2004-10-19

Went to Chiba and found some beans--Oh yeah!
The ingredients say they've got pork lard--Oh no!

Okay, so busting out with rap lyrics is not my forte. But I was still pretty excited. My quest to find Mexican style beans was accomplished. Lard or no lard, I was buying these things and taking them back. The dumb beans were like 3 bucks a can but I was gonna get those things come heck or high water. I cooked up the first can yesterday--made some rice & bean burritos for supper and shared some with Amanda. She liked them a lot and so maybe she'll want to come to California now since you can get these things anywhere over there. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA MY PLAN IS NEARLY COMPLETE

The weather is turning here, which means that a lot of students are getting sick. A bunch of them are absent every day it seems. Of course, not all of those are sick--they're just lazy and sleeping in as usual.

The cold weather led directly to the WORST THING THAT HAPPENED SO FAR IN JAPAN. To me, at least. Last night I was making the bean and rice burritos to take to Amanda since she was teaching late at the school. It was cold outside, so I grabbed my jacket out of the box it'd been sitting in all summer. When I pulled it out of the box and held it in the light, I saw my hand was about half an inch away from a centipede. A hideous squirmy puke-green CENTIPEDE! In my APARTMENT! Not three feet away from where I sleep! I dropped the coat on a pile of clothes and ran around my apartment yelling for the next five minutes.

I HATE CENTIPEDES. If it had been a spider I wouldn't have even cared. If it had been a snake I would have gotten it out of the apartment, but it wouldn't have freaked me out much. But a centipede...did I mention that I HATE centipedes? I spent the next ten minutes staring at the centipede trying to work up the guts to grab it. I had a pair of ski gloves that I decided to use (although it took me some time to actually put my hand into the glove for fear that more centipedes were in the glove).

I then waited around for several more minutes trying to work up the courage to grab the dumb thing. Just so you know, the centipede was red-orange and like three feet long, with huge fangs that were dripping acid onto all my clothes. It took me six minutes using both my hands to wrestle the thing off my jacket. Actually, the centipede was probably three inches long. I took one grab at it and missed, which caused it to start crawling and then I knew I HAD to grab it before it disappeared under my clothes. So I took one more stab at it and got it. I made haste to the toilet and flushed it. Of course, when I went to sleep, I had dreams of centipedes crawling all over me.

And wouldn't you know it, I looked up "centipedes" on the internet today and found all these web pages written by people who love the hideous little buggers. I now feel a little bad having flushed the one. Maybe next time I'll just throw them out of the house. However, the Japanese centipedes are poisonous, so I guess I'll have to go through my boxes today and make sure no more of them are gonna surprise me.