Neoguri

The same week as the Interactive Forum competition, a pretty hairy tropical storm started making its way through Okinawa. It got all the way up to a Class 5 Typhoon (Neoguri) as it blew through the tiny islands, causing quite a bit of damage and injuries. Reports put it as the biggest one in the last fifteen years. My BFF gave me a call to let me know about it, so I started making sure I had some supplies for when it did blow through the Kanto region. Come Thursday, I was getting e-mails about it from Sempais about how the enkai for that Friday had been canceled on account of the typhoon, how school was going to be canceled on account of the typhoon, how we needed to be ready for this huge typhoon that was headed our way. All this talk about this horrible, horrible typhoon coming our way, but teachers still have to attend school!!! One of the 9^th grade teachers got a fax saying that he had to go to the Board of Education (?) on Friday, and he of course was pissed about that. He made his displeasure known in Japanese, which was funny in its own right to hear, but I picked out a few words that made even me snicker. Because yeah, that sucks.

Everyone in the teachers' room was making a big deal about this typhoon, to the point where they would come up to me and tell me I should take a day off etc., etc., the traffic would be bad, the busses might even stop, yada yada… I told them that as long as the busses were still running, I'd probably still go, but I'd call if I wasn't able to make it. “You should really just take a day off.” I told Eikaiwa sensei about it and she checked with her kid's nursery school. She found out it, too, was canceled so she'd have to take the day off and stay with her kids. Well, that settled it: I asked for Friday off, as well.

On the way home I stopped by the Mega Donkey to get a lantern, just in case. I also filled up my empty water bottles with tap water just in case. I had a dozen cans of fish, just in case. I had a good supply of food in my fridge, just in case. I took some newspapers home from school to keep water out, just in case.

I felt ready.

I stayed up a little later than normal, keeping tabs on the course of the typhoon as I had been all week, assuring family and friends that I had stuff prepared and that I wasn't too worried, but finally went to sleep.

The next morning…

There was sunshine, intense heat and humidity, and a stillness only outdone by death itself.

The typhoon had been downgraded (upgraded, technically) to a Class 6, no longer considered a typhoon but merely a subtropical storm or some such, and had drifted south east onto the water.

I kept the curtains closed and stayed inside the whole day, much like I would have had there been an actual typhoon to hit. <_<

The end!