Category Archives: Personal

Both Awesome and Boring

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The best way to describe how I felt was “bored sardine.”

Our oldest had her high school entrance ceremony today and that meant I had to find a jacket and decent trousers and put on a tie. Unfortunately, it also turned out that we had to bring indoor shoes which meant we had to change out of our outdoor shoes, although we then had to carry them in a plastic bag. As a result, I was in the dress up version of a mullet: a blazer, trousers, and tie on top; Denver Broncos flipflops on the bottom.

Math and masses then took over to make things less than comfortable. The first year class has 367 girls which meant around 734 parents and various and sundry grandparents had to fit in a gym along with nearly 800 upperclasswomen and their teachers. This meant we had to squeeze into small chairs organized in tight rows that even Ryanair would find excessively cruel.

The ceremony started awesome as our oldest and a bunch of other girls walked in and all the older students sang Handel’s Messiah (which was invented in Lindsborg, Kansas) and then sang the Japanese national anthem.

After that things took a turn for the boring as each new girl’s name was read out as part of the first official roll call and they each stood, said “here” and bowed to the principal who bowed back. Now that’s about 5 seconds to hear a name, say “here” stand and bow and receive a bow from the principal times 367 girls which is around 30 minutes of time so boring I was actually looking forward to the speeches.

Then the speeches started and I could see people all around me nodding off (including She Who Must Be Obeyed). I even caught myself drifting sideways during the speech given by the head of the Parent Teacher association.

Eventually, half the crowd was turned loose to go home (where our youngest was waiting patiently/watching television) and the rest stayed at school to attend open classrooms and get more information.

Then, after our oldest and She Who Must Be Obeyed came home, we went out and ate way too much steak and salad bar, but it was all delicious.

An Oddly on Schedule Day

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Strangely enough, I actually stayed on schedule today, for the most part. What’s odd is the part I didn’t do was the part where I scheduled time to play a game.

I do not believe this is because, after all these centuries (give or take a few years)  that I am suddenly become a responsible person. Rather, it just took a long time to make a box.

I actually woke up later than I’d plan which put me behind. I then managed to catch up, somewhat, by knocking out my daily 10 ideas and a page or so of writing. That was followed by doing my actual “job” by producing “work” now that the company I work for has decided to trap me in my house on days I’m not assigned to the school where I work.

Note: Despite my whining, I’d much rather face the current house arrest than be forced to go into the office and work. Not only would I have to wear a tie but there is evil there that does not sleep. The great eye is ever watchful. It is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire, ash, and dust. The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume.

Unfortunately, the poisonous fumes have damaged the brains of management meaning I couldn’t send the “work” in until much later. (That’s part of the house arrest: appearances must be maintained.)

After the house arrest portion of the morning was finished, I focused on selling ink. That involved lots of bubble wrap, some packing peanuts and a small box that I crafted out of a larger box and then kept tweaking to see if I could reduce the weight to lower the cost yet still protect the contents. I then took that to the post office and sent it off.

After that some new ink arrived and I made some sample pages. That led me to stare at the growing pile of odd and rare inks in the variety room and ponder the best ways to dispose of it, (after ordering more of the ink that had arrived, of course).

At first I tried to implement one idea. That involved attempting to use the features provided by my webpage host and then swearing a little and abandoning that attempt when the features proved to be less intuitive than I’d hoped. At this point the overthinking took over and I felt a bit of panic caused by freaking myself out and I finally distracted myself for a bit with a game.

Now I think I have a plan. A lot of ink and a plan.

Busy and Unproductive Days

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Today was oddly busy and yet oddly unproductive. The only things accomplished involved old forms and getting the girls out of the house.

As part of my “work” days I’ve decided to update a spreadsheet I’ve been using for over a thousand years. (Note: I made it in 2,000 at the end of the last millennium; this is a new millennium; a millennium is a thousand years; therefore, I’ve been using it for over a thousand years. That’s math.)

Updating the spreadsheet accomplishes a few things: it makes the spreadsheet more usable; it satisfies my “work” day requirement; and it is completely useless to the company I work for. ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Of course, dealing with Microsoft always involves swearing, but this time there wasn’t as much as usual. There was some tedium and the promise of swearing later when I find the mistakes I made today. (There will also be swearing when I attempt to use it on my tablet.)

