The charity show is overwhelming my life right now. Luckily, it is on Saturday, so after that I won't need to worry anymore. Yay! This afternoon we will be baking cookies and brownies for the show. Should be fun.

Days like today I realize why NC schools are closed during the summer. There's no A/C in the schools here, but we have 90+ degree temperatures and full humidity. Blah. The students were like dead logs in my first period class. They could barely concentrate, and normally they are good students.

Sorry for the delay in writing. My computer came back from the repair shop minus an operating system. After trying to get a recovery disk from Toshiba (they don't have any in Japan) and my slacker brother who never emailed me back, I finally gave up an installed Japanese Windows on my computer, as a temporary measure until I get back to the U.S.

Of course, something had to go wrong after that. About one day later, my computer started crashing repeatedly, even before entering Windows. At some points, I would push the power button and nothing would happen at all. The hard drive and fan wouldn't even start up. I don't really know what is wrong with it, because it works some of the time, but not other times. It's quite annoying. I hope they can fix it (or replace my computer!) at Toshiba this time.

I have spent the last two weeks or so working on the program for the charity show. I am pretty happy with how it looks. I ended up making it in Adobe Illustrator, which I had no knowledge of before this project. Now I can use it pretty well. Today I just sent it to the printer in Kyoto. It will cost about 550 dollars for 1000 copies of the program (it's eight A4 pages long, in color). I think the sponsors will be happy, because their ads are in color for the first time, and they look nice. Last year they spent about 700 dollars on it, for 700 copies in single-color. The difference this year was that I had to put the whole thing together, while the printer last year did it for us. Anyway, it is finally done, and we can start worrying more about getting people to come to the show, and other small things like baking goodies for the bake sale.

Well, I got my computer back on Monday. Unfortunately, it has a totally blank hard drive in it. So, I can't really use it. I think I left my recovery CD back in the U.S., so I can't reinstall Windows with that. I think I might just borrow a Japanese copy of Windows for two months until I go home.

The timing of not having my computer couldn't be worse, since the charity show is reaching critical stages, and I can't send emails to people, or prepare the program at home. Instead I just stay at work until 7:30 or 8 at night.

Hopefully I will get my computer working again soon.