Too much is never enough

I feel like a neverending font at the moment - those that thirst for plausible-sounding nonsense need only twist my handle and loose a cascading torrent of it, enough to fill any container they have. Five such vessels have overflowed in the past couple of weeks, four of which were the workshops for the mid-year seminar coming up this week; the fifth, my plenary session, took gallons. They're all officially done and ready to be uncorked.

Those in the front rows may get wet.

Friday was the day I was to officially "hand over" the workshops to the seminar's helpers. This wasn't for want of speaking ability - the two hours of explaining how it was done went by very quickly (for me, at least). "I'm getting very good at talking, aren't I?" I said at the end; nobody laughed. I deliver my my plenary session, of course, which happens last thing on the second day. This means I stand between 400 people and their weekend like some kind of extremely boring last boss. Last year's survey made it clear that everyone wanted teacher training, and so one of the monkey's fingers folds down thus; they may want to word their wishes more carefully next time.

Most of the rest of my life had to take a back seat to all this last week, which is probably why the first thing I could think to write about was work. Despite the brain frying, I left the office Friday night feeling satisfied with how things were going and had to drink quite a lot of red wine to get back to my usual cynical self. The long-awaited new TV arrived on Saturday and was set up immediately, then we packed the old one into an old IKEA bag and carted it to the shop to trade it in. For reasons I don't entirely understand, an already very good trade-in price was almost tripled due to a "campaign" that was going on. I love the second-hand industry in Japan. We celebrated with a nice dinner then headed home and crashed out from all the hard work.

We finally managed to get out on Sunday to what's known as shichi-go-san (7-5-3), which is a festival where children of those 3 ages are taken to temples for blessings. It's awfully good business for the temples apparently, with parents having to fork out a hundred dollars or more for the privilege - judging by some of the kids' clothes, I'd say that was only the start of it. They tended to either be dressed up in little suits or tiny, intricate kimonos that I could almost visibly see them growing out of. Still, for that moment it looked very smart and it could be immortalised at one of the photo shops nearby, for just several hundred dollars. Once we had had our fill of culture, we headed out for a quick whip around the shops, went home to watch Harry Potter on the big screen and ate bacon and hash browns for dinner. This is the kind of thing I'm going to talk about when people ask me about what I did in Japan, just to annoy.

This is the last busy week before things start to wrap up, I think - I count about 5 meetings, 2 days of seminar and at least 1 party. The Harry Potter premiere is on Friday night, so I need to try and work out a way to mostly dress as Harry for my plenary session while maintaining my professional conduct. I might just pretend my wand is a laser pointer. After that's all done and dusted comes the final straight leading up to the end of the year and possibly awkward farewells that aren't. Nothing a little plausible-sounding nonsense won't fix, I'm sure.