ネイティブが教える英会話のジェムスクール☆Teachers☆

I was in a family restaurant and they recommended their special hamburg. To my surprise, it was inspired by the hairstyle of a youtuber! Wow. I never thought a youtuber would have any influence on a restaurant chain. It was really funny to me to hear about how they used many ingredients to make the hamburg look like his hair.

This was also my first sighting of "split-dye." In the States, a lot of young people dye their hair crazy colors. I had purple hair for almost 10 years. Right now, a craze called "split-dyed" hair is popular, where you part your hair down the middle and dye the sides two different colors.

  

In English, we have the term "early bird" to describe people that like to get up early in the morning. We also have the term "night owl" to describe those that like to stay up late.

I can't really pick one that I identify as. I like to wake up early and stay up late and I'm not sure if there's a term for that.

What about you? Do you consider yourself an early bird, a night owl, or somewhere in between?  

Readers of my particular blog posts should remember that a couple of weeks ago I posted about a book I was using to get better at programming, because of my intent on getting accepted into an online master's degree in computer science. Well, today's blog post will be about yet another book I have ordered for that same purpose.

This one takes a different approach than your standard textbooks by utilizing problems from competitive programming websites and then working through them by introducing (and explaining) the necessary concepts that will be needed to solve said problem. Not to worry though, the book does start off with very basic problems and gets progressively more difficult as the problems begin to require more complex concepts.

I, for one, really really really like this approach to learning; it's much more engaging for my brain than starting off with the concepts themselves and then being presented with Roy exercises to solve using said concepts. I will obviously monitor my progress through the book and see if I'm grasping the concepts any easier using this "problem first approach".

Wish me luck!

  

Tonight I got to enjoy a nice walk with my wife. It was just the right temperature and it was quiet. We walked because I have to park down the street from my apartment for a week while my apartment complex is being painted. I like it, it is a nice change of pace for a week.


  

"This udon shop has eluded me for too long!", I said.

When they arrived at the shop that one Sunday morning, we discovered that it was in fact closed.

"I'm here at the right time, right?"

"wrong"

One day. I will have you, 10-minute udon.

Until then, u don look so good.   

I just watched the movie Prometheus (2012).



I'm generally not a big fan of horror movies, though I have liked several. I likes Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986).

I wasn't watching the movie for fun. I'm preparing to write a Dungeons & Dragons adventure for my friends that takes place inside an ancient spaceship. I'd heard that Prometheus took place inside an ancient spaceship, so I thought maybe it would give me some ideas.

My idea for the game is that long ago there was a war between the dragons and evil space squid. The dragons won, and then sealed their souls into this spaceship like a time capsule. The players will accidentally absorb the souls of the ancient dragons and become the new protectors of the world, just in time for the evil space squid to return.

Anyway, I watched the movie and I was just...


Everyone in the movie was so amazingly stupid and everything was so pointless. It was gross and I didn't get many useful ideas for my game. It was very beautifully-made and it certainly...produced an emotional response.

Thanks for reading!  

My best friend got inspired by her Indian heritage and cooked a lot. Last week, she made homemade butter chicken and roti. It was so good! Roti is a kind of flatbread that is a bit similar to naan. When she was a child, her parents put sugar into the dough to eat as a snack. I've never had it before, but I think it's delicious! I helped her roll out the roti and it was pretty fun. Indian food can take a long time to make. I'm not patient enough to do it by myself.   

I've recently been doing a lot of swimming and one river that I went to was nostalgic for me. It reminded me of a watering hole in Texas I used to go to all the time when I was younger. My friends and I would call it "the secret place." We called it that because it was kind of hidden away. In order to get to it, you had to walk over a field and through the forest for a while. My older sister used to take us frequently in the summer, but one day we saw a giant spider there. My sister has severe arachnophobia so we left immediately and we never came back.

Anyways, it was nice to be reminded of a place that I enjoyed so much in the past.  

As I have mentioned here before, I am a HUGE consumer of podcasts - in that I listen to many many hours of them per day, so it is important for me to have some good headphones with which to listen to my podcasts. Well, last month, I was browsing Amazon for wireless headphones, and I came across a pair that is from the same manufacturer as the ones I currently have, SoundCore, and they were on sale for $20 off.

Besides the reasonable price overall, the headphones also have noice cancellation features that can be adjusted depending on your environment, which is perfect for me because I listen to most of my podcasts while I'm walking. The charging case holds way more charges than my old pair and the battery life is about 4.5-5 hours depending on whether or not I'm using the noise cancellation feature. So far, I am very pleased with them.


  

Halloween is so close! I’m very excited to celebrate with my friends. I am not sure what I want to dress up as. Are you going to dress up?




(Not my photo)
  

Been working on flour tortillas for a while now. Simple, comfort-food with a salty taste that great with a lot of grilled fish or chicken. I'm having trouble getting the consistency right, but I've had a lot of fun failing and improving.

We all have our "white whale", and mine is gluten and water. There's a reason I'm not a baker, yet. I go and see so many many kinds of bread on the shelf. I won't be working here anytime soon, but I'll continue to come for that damn Shio-pan.

