Sometimes I don’t know how I keep all this together, being a publisher and author plus touring is not an easy job! I guess the fact that I’m still working in a coffee shop at 11PM on a Friday night has something to do with it!

Got the newsletter sent out this week, and I’ve been working on the photos of the actions to the CD5 songs. But whilst I’d got all the green screen stuff set up I figured I might as well just go and video the whole teaching guide videos for CD5. I haven’t a clue when I’ll get time to edit them up, but at least they’re now recorded! You know I’d love to do more video work, it’s so much fun!

I also got asked to do the Tokyo JET Programme Orientations this Summer in Tokyo, which is cool! I’ve never done the national ones before, and it’ll be a nice challenge and a good chance to fill the ALTs in on some of the survival techniques they’re going to need! I also got a call from the ALT advisor at the Ministry of Education asking me to come along to the “EU-Japan Year of People-to-People Exchanges Video Clip Competition Award Ceremony” ( a bit of a mouthful that! ) to have a chat about exchange projects and to meet the EU ambassador! Can’t be bad, and if you’d like to pop along it promises to be a very good event!

Whilst I was looking for the official Japanese for “Orientation”, I happened to come across the document that shows that ALTs salaries and travel expenses are not paid by their town, but are in fact paid for by Tokyo. So if your town gives you any hassle about that, just show them this document!

And I also noticed that the girl who did the Recontracting Conference Elementary School workshop had once again basically just copied the entire Genki English website into her handouts. Now I don’t mind helping ALTs in the slightest, but it’s not on really when people don’t even ask!! There’s a lot of work gone in to building all that info and it’s not nice to just have it stolen!

Ahhh… anyway, back to work, they’re going to throw me out of the coffee shop in 15 minutes!!