The Typhoon

So many of you probably don't know that there is a big typhoon covering, basically, all of Japan. Because of it, for the first time in about ten years my school closed... for the students. Teachers, of course, had to go to school... even though it's too dangerous for students to go. Anyway, all complaints aside, I went.

So I arrived at school and almost immediately found myself bored. I think the other teachers could tell too. I'm not sure if it was my constant yawning, the pages and pages of random kanji that I was practicing that gave it away. Anyway one of the other English Teachers, who is in charge of English Club came up to me and said "Let's go make some pies." So... I did.

In English Club over the past few days we've been preparing pumpkin pies from scratch. I missed the first day where some of the directions got messed up but that's ok...

This was my first time making a pumpkin pie from completely scratch. Usually I used canned pumpkin and then mixed all the spices and stuff in. This time, they started with big raw kabocha pumpkins. Anyway... we already had a whole lot of pureed pumpkin that already had condensed milk, sugar, and eggs in it. (That was their first mistake, that stuff was supposed to go in a lot later...)

So one teacher and I went to the cooking room and made pie crust and then made 3 small pies. After that, we served them to the teachers who all seemed to like it. Since they had put the ingredients into the pumpkin earlier, all the measurements were messed up. They had about 10 cups of pumpkin with ingredients for 3 cups of pumpkin. So it wasn't sweet or light enough. Either way it tasted good...

After the teacher and I had a slice we brought all the pies to the rest of the teachers in the office and had a bit of a pumpkin pie party on our rainy boring day at school.

Then I took nenkyu (paid vacaion) for the afternoon because after the pumpkin pie party died down I was starting to go crazy again. Now I'm at home eating instant ramen and watching Pee Wee's Playhouse on my computer. I am taking full advantage of my paid vacation hours.

-Mike