  

There is a story of a man who never went to sea, but he loved pictures of boats and hung them in every room in his house. All of his sons grew up to be sailors.

When I was young, we had a poster world map in our kitchen. At every meal, our eyes would wander over the map. And my brother, sisters, and I almost all became linguists and world travelers.

I got a world map shower curtain for our bathroom. Now, every time they go to the toilet, my kids are looking at the map. (Remember: in an American house, the bathtub/shower is in the same room as the toilet.)



We'll see if the pattern continues.

Thanks for reading!  

Look at this maze? Can you believe it's manmade? Or that it's all corn? Well, it is!
It's not hard to find a farm in Michigan. They're sprinkled all over the state. It's where we go to buy pumpkins for carving. Pumpkins and corn mazes are great for farmers to make some extra money. Now some of the farms have become Fall and Halloween themed attractions.

The mazes are family friendly usually, but if you go to a "haunted" corn maze, you might have scary, jumpy moments.
  

When I was younger, we had this pet bird called "Wisdom." One day, my younger sister got it in her head that he should be set free. She opened the cage, grabbed the bird and stepped out onto the second-floor balcony.

She reached her arms out over the railing with the bird in hand and let go, thinking that he would just fly away. What she didn't realize is that Wisdom's wings were clipped to avoid him doing just that. Considering this fact, when she let go, the bird just frantically fell to the first floor.

I was outside at the time and saw him falling in my peripheral vision. I quickly ran to the nearby bush that he fell in. Amazingly, he was perfectly fine. Once we found out he was okay, we all couldn't help but laugh. My sister has never lived down this story. In her defense, she did it with the best intentions.  

I do not know how many readers of this blog know that I am currently studying and preparing to enter an online master's degree in computer science - I am hoping to start this upcoming August. So one of the areas that I am prepping is getting better at programming - even though I took some programming in high school and dabbled with it throughout university - I never took it seriously and devoted a lot of time to it.

Sure, I can throw together scripts to do basic computational tasks for me, but solving more complex problems is an area that I definitely need to work on. So pictured below is one of the books I have been using over the past few months to inject a little more programming into my daily schedule, either before my teaching job or between classes. Python is my go-to language at the moment.

Once I finally get a computer, I will be able to try and complete more complex projects; which I am definitely looking forward to.



  

I went with some friends to a pottery museum. While there, we painted dishes. I painted my new coffee cup. I didn’t try hard and instead decided to make a silly cup. I hope you like it.



  

Got some real fire-power here. My history with weapons is not extensive, and this may be more than I can handle. Picked this dude in a little side-shop. Made knicks and knacks with bamboo and wood.

I had a lot of fun making this one. Real easy. A little bit of glue and about 10 minutes. They had a lot of others, too. Some cost as much as 12,000 yen. Is that something you'd want to try?

I think I'll get another soon.

  

The American school year starts in late August or early September. One of the traditions associated with starting a new school year is shopping for school supplies.

In August, all the department stores have sales on kids' clothes, backpacks, pencils, notebooks, calculators, etc. Each school and grade has different requirements, so parents go to the school's website to find the school supply list for their children (or pick up a paper copy from the school or store) to know what to buy.

It's very exciting for a kid. You get to go on a special shopping trip with your parents and pick what color notebook you'll have. Maybe you'll get a really cool pencil with the star-shaped eraser! It's a little like Halloween and a little like Christmas.



In the past few years, our children's school supplies have been provided by the school through government grants and tax dollars. We just go to the school and pick up a backpack full of supplies. I'm not sure if this is because of COVID, because we moved to a school with more poor families, or if this is just the way it works nowadays. Is the tradition of a school supply shopping trip going away? We'll see.

My church is collecting donations of school supplies for refugee children from Afghanistan. Since we didn't have to spend any money for our children's school supplies this year, we decided to take the money that we would have spent on school supplies and instead buy school supplies to donate.

Thanks for reading!  

September is here! The weather is getting a tad cooler. It's great! I am starting to feel the excitement of Autumn.

Japan sold pumpkin spiced lattes at Starbucks. I've said before, pumpkin spice is a popular autumn flavor. Pumpkin spice does not actually contain pumpkin. The blend of ingredients got its name because it is traditionally used to flavor pumpkin recipes.

The starbucks latte tasted okay, I had to add more cinnamon. I'm thinking about making pumpkin spice at home.

You need:

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
¼ teaspoon ground ginger
⅛ teaspoon ground cloves

I hope I can find all those things in Japan!
  

One day back in the States, I went out to run some errands and when I got home, these kids ran up to me and said, "Your dog is flying in the window!" I literally could not believe what they were saying, so I continued to my home. When I got there, what I saw was my dog had gotten caught in the upper part of my horizontal blinds. This created the illusion that he was flying to the neighborhood kids. I assumed that my dog was overzealously attempting to look outside, but the blinds were closed resulting in this silly incident.

When this happened, it was funny and irritating at the same time. It was funny to see my dog caught in the blinds, but also irritating because he ruined my blinds and I had to have them replaced.

Anyways, this story always gives me a laugh when I think about it and I hope you found it entertaining as well.