Now there's something new...

I just discovered this evening that the toilet at Fukuwatari Station is a squat. Not only that, it's a squat long-drop. Yup, you squat, have a poo, and it falls down a hole. Yuck.
In other news, the other guy who got off at Fukuwatari tonight was hott. But that's nothing to do with anything.
What have I been doing the past month? Not a whole lot. I announced the 2006/7 Okayama JET LookBook a fortnight ago, and have spent most of my evenings working on that since then. It's been going much, much more smoothly than last year, since a year of making the Fuzzy Peach has taught me all about the miracle of text boxes on Word. Basically, I made a page-by-page layout beforehand, and now I'm just pasting in the photos and words as people send them to me. It's been fun.
Went to Bernie's birthday barbecue today. The twenty-something gaijin populating her backyard will surely be the biggest news to hit Yoshinaga in years. It was a delight, and I realised I had forgotten the pleasure of standing around the barbecue, beer in hand, watching the meat cook. Good times.
At school, I have had very little to do. A combination of school trips and exams has deprived me of most of my classes, leaving me to spend my days working on the LookBook, studying kanji, and occasionally working on the other book I've very occasionally been working on writing. Elementary school, on the other hand, has been fun. A fortnight ago, I finally gave my last jiko-shokai (self-introduction) lesson of my life to the year 1 class at Takebe Elementary. This year I've shortened my self-into speech to just ten minutes. I show an Australian flag, a map, four photos and draw pictures of emus, kangaroos and crocodiles, and then let the kids ask me questions in Japanese. The other two schools' year 1 classes just asked "do you like oranges?" and such, but Takebe's kids' questions were much more impressive. I was asked (among others):
How fast can an emu run?
How many countries speak English?
When are all your family's birthdays? (with brothers-in-law and nephews that's ten people, so I didn't spend the time to answer that)
How long does it take by train to cross Australia?
Are you taller than Inoue-sensei? (their teacher is a freakishly tall woman. And no, I am not.)
How long have you studied Japanese?
And so on. Pretty impressive for six-year olds.
Finally, I've finally noticed that my schools are fairly enlightened when it comes to gender roles. Of my four schools, there are two male and two female kocho-senseis, two male and two female kyoto-senseis, and two of the Office Ladies are actually men. Interesting, ne?