Plastic toy food is a common request for teachers of small groups, and I’ve managed to find some! So I put up an order form on the site today. I’m not sure how many of these I’ll be able to provide, but if you’re interested, click here for Plastic Food!!

I also did the November update of the Japanese pages with the mini cards and picture books. Last night I also found out that the “Submit your games” section of the site hasn’t been working ( another victim of all the spam attacks). So I fixed that and 2 new games came through! They came through titleless, so I called them “I’m going to …” and “Wow“. They seem really good! And if you have sent in games recently and they haven’t appeared on the site, please send them again and a million apologies!

Then I got on the Shinkansen for a 3 and a half hour ride to Nagoya. I was quite genki, but not up to doing office work, so I messed around with some song ideas. After I sold all my studio gear earlier in the year, I’m still trying to decide which new music package to go for, either Ableton Live ( pricey, professional, bit boring looking), Sony’s Acid ( fantastically easy to use, inspirational, touch pricey), Magix’s Music Maker ( dead cheap, really fun, but crashes and a bit of a toy) and Cubase ( major professional, boring, but I can upgrade my old version). It’s all very tricky! But anyway on the train I was messing around with Ableton Live and it is fantastic!!! The best thing I found is that you can play MIDI straight from the computer keyboard. Recently I’ve been buying up loop libraries, as real time playing doesn’t really work on a computer. But with Ableton it does! It’s cool just to jam away on the keyboard, start up another track, and add in some new stuff! Plus the effects are great, unlike Cubase they are really easy to set up and have cool presets to get you going straightaway. So I had a great time jamming away on the train ( don’t know what the people either side of me thought) and I wrote a really cool track, totally from scratch. That is good. I couldn’t save it because I only have the demo version, but I might buy this package. The only problem is that if I do get it I can quite see myself doing remixes and dance tracks instead of Genki English tunes!!

Then got into Nagoya and Star Wars was on telly, but I think I’ll wait till Christmas to watch it on DVD!