My computer's been working again since last friday. Oddly enough, Toshiba couldn't discover anything wrong, so I assume the thorough cleaning they gave it solved whatever the problem was. Currently I have a bad cold. I took off from work today and walked to the hospital near my apartment, where they gave me what seems like enough medicine to get an elephant high. It seems to be partially working, but I'm going through tissues like nobody's business. The weather's nice enough here that I can leave the window open, and it's a peaceful evening. There's a streetlight right outside my window, but it's not too bright and it's a nice design. I saw a TV show today about Japanese reactions to the Japan-Australia World Cup match last night. One of the most disturbing clips was of a maid cafe where the waitresses were wearing Japan World Cup soccer jersies and spoon-feeding the otaku clients as they watched the match. Brrrrrrr.

Things are going better than I`d expected, despite the inconvenience of my computer being broken. The teacher who sits next to me has a college friend who works at a computer store who sent it back to Toshiba for repairs after backing up all my data for me. It looks like the problem is with the hardware, not the software; it seems like the computer overheats and shuts down whenever I turn it on. I think one of the internal fans may be broken. The computer store clerk said it would take a week to ten days for Toshiba to repair it, but that seems unrealistically quick to me. In the meantime, I`m borrowing a old laptop from the the teacher next to me, Yoshida-sensei. It has the daemon Windows ME, frustrating as that is, and I can`t connect to the internet at home for some reason, but it`s better than nothing.

The sports fest was fun. I`ll have a longer post about that later. I`m also teaching an elective English class mostly by myself once or twice a week with mixed results. My first class was all right, but I didn`t plan for the second class enough. I`m learning, at least. My personal life is starting to resemble Maison Ikkoku to an annoying degree and I`m acting like Godai, not Yotsuya, but I`m working to change that, at least as much as I can. I`m currently reading a very interesting book on sumo by an American sports writer that treats it like an actual sport and not like a `precious cultural artifact.` It`s a perspective I haven`t seen before and the author`s writing style is very entertaining, but still informative. At one point he classifies sumo wrestlers into hippos, jocks, butterballs, and cabdrivers. I also recently finished Guy Gavriel Kay`s A Song for Arbonne, a historical fantasy based on the troubadour culture of Southern France.