Things have been going quite well over the last week or so. I’ve uploaded lots of new stuff on the site, including the January newsletter, some great readers games and an animation for the Card Game to make it easier to understand. The packs have been really popular at workshops where I’ve shown people how to play them, but on the site it’s pretty much 50/50 split between people who know the game and those who haven’t a clue how to play it. It is such a fantastic game that I really want everyone to try it out, even if it looked a bit scary before!

And for a change the CD5 songs are coming on really nicely! The ones I’m particularly happy with are “Creepy Crawlies”, “Where is Mr Monkey?”, “Can you…?” and “What’s your favourite?”. The googlefight.com site has been really useful in solving disputes over which terms to use in the songs, e.g. “Creepy Crawly” vs. “Creepy Crawler” or “Can you play the guitar?” vs. “Can you play guitar?”!

I’m also working on a new project, to have a downloadable ebook available on the site! A really cool ALT in Hokkaido has written a fantastic “Big Blue Book” of ideas and games for elementary school. It looks so good in pdf form and contains a ton of stuff. So as soon as I can sort out the technical side for credit card payments this could be something really exciting!

Otherwise it’s been cool hanging out in the UK. The local comedy club is really great! It really made me miss doing all the JET workshops. Some of the comedians here are pretty bad ( most are cool though), but I look over the JET workshop videos and people are just killing themselves with laughing!

I’m really getting into the Pimsleur Spanish course. Their method is brilliant, it’s a bit like my idea of having “lego block” bits of language that you can re-build and reconstruct to form new stuff, but their method does it on acid! I’m only on lesson 8 but there’s a whole load of stuff I can say. I also noticed there’s a new advanced Michel Thomas course out, which should be worth looking at!

And I’ve also bought myself a really cool pair of headphones as an early birthday present to myself, the groovy Shure E2!