Snow at the homestead!
The most snow we’ve seen here for a while. Perfect snowball and snowman snow, but perhaps less good for sledging…
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Glad you’ve been having fun Jul but it sounds like it been pretty arduous and painful trying to get work. I think we should make you World Leader, you could create a world in your image. That way everyone would be chilled and everything would just flow effortlessly. Julios for El Presidente!
Nicky, that contraption looks as if it was first used several hundred years ago to brand slaves with the union jack so no Yank could claim them as one of theirs. Perhaps during the Victorian era they started using them to make toasted cheese sandwiches – it might be worth a few bob.
Maybe you shouldn’t blame the dry cleaners. I think I know what happened to your suit. Was it a sweet, sickly, musky kind of odour? Repellent but not rancid? Rank but not acidic?
Difficult to wash out, etc, etc.
The answer is: the Minion pissed on it!!!!!!!!!
If it was left flat in Tan’s old room, the mystery is solved. She pissed on our duvet in there and sundry other things.
She’s now an outdoor cat.
We found this in the kitchen. I feel I ought to know what it is. 
hail all.
cheers liv! this computer cant seem to compute the complexities of this new blog thing so ill do the captions later
interviews so far. i was going to do this once i had a job as it would be more amusing. but as i don’t have a job yet it is perhaps quite bleak.
so the first one was for a kids school, teaching children from 0 to 12. and when they said zero they aparently meant it. the chap interviewing me made it clear that if they could teach children in the womb english, then they would be doing it right now. i assured him that i could change a nappy and wotnot.
the interview went off to a bad start with him fixing me with intense look and stating “i am really interested in hearing about your experiences at this willow nursery”
it took me a moment before realization hit me and i had to explain that this was a plant nursery not in fact a childrens one. this seemed to depress him somewhat and put a bit of a damper on the rest of the proceedings. in fact i began to get the feeling that he was going through the motions after that. any way needless to say they didn’t get back to me with a time for my second interview.
next was one helpfully engineered by alex’s friend angie. it was once again for teaching english to kids (we had been told that this was where they jobs lay) but this one had a unique drama method of teaching. we met up with the chap who seemed somewhat like a walking cliche, intensely interested in the sound of his own voice, jabbering on endlessly about various aspects of the job until we were quite stupefied. then things took an unpleasant turn. with a cheery “lets step things up a bit!” he suggested we progressed to the next stage of the interview. (this was the first we had heard of any “next stage”) this involved us acting out a delightful bit of roleplay. where a bunch of people would come and we would all pretend to be 4 year olds and alex and i would take it in turns to teach us. this may well sound deeply unpleasant, and i can assure you it was. asked to recite and teach a childrens song (i have no recollection of learning any children songs) teaching words with aid of flash cards and carrying out imaginary conversations with fictional parents, we were a little nonplussed and perhaps concerned. summoning extreme mental strength we managed to pull of insane feats dispite the horrifying embarrassment of leaping around with other grown men pretending to be four years old and singing at the top of your lungs the “grand old duke of york” complete with full body gesture acomplyment. all in all i think we did a good job, or “well job” as our slightly perculier interviewers ensisted in saying continuously throughout. in fact they were a wierd bunch and im not sure i like them. its hard to like some one when they turn from grinning and chanting to deadly serious and talking about monetary gains in a fraction of a second. they came across as completely false and i would hate for my children to be a sent to a school with teachers who had masks of caring but inside where nothing but bleak machines. still that seems to be the “drama” way. everyone is playing a role mainly because there original personality is mildly unpleasant.
dispite warmly assuring us they would contact us in 3 days we never heard from them again.
next was gaba…which seemed to go alright. minor horror was that i needed a black suit. i had a black suit but for some unknown reason it smelled like someone had taken a leak on it. someone probably had at one of the balls i frequented at uni. any way i took it to a dry cleaners. they said it would be back at six. this was handy as my interview was the next day. hold on it was a quarter passed five now! how could they get it done in 45 minutes? needless to say i went back at 6.30 to find that they in fact had meant six tomorrow. alright, not too bad. my interview was in the evening. went back the next day and lo, they meant PM! and if it was alright by me the suit would be ready at 7pm. my interview was at 6pm! curses. deciding i would just have to wear my grey suit. went onto the internet to check what i needed to take with me. hmm somehow i confused the dates and the information seminar was yesterday. fail! felt a bit rubbish. decided to ring them up and the girl on the other end said i didnt need to worry just reschedule for then next seminar. jolly good. i did so. that day rolled around and i started to get ready. peeling open my freshly drycleaned suit that i had collected a few days ago i quickly realized there was a problem. it still smelled of yak pee. i stood there, incredulously sniffing my siut for many minutes trying to convince myself there was some sort of mistake. the mistake was that they had clearly not drycleaned my suit at all. they had spent 2 days not cleaning my suit! fiends! i had about five hours until the interview. drastic measures were needed. i alternatively sprayed it with deodorant and my crystal spray and hung it up out side. i took it down an hour later and the impossible had happened, it smelled worse. somehow the melange of chemical scent, crystal and pee had created something horrible. i took it inside and demanded alex smell it. he said it was fine but his sense of smell is somewhat suspect. still i began to suspect i was being paranoid so i slither into the fetid thing and headed off. it takes about 45 minutes to get from yokohama to tokyo where the interview was taking place. that is as long as you don’t get on the local train which takes about 2 hours. i didn’t know this. needles to say i was on the local train frothing at the gills as zero hour slowly aprouched. my suit was beginning to ripen in the heat of the train and it was making me physically sick. i was sweating profusely. i admitted to myself that i wasn’t in the best frame of mind for an interview. i got to the destination station dead on five. which was the time i was supposed to be at the interview. actually they preferred if you were there 15 minutes early. i charged out of the station and headed of at a sprint in entirely the wrong direction. 10 minutes later, peering at my poorly drawn map of the location of the recruitment place i began to suspect that i was quite lost. this really took the biscuit. the gods did not want me to get to this interview. i rang up again. i explained that due to circumstances entire beyond my control i was 15 minutes late and lost and would it be ok if i rescheduled? it was ok. huzah! i spent the next half hour finding the place and recording the location in my internal map.
i went home in a somewhat bleak mood. i didn’t know of any other dry cleaners. i contemplated buying a fresh suit. but the expense was an issue. deciding that there was no way i could make things any worse i decided to wash my suit by hand. it was only the jacket that smelled and only on one side. i gave it a stab and hung it up outside. i then promptly forgot about it and went off to yokoham for the evening. it began to rain. rain in japan is not some sort of half hearted drizzling affair, but full blown torrents of water jetting down from the sky. no umbrella and you may as well give up going outside for fear of drowning. this concerned me somewhat. i had tried to minimise what i had washed to keep the potential damage to a minimum. ahh well at least it will be clean now. came back to the hostel and had a look. not as bad as i suspected but pretty wet. i made the bold decision to leave it out over night and hope that it would be a nice day tomorrow. as it turned out it was. the winning combination of sunny and really windy. and outside a glistening fresh suit jacket. it was dry looked fine and smelled kinda alright. jolly good!
i went to the next interview date with only minor mishaps. chatted to some of the other people going for the job. most of them seemed to have been in japan for years. we were called in and told about the job. then we had to do a test of sorts. it was not too difficult. then the interview. this consisted of the chap peering at my passport and talking about good places to live in tokyo. then he slid over a date for the next interview. i met up with some of the other people afterwards and we went for a relaxing drink. the end to quite a stressful process.
i shall keep you updated with more tales of idiocy as they occur.
