We just got our first snow today. I went outside this morning to quite a snow flurry. The ground has a thick layer of snow on it now. However, it just stopped snowing and it looks like it might rain later on today. It's possible there won't be any snow left in a day or so. For once I might actually be happy to see the rain here. My parents sent me some shoes for Christmas which are better than my running shoes. My running shoes have a mesh top so they are not so good for the snow. Hopefully I can waterproof the shoes my parents sent me. I don't mind the snow, but walking around in it isn't that great. I need to get an umbrella too. Everyone uses umbrellas here because the snow is quite wet, and you are protected better with an umbrella. I can get one for about 80 cents at a cheap store, so I might as well. I think this is the only time that it will snow until I go away for Christmas.

Last night Elita got her ADSL modem. It only took a minute to set up, then we were chugging away on the internet. She has an old Win95 computer with 16MB of RAM, so it was not as fast as it would have been with my computer. I found a website where you can download old browsers, so we got a bunch of different browsers to see which works best for her computer.

Today I have four lessons. They are my last second year student lessons until February. One of the classes was supposed to be fourth period, but it got moved to third period because a teacher is absent today. They don't have substitute teachers. Instead they just rearrange the schedule. However, this may mean that you are not prepared to teach a class and then you find out you have to. The Japanese teachers are generally told about schedule changes, or they read about the changes off a board. However, the schedule is written in kanji, so it is too difficult for me to read. One of my teachers is particularly bad about warning me when there is a schedule change. He just comes in the office and tells me its time to teach. Normally I tell him the schedule says we are teaching during a different period, and he runs off to see what is correct. He's almost always correct, but never bothers to inform me ahead of time about the change.