Miyagi Gakuin University

 This year I teach three days a week at Miyagi Gakuin Women's University. The school rules say that a part time teacher can only teach three classes a week but I am teaching five. The rules allow for emergency exceptions and I have two additional classes that fall under the exceptions. They asked me to teach a sixth class but the top level committee of bureaucrats rejected this as too many, so they increased class size to make up for it. I have two classes on Wednesday afternoons, one on Thursday morning starting at 8:50, and two just after lunch on Fridays.

To get to the university I walk to the Yaotome subway station and they take a train to the second station. From there I go up to the street level and get a bus to the campus. On this day I discovered a sign taped to the window. It was announcing construction that would begin soon on the sidewalk outside the station. The thing that I found interesting about this was that the sign was in color. It had obviously been prepared on a computer and printed out on an attached printer. These days a very large percentage of PC have a color printer attached. Even notes and office notices are beginning to appear in color. This is driving the prices, particularly of the toner, down and that will mean an increase in color printouts in the future.

 This is the university campus from the non-smoking teachers' lounge. It is a very pleasant place that is well kept up.

 The mountains in the western part of the prefecture are clearly visible from here. I have climbed almost to the top of the mountain on the right.

 I took this picture from the moving bus on my way back to the bus depot. The light colored area in the middle is the remains of a landslide that took place during the earthquakes. It did not cause any apparent problems but it looks like part of the street above it is blocked off.

 This is back near my home. We stopped in the Lawson's Store 100 shortly after the earthquakes and they are finally getting around to repairing the damage to the upper floors. The store, in which everything sells for 100 plus 5 yen tax, specializes in food and is like a small supermarket, but everything is cheap or in very small packages.

This used to be an old house. I showed it a while back and it appeared to have been damage, but I could not be sure. In any case, they have torn it down and started to put up a replacement. This section of the street has a number of new houses. There used to be stores along here but they all went out of business and have been replaced by new private houses.

The next day I was back on my way to the university when I saw this bus pull into the depot. The picture on the back is of two cranes. The text beside the picture is a good lesson in Japanese. The first line says, "Mamoru beki mono ga iru" and the second, "Mamoru beki mono ga aru". They both mean "there are things that should be protected". The difference between the two is in the words iru and aru. Both mean "to exist" but iru refers to living things and are to inanimate objects.

A while back I showed some flowers that had been placed in the underground passage leading from the bus stop at the university to the other side of the road. On this day someone had put new flowers here and put a sign on the wall explaining that they were donated by some religious charity, if I understood the sign.