Week One

This post brought to you by melonpan, food of the gods. Also, this brand "is reputed to as a good taste." I love you, Japan. You come up with the best signs. "Emergency Egress Plan." Now, to teach the Americans the word egress.


I'm done with my first week of interning and, so far, I'm loving it.
I have my own cubby in the break room/back office, binders full of info, and a notebook featuring 'Binky the Space Cat' for, well, notes. Our tech just left yesterday, so there are five others working at the library, including the director, four of whom are nationals. I've also met a volunteer, who does storyhour every week.

WARNING: Libraryese beyond this point!

The first few days, I got a tour of the library and the classrooms in it for the colleges, as well as a tour of the rest of MWR offices and buildings, then did some shelving and practiced with the catalog system by taking some books out of circulation. I also got a tour of the rest of the base and a meal at the officer's club, where I'm rather sure I'm not usually allowed. I started working on my big, big project, looking at all the current records, which were recently merged onto another system, and fixing the problems. At this point, I'm literally grabbing kid's paperbacks off the shelves in bunches, then working on each record, since the searching functions never pull up everything (No one knows why. Only two of the five E BAI's showed up when calling up E BAI, but they all showed up under an author search...etc...). Obviously, this is flawed, since kids are in the kids' room all day and things will be checked out, but I can run a date-edited report after going through the alphabet once to get the ones I missed. As part of this, I'm also looking to see if/when every item has been checked out and whether it needs repair or replacement.

Other than that, I get to sit in on various meetings, including a base-wide marketing meeting about holidays, where I watched the Japanese club owner argue that St. Patrick's Day is about Irish food with someone who doesn't want to get yelled at by officers again for there being no drinking specials on the holiday. I also get to work on programming and display ideas for these various holidays (both American and Japanese) , including Teen Tech Week and Military Child Month, which, not surprisingly, is a big deal around here, and happens to fall along with Kodomo Day, for extra kid-celebrating. And, I had my very-first Japanese meeting with a rep from 3m, who thought I knew what I was doing; it was amusing, since I'm still not even sure how the current magnetic gates work or how many people the library sees in a day.
Look! Business card! English side not shown to protect guy's privacy, since I assume most of you can't read this side and don't want to call Japan.

Yesterday was Thursday, which is storyhour day, so I sat in on that and helped out a bit. Our tech is usually the head of it, but it was her last day, so her replacement was helping. A volunteer, Rie-san, comes in to read, and they sing activity songs (The insy-weensy spider...it's been a while) before making a craft based on one of the books they read. Usually about 15 kids show up, since that's the room's occupancy limit, but a new batch of people had just come in and all the wives travel in packs, so there were ~30 kids, speaking three different languages while their parents futilely attempted to convince them to stick to language X and use their glue on the right side of the paper. They're all so cute! I ended up helping one girl finish her project (a flip book of The Very Hungry Caterpillar) while her mother watched her hyperactive brother; she put exactly four drops of glue on every piece of paper and yelled at her neighbor for putting too much glue on his (to be fair, so did his mom). And next week Rie-san won't be in, so I get to read! Here's hoping someone else picks out the books for me, since I only know what the library has up to COL in the paperbacks...

LIBRARYESE done.

Now for life outside of the library. I don't have much of that, yet, especially since it gets dark around 5. But, the commissary (read: base grocery store) evening ID-check guy knows who I am, so that's one less person to show my letter of permission and passport to... The maid cleans my room daily, so it's made me compulsively neat since I feel that only I should be the only one picking up my messes. Plus, she keeps tucking my stuffed toy into my covers, which makes me feel bad even though it's adorable. The TV is all American stations, which is disappointing (no J-comedies and morning anime for me) and makes me wonder about the NDF forces on base. Do they have separate channels or do they suffer through the same ones as me? I mean, there's an AF/N channel that talks about the flu vaccine and domestic violence a lot and airs The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (I don't know if they see the irony of this choice).
My care bear, all tucked in. Today, the pillow were arranged around her. I don't know whether to be mortified that someone is making my bed every day or what.

I have a three-day weekend, so I'm going to explore this weekend! I'm thinking Ikuta, Sophia, and discovering what city my base exit actually leads me into. I need to find some good ramen places nearby and I want to see what those mountains in the near distance are. I also noticed on my train map that I'm rather close to Fuji-san. It's been in the high-fourties almost all week from about 9 'til sundown, even though there's still ice and frost in the mornings; this means I won't freeze while wandering various cities. I'll takes lots of pictures!
And, to end, Rufus showing off my way of getting Vitamin C--C.C. Lemon pop. It tastes awesome but is fizzy and tangy like crazy and I have a feeling that it may have many of the same properties as battery acid. I don't quite get how it can have so much vitamin c in it, but I don't question something that good.