A Secret Letter I've got a good idea. No cost, no risks, but the idea makes me a little excited. I decided to set up a secret letter in a certain place. Maybe this kind of action is a little childish, though. 　　Last week, I found a mysterious tube on a street at my town. The street is in the back of a shopping mall and are relatively empty. I've often passed there, but I never found the tube before. I'm not sure that it's been there for years or not. The tube was round and black. It was a case for a diploma and it was wired to a gas meter. I felt it weird that the diploma tube placed there. The mysterious tube: https://38.media.tumblr.com/5e0cd2577bd6a0c3dff529d6c55c196e/tumblr_n8uwt0n6Xc1teii89o1_500.jpg 　　I took off the cap and checked the contents. But, it's empty. Then, I imagined what this was for. Maybe, someone left it there and the tube was a just garbage. Or, someone may use it for some reason, for example, a sort of a post for the slip of a gas meter. After gas man reads a gas meter, he puts the slip of the result into it then the owner of the gas meter took it out from the tube. However, my poor guess might be wrong. 　　Anyway, when I go to the place again, I decided to set up a letter into the tube and wait for a reply from someone. I thought waiting for a reply from a stranger a little fun. Or, if I could find the owner, I would ask he/she the purpose of the tube instead.

"Olives" Or "All Leaves" English and Japanese are quite different languages. Particularly, the English pronunciation is one of the most challenging for Japanese native speakers. 　　When I read a blog on the Internet, I remembered a story about the communication failure due to bad pronunciation. One of my ex-classmates at an English school shared this story. 　　Here is the story: 　　During his journey in the US, he dropped into a Subway's outlet. He wanted to buy a sandwich filled with vegetables. That was because he got tired of meat-oriented diet at that time. 　　 When we place an order at Subway, we can choose type of bread, veggies and sauce. We can ask to arrange a sandwich to taste, for example, we can place an order as "some more tomatoes and without onions." 　　 He placed an order like this; "without olives." 　　 Though, his pronunciation of "olives" was not proper. He should have said as "ɑ́liv", but he said "o-li-bu" like the pronunciation as he usually says オリーブ in Japanese. The shop clerk asked him in astonishment, "Don't you want any vegetables?" That was because the clerk misheard his order as "without all leaves." 　　 I heard that he was able to get a sandwich with salad in the end. And I thought that I might be next at that time. Ah, English pronunciation is difficult.

Mom's Salt One summer day, in the kitchen, my mother was replacing a bag of salt into a salt pot. Mistakenly she poured all of them into a water-filled container. Much of salt dissolved into water and spoiled. Then she said to me, "Couldn't you find some way to recover it?" 　　It was muggy and hot day, and I didn't want to stand in front of stove, however, I decided to bring them to a simmer, in order to evaporate the water. 　　About one hour, I kept to bring soil water to a low boil, in the end, I made salt again. Since I stood in front of stove for a while, I had a sweat a lot. Though I lost my in the body, I felt happy to recover salt successfully.

Sharing with Someone About My Unpleasant Feelings Healed Me. In the past few day, a few trivial things made me unpleasant and sad. I tried not to think about them but I couldn't. I often remembered about that again and again. Then, that made me feel blue more. Usually, I seldom talk and share with others about myself, in particular, bad and negative things that happened to me. I keep them bottled up inside. I'm not sure about the reason but perhaps I'm worried about how they think after they listen to my story. Only if I came up with a nice punch line with my story, I change a bad story partly into one that sounds funny a little and share with it. However, I got an opportunity to talk to a person about my bad feelings, and talked irregularly about the bad news as it happened. While I was talking about that, I remembered how I felt sad and unpleasant and I wept a little. 　After I talked about that, I found myself feel refreshingly and ease. I no loner remember and am suffered from that. I think sharing with someone about my unpleasant feelings healed me. I want to say thank you to the person.

Demounting and Cleaning Devices I like disassembling small electric appliances to clean them. I demount and clean, for example, electric fan, keyboards and computers, and so on. Using for a long period, they got dusty and stain in the small parts where we can't maintain easily. The other day, I decided to clean a PC mouse. The color of it was originally white but it turned yellow a little due to aging degradation of the plastic. I also decided to bleach it out. At first, I removed some screws to break down the product to building parts. Next, I chose plastic parts that can be breached. To bleach them, laundry bleach is effective. A website said that in order to bleach plastics, hydrogen peroxide water, bleach activators and ultraviolet rays were required in chemical explanation. Somehow, I soaked the parts into water, pour a spoon of laundry beach and place them in the sun for a few days. In the end, it worked extremely well. The color of plastics returned white that looked new. At last, I reassembled all parts back. The mouse regained its color, and worked as it did.

My Mother Forgot Her Cell Phone One day, I found that my mother forgot to bring her cell phone in the living room. Since she just went out just a few moment ago, I quickly went outside to catch up with her. Fortunately, I found her shortly. While I was putting it in her hand and said, "Mom, you forgot your phone." She said, "Oh, thank you!! It helped me. Without this, I’ｌｌ lose track of time." It was only then that I realized she referred to "watch" as "phone."

Looking for English Drills and Textbooks to Practice Verbs Would you recommend any English drills and textbooks to practice the usage of verbs? I'd like to practice in particular changing active to passive voice and building vocabulary of verbs.

Hi, there! :) I'm quite new here. Since I'd like to improve my English skills, I signed up here today. Could you correct my texts and suggest more natural expressions? I'm a native speaker of Japanese and maybe I could help your Japanese!