The other accomplishment was getting the girls ready to go. Our oldest, in addition to going full vampire, has also gone full teenager. This means the brain damage is real as is her self centeredness. (Her grandfather gave her some money. She’s spent some and doesn’t see the need to go see him and thank him in person. In fact, she doesn’t understand why she needs to thank him at all.)

In other words, she’s not only the center of the universe, she is the universe.

(Note: She probably inherited this from me, said the man who writes a daily post about his life.)

This attitude disappointed She Who Must Be Obeyed who got angry. This prompted back talk from the vampire, er, our oldest, which increased the anger. I helped pack the care and sent them on their way.

(Note: Because I’m obligated to work, I technically have to be available to be sent out which means I can’t leave town without a vacation request that uses paid holidays. This may actually be the only good thing that came out of this “work” day nonsense. re. earlier comments about self-centeredness.)

Now I have a few days by myself. I’m sure I’ll think about doing something productive.

The Fail and the Lesson

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One of the odd things I’ve remembered now that I have a high school student in the house is the way I became a vampire in high school.

Our oldest is now a vampire and today that caused some problems.

I’ve mentioned before how I tend to reverse “polarity” so to speak during holidays. That involves staying up later and getting up later. As Benjamin Franklin wrote: Late to bed, eventually to rise makes a man, something, something wise. (No, really, look it up.)

As our oldest has become a vampire and I’m shocked by two things: 1) how fast it happened and 2) how merciless it is.

That’s what led to today’s Fail and Lesson.

Our oldest, enjoying a very rare actual day with nothing to do, made plans to meet a friend. However, complicating this was her also getting up early (5:00 a.m. ish) to see off another friend who’s moving to a high school in another prefecture where she will study soccer and probably end up on the Japanese women’s national team some day.

After our oldest came home, She Who Must Be Obeyed encouraged her to go back to bed and then I was instructed to wake her up at certain time so that she could meet the friend.

I made breakfast, hung the laundry, did my “work” for the day (no really, I did actual work that will help me with the school year) boxed some ink, filled in some mailing labels, washed dishes and made lunch for our youngest.

Our oldest woke up at 2:30, which was three hours past the time she was supposed to leave and well past her meeting time with her friend.

My reaction was something along the lines of “How did you get there I thought you went out oh crap I was supposed to wake you up why the hell didn’t you set your alarm if today was so important to you?”

She rushed out and eventually met her friend and a good time was had.

I felt bad about things until I found out that she had, in fact, set her alarm, but had slept through it. Unfortunately, no one else in the house heard it or we’d have found her asleep.

Now, though, having slept until the mid-afternoon, our oldest may have turned full vampire. We’ll find out in the morning when we expose her to sunlight.

 

 

A Lightbox in the Darkness

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If She Who Must Be Obeyed had come home an hour earlier, she probably would have turned around and gone back to work.

Instead, in keeping with the motherly tradition of following “I’m home” with a critical “What the hell is that?” whilst still in the entry way, she questioned why no one had opened the curtains.

I stated there were two reasons 1) it was raining so there was no sunlight to let in and 2) I needed the darkness. Oddly, this latter reason didn’t seem to comfort her.

I needed the darkness because this morning was an exended photo shoot of  pens and random stuff I plan to review and/or sell. This involved breaking out my lightbox–a Foldio 2 I got via Kickstarter–and testing the limits of the camera on my Samsung tablet. I almost broke out my tripod and DSLR but decided I wanted to see what the tablet could do. (This also meant I didn’t have to charge the DSLR batteries, dust off the tripod or wrestle with its aging parts.)

The Foldio 2 works well, but it requires the room be as dark as possible. That meant I kept the kitchen and variety room curtains closed and turned off all the overhead lights I could. Our youngest was practicing piano and doing homework and didn’t notice the darkness in the rest of the apartment. This surprised me as she usually has a natural scanner that tells here when is the best/worst time to interrupt someone else’s project in order to achieve maximum disruption.

After almost two hours, I emerged into the light with over 300 pictures. The next stop was to upload them all to my desktop and load them into Lightroom. That was followed by a brutal, occasionally depressing culling. The tablet didn’t do as well with ink swatches as I’d hoped. More on that in another post. I’ve scheduled other Saturday photo shoots, some that will involve my DSLR and the old tripod, in order to learn how to solve that problem.

The next step is to post the pictures along with some prices and sell some of the stuff. But I also have a lot more pictures to take. I just hope I can convince She Who Must Be Obeyed not to be afraid of the dark. At least for a few hours.

