Today was great. In the morning, i ran over to Michele's house so that we could head off to Japanese class. She wasn't ready, so i went on without her, meeting up with Yassin at the station. The teachers were kind of annoyed at her second absence in 3 weeks, so hopefully she'll get back on track. My sensei checked the practice test, and yappari, i didn't do so well. I got about 70%, but i thought i had gotten around 90%. If i had known more vocabulary, i could have done better. I told her that i want to focus on learning more and more vocabulary because grammar was not the problem on the test. I understood all of that, just not the friggin words. She tried telling me that if i work with "Minna Nihongo 2" i would be able to ace the test. But i would have been able to ace the test if i had known the vocabulary. So i told her to start giving me more homework which will help me build it. Hey, the teachers said two weeks ago that we were to start telling them what we wanted from them, so i'm telling them. Of course, I could be better about studying vocab. I forget it so much! I tried this mnemonic technique a couple weeks ago and that helped me to remember more words than usual, so i should do that again as well as setting more time aside in general for flat-out memorization drills.

After class, i met up with Tomoko and we went over to the abandoned house again. This time i picked up some nice, hardy potted plants and i got to raid the guy's record collection. Most of it's easy listening crap, but i found some old interesting ones. Some Louis Armstrong record, the soundtrack for "over the edge", and a pre-50's american popular music. Some other stuff too that i researched on the net to find that it had very little value. The relative who used to live there also gave me a 10,000 yen reward for finding that diamond ring. It was nice, so Tomoko and I went out and splurged on a nice dinner at Spaghetti Rossa, where the guy was not a jerk at all like everyone says he usually is. Actually, he's usually pretty nice to me, so i like the dude even if he is a little eccentric.

This week i have to talk with Michele about doing taxes. Apparently she knows what to do and it's really simple since we didn't make any money in America last year. I just know that i don't really have to do them, so i keep putting it off.

Tomorrow I have nothing planned so i need to take the day to do anything I've been meaning to do for a while. Also, meeting with Masaya to help him fill out his college application.

Japanese I learned over the past couple days:
限り　－　かぎり - limit, extent of: attach to plain verb form base
As far as I know, he doesn't work.
僕の知っている限りでは彼は働かない。
As long as you live in this apartment, there will be many strange sounds.
このアパートに住む限り夜で変な音が多い。

くっつく　－　to stick/cling to
Trash is stuck on your clothes.
ごみが服にくっついているよ

反　－　はん - Opposite, anti- (i.e. anti-war)
反テレビな人 - anti-TV. Opposed to television
あぶらぎる - Leering
あぶらぎるじじ - A leering old man
とし - large city such as Osaka or Tokyo
がくがく - wiggling in place like a loose tooth, jiggling back and forth
かちかち - rigid, too focused and nervous, thinking too hard about something
きびきび - attentive and alert to the point of annoyance like the postal workers who act like chirping robots with no common sense.