Always, again with the bugs!

They're just everywhere. All the time. This weekend there seemed to have been a surge in activity among the praying mantises in the area around my house. The following picture shows me as close as I was willing to get to the enormous one outside my neighbor's front door.

Besides the excitement with this exceptionally beady-eyed and unsettlingly observant green insects, the majority of my weekend was preoccupied with sitting on my living room couch with a tissue in one hand and a cup of hot tea in the other, combating the sudden onslaught of a cold that took hold without warning on Friday night. I was alone in the house, since both my roommate, Jennifer, and my friend Josiah left for the weekend to take part in a home-stay rice-harvesting festival. I was pretty jealous of them for getting to go to this, especially as I was the only AET who didn't get invited. But not having any plans for the weekend ended up meaning that I had ample time to lie around my house sniffling and groaning as I waited for the sickness to subside.

Today (Monday) we have the day off on account of National Sports Day. I have yet to work a full five-day week since starting teaching at Yamazaki. For as work-obsessed as the Japanese are, they certainly have a lot of national holidays. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that all of my teachers aren't at school anyway today, finding some task that they absolutely have to complete or some school club that absolutely must meet even on a holiday. Luckily, they don't hold us foreigners to the same standards.