 

An Annual Ritual of Much Touching and Pondering

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Everything must be touched. It is a curse.

One of the hoarding habits I have is an odd compulsion to touch everything I plan to throw out before I throw it out. I look it over, relive a few memories and then decide if I’m really going to ever use it again. Because of this, it’s impossible for me to simply throw out a box of stuff I haven’t touched in months without going through it first. Luckily, I’ve gotten a lot better at throwing stuff out.

I bring this up because the end of the school year marks an annual ritual I have where I purge the old school related stuff and make room for new school related stuff. I do this at school during exam pass backs and whilst waiting to check final marks.

I also rethink my desk space at home and try to declutter it by rethinking how I use it. (Lately that means “less space for writing” and “more space for gaming”.)

The problem is that rethinking the spaces on the desk requires rethinking the spaces in the file cabinet and “variety drawers” (which is totally not a dirty phrase). Moving stuff off the desk, if it’s not to a trash bin, requires moving other stuff.

At the same time, I’m culling my pen collection to get it down to the stuff I use (including stuff that stays at home) and to implement a one in/one out policy. I’ve already chosen several pens to sell. I also have 15 bottles of ink around that I hope to resell. (I acquire interesting stuff as it becomes available and then hope I can sell it. So far, so good.) Then there’s a number of knives that need to be culled.

Note: in an odd way, reselling the ink has made it easier for me to decide which pens to sell as I’m more comfortable with online buying and selling. I’ve also managed to arrange PayPal accounts to get money from my US account to my Japanese which makes She Who Must Be Obeyed Happy.

Today I cleaned one space–a trick recommended by Leo Babauta in his Sea Change Program–and plan to do another space tomorrow.

The trouble is, I start to think about why I filled that space in the first place and why i want to keep that stuff.

Or I’ll just buy some ink. Or play some games. We’ll see.

Longer and More Boringer

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It is commonly understood that the most boring things on earth are a Baptist sermon and a Japanese junior high school graduation.

Both start out with lots of hope, energy and spirit. People dress up in suits and, well, Sunday best, and sit in rows and, on occasion, sing songs. This spirit carries people through only part of the ceremony, though.

In the case of the Baptist sermon, God eventually takes leave by pointing out “I AM the Word” implying that it’s not necessary for God to sit and listen to someone else explain the Word. God leaves and goes and has brunch and gets ready to watch football (or basketball depending on the season). Those left behind suddenly find the spirit waning (with God present but not technically there you can expect nothing less) and they get restless and start thinking about brunch and football (or basketball depending on the season).

At this point there is at least an hour of actual sermon left and all that’s happened is the reading of the church announcements and one 17 minute prayer. (Attend a Baptist church this Sunday and prove me wrong…)

In the case of a Japanese junior high school graduation, the energy starts with the students walking in and, one by one, receiving their diplomas in silent dignity. Spirits are high and a few tears flow from parents’ eyes as tens of thousands of dollars worth of camera and smartphone equipment record the event.

Then the speeches begin and the spirit is murdered through repeated blunt force trauma.

In our oldest’s graduation today, there were five different speeches, not including two by students. The longest speech, about five minutes in, invoked John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” and my reaction was “ah, crap. Here we go.”

As a rule, when someone invokes JFK, you know the speech is going to go on a while.

As more people took the podium, it seemed that everyone was expected to give a speech. At one point I’m pretty sure the MC was saying “Has everyone given a speech yet? Have you given one? Lady at the back in the dark suit, yes, you, have you given a speech yet? Sorry, what’s that? Three months ago? You gave your speech three months ago when this ceremony began? Well done. Thank you.”

It should be noted: no one actually records the speeches on any of the tens of thousands of dollars worth of camera and smartphone equipment. Instead they save their batteries.

Eventually, after two hours, including an hour of speeches, the ceremony ends and the students and VIPs leave and the parents are locked in the room whilst the principal gives another speech.

After that we are set free to visit the classrooms where the actual fun begins. Our oldest’s homeroom teacher showed a slideshow, complete with music, of fun moments from the year. The class surprised him by serenading him with a famous pop song, changing the words to include his name and “arigato, sensei”. He burst into tears.

Everyone else started crying, too. Even I got something in my eye. And not because of boredom.

Paper Work and Friendly Strangers

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One of the things that happens with simple plans is a few simple things can make them rather complicated.

