Busy

Quite busy, actually! I managed to snag a "part-time" job assessing a pronunciation test that the university has made mandatory for many students. They are paying me 500 yen per test evaluation. They expect it to take a while, since it can be difficult for native speakers of English to assess non-native pronuncation (but the university wants to know how their students are pronouncing English, so having genuine marks for ever last English sound is important to the institution). I however, have taken no less than 4 upper- and graduate-level courses that studied phonetics, and I was trained brutally by a Finish man that I cannot thank more than enough for his well-meaning, difficult training in SLP (Speech Language Pathology, a horrid term).

I have finished most of the tests in under 6 minutes, on average, and thus I am making close to $40/hour. With my lifestyle, that essentially means that I can easily earn as much as I spend in a month--in five 3-hour days! So now that I landed the seasonal dream-job, I of course have to work as much as I can until the folks arrive here. At my current rate, I believe I can finish a grand total of around 240 evaluations during regular school hours, with interuptions for a few free trips that have been offered to me by my colleages and business connections that I have gathered here in Japan.

Yes, Adam just said "business connections" and that may be the last time you hear it from me! It's really too bad that this is only seasonal work at the end of the (Japanese) school year, Otherwise I could pay for a reasonable portion of my school at Gonzaga while attending, if I could only find such a job in the USA. I have to face it though; chances are I will never make this much money again in my life, and if I do it won't be something that I have such an ease at in doing the task as is the case with phonetics (my favourite part of language studies and the focus of this job).

So anyways, I'm going to try to get Tsune in on some kind of activity with us, maybe like USJ (Universal Studios Japan, which opened it's new roller coaster TODAY) or something like it! I STILL haven't seen the guy since he homestayed with us in the US! He lives about 3 hours (almost 4) away from me, but our schedules don't normally line up.

Well, that's it for me for now. I need to get food; I've only been eating about 2 meals per day because of my schedule. Big meals though. I better go make myself sick of everything I like to eat here before I leave so I won't miss it as much now.