Idioms

Monday, I again led the class I'm subbing for another Navy wife who took a vacation. Our official topic of the day was idioms, but we spent the first hour or so just chatting. Since they know I'm new to Japan, the first questions related to driving and then they commented that it's my first summer in Japan. One of them announced that the rainy season is over, so now it really is summer. All further rain will be categorized as just a summer shower. I find these proclaimations highly amusing. It's not the rainy season, even if it's raining, until someone says so, and it's not over until someone announces it. The weather agrees with this assessment, though. It's been sunny and HOT. While I am too lazy to mess with converting Celcius to Fahrenheit, I will say that 30 Celcius in the house (according to the AC units) is too hot for me to be comfortable. I usually set them to 27ish. Yesterday, I know it got to 34 outside, and this morning at 9:00 it was already 30 in the house and almost too hot to walk to the store to get dinner. Bleh. I'll be spending a lot of time inside for awhile.
Also, another round of elections are coming up. This time, I recognize the headquarters of various canditates going up in various places, and the posters are also obvious now that I've seen them before. I even know enough kanji to read a few of the names. I think these are national because someone told me the others were city elections. I'm dreading the return of the loudspeaker vans, but hoping I'll understand a little more this time.
Tuesday, I went to Japanese as usual, and my tutor had a few questions about the English language from her studying. I jumped at the chance to help her out, as usual. As it turned out, she had been reading an English newspaper. She had four questions. The first three were idioms. First, she wanted to know what hokey pokey meant. This was fun to explain. I think, though, I left her with the impression that children in America dance the hokey pokey in playgrounds. I was trying to get the idea across that it was silly. Oh well. The next idiom was brown nose. She understood what it meant, but she wanted to know the source of the idiom. "Why brown nose?" she asked. I considered making something up, but honesty won. Instead, I tried to explain it without using any offensive words. My first problem was that she didn't know what a butt was, so it was hard to explain about kissing it. I used a little sign language, though, and she caught on and we both had a good laugh. Then we moved on to apple polishing. The Japanese version is sesame grinding. Never in my wildest dreams, though, did I imagine myself trying to explain something like that to a Japanese person.
My tutor's final question was why anyone would bother to publish an article she had read. The article announced Tony Blair's conversion to Roman Catholicism. She wondered why anyone would care what religion Blair followed. She said that in Japan, the religious background of political figures was irrelevant. I really couldn't argue with the idea that it shouldn't matter too much.
Zack's been working hard as usual. The stress is still high. I know he's having a rough time because he's not talking long term Navy. I've gotten used to the fact that good weeks lead to talk of staying in twenty years and bad ones lead to the insistance that he'll get out at the first chance, so I don't take the planning part of it too seriously. Instead, I let him hog the wii when he's home. That thing is too fun. Dory's a little scared of it because I accidentally clocked her with the controler when I was playing tennis. She keeps her distance now.
Sorry there's not much news lately, but we'll keep you posted. Who knows, I might actually take a few pictures sometime soon. There are some fun festivals coming up in the next few weeks, so we'll see...