My plan today was to open a Japanese PayPal account so that people could transfer funds from an overseas account to my new Japanese account. Setting up the new account was no problem and only took a few minutes. Then, as an experiment, I tried to send money from my US account to my new Japanese account.

Nothing ensued except a series of  “I’m sorry, Dwayne, I’m afraid I can’t do that” messages. Those were followed by some web searches and a lot of swearing.

Eventually I figured out what I had to do, which wasn’t that complicated: change the account, prove I am who I am and that I live where I live and do this all with photos of documents wait five-seven days to get a pin code and then enter the pin code and then everything will work. (Well, maybe it was more complicated than I thought; suddenly BitCoin seems like a good idea.)

I did all the required changes and sent it off to the Mysterious Forces of PayPal (actual job titles) who contacted me with further steps to take that involved the odd notion of entering the information in my Japanese PayPal account in Japanese. (What evil is this?)

That seemed simple, except the system wouldn’t allow me, even after I changed languages, to enter the entire address in Japanese. This prompted a message from me.

Oddly, at this point, I received a positive message that said I didn’t have to worry about that one bit of English. The same message said the friendly stranger had also made another change (putting my full name as it was on my submitted documents) which made my life easier.

It all ended so well that I’m now convinced a disaster of some sort is about to occur.

 

All Over But the Tears

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Our oldest is convinced she failed today’s high school entrance exam. She may have, but it might just be stress and panic talking.

The past couple weeks included occasional arguments between our oldest and She Who Must Be Obeyed about which school our oldest should try for. She chose, as her first choice, a high level public school with fairly strict admissions standards. However, before the final registration fee was paid, it was possible for her to register to sit the exam for a different, easier school.

Note: Most schools in Japan have their exams on the same day at the same time, with private schools having their exams a couple weeks earlier. This means students have to choose which schools they want carefully as they only get one chance at each type of school. I suspect there’s too much registration fee money involved for this to ever change to a single test system.

As parents our dilemma is that if our oldest doesn’t get into her first choice it’s going to cost us a lot of money to send her to the private school that is her second choice (and to which she’s already earned admission). It is also a good school, but it has private school tuition (and boys–more on that some other day).

This leads to the other dilemma: although changing to a slightly lower level school might increase her chances of admission, it can also hurt her chances for getting into a top tier university. Schools in Japan are ranked by academic prowess and by their ability to place students in good universities. (Both our oldest’s choices have good reputations in that regard.)

Unfortunately, the school handed out the answers after the exam and our oldest is pretty sure she messed up at least part of the mathematics section. She was in tears and apologizing for messing up. We got her calmed down and told her she deserved to relax for a while.

Now, however, we enter the phase of second guessing. She Who Must Be Obeyed is second-guessing the decision to let our oldest sit for the higher level school. Our oldest is doing the same thing.

I personally would rather have our oldest try for a school she likes rather than one we prefer or to hedge her bets by picking a lesser school.

She may have failed her exam, and it will cost us money if she did, but I’m glad she went for it. I’m proud of her for that.

We’ll find out what happened next Thursday when the school posts the results.

Ink and Marking in Confluence With Posts

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I’m in the middle of marking final exams which means it’s a great time to deal with ink. In fact, today was a confluence of different events related to recent posts.

Not only am I marking final exams, but once again, I have some concerns about the listening test as the first listening I’d recorded at home had sound issues that earned comments from one of the test proctors. I was worried they’d affect the results, but thus far the scores have fallen in the usual spread.

The marking is being done with the MUJI fountain pen I gave my initial impressions of a couple posts ago. Although I like the nib, I can already sense a few issues that will make an eventual long term review–hints: thin, slippery, dry. It hasn’t made me reach for my old marking pen yet, though, but it’s still early in the process.

Then, in the middle of marking, the doorbell rang and three boxes of ink arrived. I’ve mentioned before my low margin, suddenly higher volume (barely enough to buy me a bottle of ink for myself) newly started side business but today it actually became a real thing. I’m now responsible for carefully packing and shipping things people have already paid for.

I also have to remember who ordered what and where they want it sent–I kind of wish I hadn’t written that all down in pencil–and get it to the post office without breaking anything. I then have to deal with the post office staff who think INK=WMD. I also have to decide if I want to continue this and how to make it a more organized thing. Then I have to do some math to see if the margin is merely low or actually negative.

Oh, and at some point I have to finish marking my exams. That is also rather low margin. And math is involved eventually.