Yesterday afternoon Gordon called to tell me there is a storm building in the east and headed our way. Sure enough a tropical depression was developing into a tropical storm and was scheduled to be over head by 3:00 AM. I ran outside, put away a lot of the junk we (I) have lying around and took down the canopy. Today it turnes out that the storm will miss us and we'll get some rain and wind. Whew!

Last week Liberal Academy was "closed" so we could host a summer school of Japanese kids. I didn't have any of my regular students. Instead I taught English to two of the mothers of kids in the summer school. One mother, Kumi, brought her daughter, Marina. It was a fun class. Kumi and Sayako had some proficiency in English. Marina, it turned out, has a pretty good vocabulary but no experience in speaking. Getting any of them to speak was a chore. I learned a lot about what I need to do in teaching English.

Marina is one of the cutest kids I have seen in a long time. She has flashing eyes and a wonderful smile. She's thirteen but in another ten years she is going to be a heartbreaker. At one point I had all three of them unscrambling sentences. One of Marina's sentencses, when unscrambled, was 'I like candy.' I asked her about her favorite candy. She hemmed and hawed and consulted her mother in Japanese. At one point, to illustrate eating her favorite candy, she held her fist in front of her mouth and moved it back and forth. Sayoko and I exchanged a look and looked away and let her mother deal with that but inside I was laughing. It turns out she loves lollipops. I hope, it the future when she discovers sex, that she does not remember this incident.