The storm before the calm

This week has kept me pretty busy. Mid-terms have rolled around, and I was responsible for composing more test problems than ever before, on top of all my regular class planning activities. Next week, on the other hand, I will have very little to do while the students are testing. I'm scheduled to be in five of the tests to read the listening portion, but of those five, two pairs are doubled up, so I basically only have three hours of work all week. (That's not counting grading, of course.)

Also, I heard that megory is planning to come visit me this summer for about three weeks. Yay!

On Saturday, I spent most of the day participating in another Zul'Gurub raid with my Warcraft guild, with two of my brothers present as well. This raid was more successful than my first one, and we killed the main boss Hakkar. Unfortunately, I suffered from some terrible lag throughout the game, so everything I did was in slow motion. Sometimes I would be frozen in place for five seconds or more during combat, where even a split second can mean the difference between the character winning or dying. I felt kind of bad about it, because it meant I wasn't very dependable as a team member, but there wasn't much I could do.

Today I went to Osaka for a manga fan event called Communication Game. I was tickled to see this sign when I was heading for the shuttle bus to the event site; Nishiwaki is the name of one of the main characters in the manga series. Quite a few of the participants wore costumes for the event, and they graciously posed as a group for everyone to take pictures.

Part of the event was a bingo game, and they had 16 prizes to hand out to the winners. The bingo cards consisted of stickers of the various manga characters pasted in whatever order the player desired. I got four in a row rather early, and since I was the only foreigner present, this drew the attention of the MC. She asked which character I needed for a bingo, but it was a relatively minor character. As the game progressed, they got to the point where there were 15 winners and practically the entire room with four in a row. The MC drew a couple minor characters in a row, but no one had used them. Finally, the last one she called was the one I needed, so I got to be the 16th winner. (It's entirely possible that she called minor characters on purpose, hoping not to have a whole surge of winners fighting over the last winning slot, but I can't prove that.)

The winners all received small prizes that held some connection to a character from the series. The winners went up in order and each called out the name of the character whose prize she wanted. One called a character named Uzaki and was told to wait for her prize, which hadn't happened to anyone else. Finally it got to me, and there was only one prize left...which turned out to be Maya, who happens to be Uzaki's love interest in the series. We were both asked to open our prizes at the same time. They were matching rings made out of beads, which we were then asked to exchange. Getting into the spirit of things, I knelt down and put the ring on "Uzaki's" wedding ring finger, which got a great response from the audience. We got to show off our pair rings for the rest of the afternoon.

So it was a fun but busy weekend for me. Now I'm working on planning what I'll do with all my free time at my desk this week...