students had written way back when. So we go through the normal greetings and I figure out who this is and then she tells me that one of the students, I think the girl who we gave first prize to for the 3rd year (9th grade) division, had her competition against the rest of the Yamanashi prefecture 3rd year students the day before. And it turns out she won. Damn cool, I think. Cool for the student. Good for the school. And really, if I may get a little selfish here and toot my own horn, it is damn good for me too. I did the initial edit on her speech, chose her to win the contest, and then did another major edit on the speech before she went off to conquer the prefecture. I remember telling this teacher after my second edit of the speech that I was holding this paper to higher standards now that she was going to be going out to a major competition, thus all the corrections. She seemed to understand and thanked me for my efforts. And lo and behold, the thing won. This is not to take anything away from the student, of course, but hey, this was a joint effort. I feel like the girl's pit crew (yes yes, I know, everything is beer and racing to me). Anyway, thought that was cool.

Just had an interesting conversation with one of girls here in the office. She and I get along quite well. While everyone is quite nice to me, she is the only one that actually makes any effort to talk to me for any length of time about things outside of work. I don't blame any of the others for not talking to me too much. They are busy and are probably just a bit nervous about using their English. Most of them can't really speak it to well. But this girl, her name is Miho Tanaka, is quite friendly and while her English isn't great, it is definately enough to go on. Anyway, we talked about me trying to learn some Japanese and I showed her the flashcards I just made this morning. Hiragana flashcards. On Monday I will make the Katakana flashcards. So I show them to her to make sure they looked ok by native speaker standards and then we get into a conversation about Kanji. Kanji may never fully come to me, but that's ok. If I can just recognize a few symbols needed for everyday use I will be happy. I asked her what the two symbols that make up "Kofu" mean. I knew one was something like armor cause I bought a book a couple weeks ago called Essential Kanji that had it in there. So that's the ko part, but I couldn't find the fu part. Well, somehow she found it and it said that it essentially means prefectural center. Kofu being the capital of Yamanashi I guess that makes sense. So essentially Kofu's name means armored prefectual center or something like that. From there we went on to discuss names. I showed her that I had written my name in katakana ("That's wonderful, little boy? And what grade will you be in next year?") and she wondered about my middle name. I expalined that most Americans have middle names but that we really don't use them very often and told her I wasn't really sure why we had them at all. That put us onto her name and how you write it in both hiragana and kanji (and here we get the heart of my story). The two symbols that make up Miho in kanji combine to mean beautiful hops. Is that great or what? Me being the beer lover that I am, and a beer lover who prefers the hoppy beers (mmmm.....India Pale Ale) and her, whose name means beautiful hops, working in the same office. There's a folk song here somewhere.

Ok, that's all for today. It is Friday afternoon, I am out of here in less than a half hour, and I have no plans for this weekend (other than to get my bike fixed and go to a sports bar tomorrow night to watch a rugby game with a couple other JETs, might learn something).
So........KAMPAI!