A Time To Suck

Good God, how do I miss New England weather at this particular moment. I think I'm built for higher latitudes. I'd much rather suffer through winter than deal with the sweat and heaviness of summer. Today was just a nasty day. Overcast, about 85, and the air was as still as could be. Stick me in a my monkey suit in a small classroom full of 20 smelly college students and none of us were happy to be there.

We've got a bit of a design flaw at the school's library, where my classes are, which is too ironic at an engineering school. There's only one small A/C unit, stuck at the back of the class. Not only is it insufficiently powerful to cool the whole room, but the only person who feels any benefit is the student who's sitting right in front of it who, inevitably, has himself and all the crap he brought with him draped across the vent. It's funny though because in general the students are usually comfortable since they aren't moving around. But I get hot and sweaty, and am thus drafting a letter pleading the powers that be to upgrade the aircon system in the library. Not really, but I want to.

My solution is to open the windows and let the breeze in. Up on the tenth floor there's usually SOME kind of wind to at least move the air around. Not today. It started to rain this evening which ratcheted up the humidity even more, so needless to say our air conditioners here are back on full power. And here I was ready to moth ball them for the winter after last weekend.

As if to rub salt in my wounds, Tokyo is getting a direct hit from a typhoon right now. I want a typhoon! We don't get them here much though. Any typhoon that came here would have to thread itself between the relatively narrow straight (which probably has a name) between the Korean peninsula and the southern islands of Japan. Take a look at a map and you'll see what I mean. It's an unlikely scenario, sadly.

Yesterday, on the other hand, was a nice day. The skies were blue blue blue in the morning, and the wind was strong, which made my classroom more than tolerable, though students were grasping for their papers most of the time so they didn't blow away, and we had to prop the door open with a chair so it wouldn't blow shut. That's my kind of classroom.

Here are some very random pics from the last few days.



Hearkening (thanks spellchecker) back to my landscaping days in college, I always appreciate a nice set of lines mowed into a lawn. The grounds crew was at it yesterday making the campus look tight.




Don't know why but I dig this picture of Japanese junk mail in junky old mail boxes.



Time to sign off here for the night. Tomorrow's Friday and the weeks are already picking up steam. Karaoke on tap for tomorrow night, which will be a nice debaucherous release at the end of the week. Pics to follow at some point over the weekend, maybe. Have a good one where ever you are.