Something’s going on in my house and as near as I can tell it involves education and nearly frozen iPads.

As I’ve mentioned before that, despite her relative average scores in math, our oldest earned entrance into a high school with a science focus. (Note: She may have been recruited to play flute in the brass band club; more on that in a future post.) Because of this, we’ve entered her into a correspondence math course that involves doing assignments on an iPad that’s been sent by the education company. This apparently makes it easier for us and the company to enforce a level of immediate accountability.

However, when the iPad arrived, it was surprisingly cold, as if the courier was also delivering frozen pizzas and couldn’t be bothered to carry a separate box or bag for the iPad.

That’s one explanation, anyway.

I’ve always maintained that one of the Tokyo region’s dirty little tricks is that it always get’s cold one more time. However, even I didn’t expect it to drop into the 50’s (15 Celsius) at the end of April. I also don’t understand why the iPad was cold enough to get condensation and/or preserve raw meat.

Of course, once the iPad was extracted, wiped down and warmed, it fell upon me, apparently because I own an iPod touch and that makes me, by default, an Apple “Genius Bar” worker, to deal with all technical issues.

The problem with that is that Apple tends to deny that problems exist. This means that you are often on your own when dealing with an issue, which also means my main solution to all problems is “turn off then turn back on”.

This time, though, the problem was with the Apps store. My only solution in that case is “do something else for a while”. Sure enough, after a suitable delay, the app store started working again and our oldest was able to download the software and start studying.

One that began I was unable to help as her math level is already higher than mine. (She’s still doing math with numbers, but there’s a lot letters involved.)

I just hope she doesn’t need any help with that. If she does, I’ll just refer her to the iPad.