4th of July and the day after

Yesterday started with a trip with Chris to the mall to find her a few pairs of Niigata workpants. I found inadvertantly found some unmentionables, bathing suit bottoms, and a sundress. All on happily patriotic sales. I paid less for everything than the dress itself was worth by itself. :)

After the shopping spree, which lasted only 2 hours, we came home. I watched Matrix Revolutions on HBO or some movie channel, and tried to compose a letter to my supervisor. The english part took about 10 min. I just finished and sent off the bilingual email a few minutes ago. It took me 2 hours to get it to the point that I sent it to Chris and Marnie to look at. I hate being so sucky at Japanese, because all of the suggestions they gave me I understood, but they've been in language classes more recently than I have, so they remember the grammar better. And I only had to look up about 5 of the kanji they used. Not too bad. The reason I had trouble with this email was that I got my contract. Which is awesome. It said I would be working in 5 junior high schools, which if you've been paying attention, Nick, my pred. told me I'd be working in 5 elementary schools. Either way is groovy, (you know me), but I'd really like to know before I get there and different mental thought goes into the preparation of classes and whatnot. Ie: my wishlist would be different for stuff I need because of the different level of mental growth and english proficiency. Hopefully she or Nick will reply back soon.

After banging my head into the perverbial wall we went over to Kay and Charles's house for grilling and party-type atmosphere. There were only 7 of us there, and it was really nice and laid back. Charlie cooked the meat while Kay made a cobbler and taught me how to do it. I'm thinking it would be a great southern food to make for my kids in Miyako. It's really easy. 1 cup four, sugar, water, 1 stick of butter, however much fruit you want in it. All I would need to do is find someone with an oven. Which may be difficult.

We lit fireworks in the street (they live on a culdusac) after it got dark, I played with my favorite (sparklers). And I got some nice pictures of people and fireworks, which I should be able to show to my classes when we talk about holidays.

But on to today. Today is July 5th, which is my anniversery. So Leo and I have tickets to see Transformers, then he highered a driver to take us out to dinner. Our reservation is at 8:15, which is really late for dinner, but it's at this really, really, really nice place called Pano's and Paul's. It should be fun.