Category Archives: Random

Another News Cycle of the Same Cycle

I was pretty sure I’d seen what was happening on TV before. She Who Must Be Obeyed said I had but not with that family. This proved that the only things certain in Japanese are death, taxes and maps verses navi’s.

As we are in the middle of Golden Week here in Japan, there are certain TV traditions that must be upheld: there will be endless reports of the endless traffic jams at the beginning and end of the holiday, reports on the number of people taking a couple days of to enjoy a full 10 days of holiday and a dad with a map will compete against a dad using a navigation system in a race to the same location.

This race usually involves a car full of mom, dad and at least one kid with patience of, well, a kid. Dad A puts his faith in himself and his driving instincts and Dad B buts his faith in technology.

Dad A chooses byways and sideways that often seem to lead in the wrong direction which Mom A is more than happy to point out. Dad B does similar things but uses the navigation systems on-the-fly traffic reports to help choose the correct path.

Along the way each tends to take a pit stop to allow family member to buy souvenirs and “evacuate”. I don’t remember if this is a requirement or not. I also don’t remember if there’s a prize other than pride.

I watched this race a few years ago and I vaguely remember Dad A winning, but not by a significant amount (maybe 15 minute or so) as most famous places can only be approached by a few routes. Today, when I saw the same events happening in similar types of cars I was convinced it was a rerun.

She Who Must Be Obeyed told me it wasn’t, although it was exactly like things we’d seen before so it kind of was. It was a rerun with different players.

That actually made sense. I don’t know who won. Because I’d seen it before, more or less, I didn’t bother watching the ending.

What Day Through Yonder Window Breaks

It’s the time of year when I’m not sure what day it is. Even worse, I don’t actually trust myself to know where I’m supposed to be.

This week, starting with this past Friday, is Golden Week which four Japanese national holidays all occur in the same seven days. The 29th was Showa Day, which is named after the era of the Emperor the world new as Hirohito. The 3rd is Constitution Day, celebrating the 1947 constitution. The 4th is Green Day, which used to be on the 29th, while the 4th used to be a “bridge” holiday between the 3rd and 5th but that was all changed in 2007. (Confused? Now you’re beginning to understand my world). The 5th is Children’s Day which is actually in honor boys but, well, yeah.

The problem is that this big holiday season comes just a couple weeks after the start of the school year. Right about the time we get in a teaching rhythm, we have four days off (sometimes, unless the 4th is on a Saturday, then we don’t. Long story.)

Friday was a day off, but even She Who Must Be Obeyed said it felt like Saturday. Then we had Saturday which felt like Sunday, and today I woke up as if it were Monday (then went back to sleep when I remembered it wasn’t.

Even more confusing, we work tomorrow, but then we have three days off, and have to work Friday. It’s common at this time of year to wake up in a panic and check your calendar several times to make sure you are where you’re supposed to be. Luckily, because it’s a national holiday and not a random day off the schools tend to have, you quickly calm back down and go back to sleep, laziness, sloth, etc. On the random days, you no longer trust your calendar or any other ways of tracking time.

The trouble is, I actually have to be some place tomorrow. At least I think I do.

Variety Days in the Variety Room

I cheated, but it was worth a try. It worked reasonably well but it was still cheating.

Today was a day for random tasks as it turned out that our oldest had school (normal for some schools) and that She Who Must Be Obeyed was going to an open house at the school. That meant I was watching our youngest.

Because there was no way to make other plans I did a few things I’d been putting off. First, I finished cleaning pens and chose a couple that will be put up for sale. After the cleaning, of course, comes the reinking and that led to some rethinking and I thought about putting a couple more up for sale. Of course, I’ll have to clean them first, which adds complications. (In a future post I’ll talk about the criteria I’m using for keeping or selling.)

That process, of course, took a lot of time. I had to pull the pens apart, rinse them out and soak the nibs and feeds to flush out all the old ink. While the nibs were soaking, I took on a different task: sharpening knives. This is where I cheated.

I recently acquired a diamond sharpening stone and, just as an experiment, a guide for helping the lazy/unskilled keep a knife at a consistent angle for sharpening. I spent some time playing with that and the main problem was it was sharpening the knife at a much different angle than I usually use. This meant I had to spend a lot of time removing a lot of steel before I could actually form the apex and sharpen the knife. This meant I spent a lot longer sharpening the knife than I’d planned.

The guide worked well, but it doesn’t solve the problem of curved edges and a lack of skill. It also probably won’t solve the problem of the way we abuse our knives and manage to dull them rather quickly.

After the cheating, er, sharpening, I managed to get some writing done, but the sense that I’d cheated at sharpening distracted me. Tomorrow I’ll have to freehand sharpen something just to prove I can still do it.

I’ll also think about cleaning and selling those pens.

Frozen IPad and the High Tech Lessons

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.

A Little Less Conversation A Little More Food

I had a big lunch because history has taught me that there wouldn’t be much food at supper. I didn’t count on the drinks coming slowly. I also didn’t count on there being rules.

I also didn’t count on my food trying to kill me.

Tonight was the welcome party for new teachers at the school where l work which meant everyone assembled at a bar for drinks and food. However, I spent part of the afternoon hunting for bottles of ink. I also had a sneaking suspicion that there wouldn’t be much food so I had something called the Chicken Chicken Platter for lunch. This involved two pieces of what e’d call “chicken fried chicken” back home and some chicken nuggets, salad, soup and rice. Then I decided to have ice cream because Baskin-Robbins was having a sale.

A group of us met for pre-drinks and then went to the party. We were impressed by the live seafood we had to pass on our way to our room but dismayed when our welcome was an unusual rule. Although the restaurant was “all you can drink” they required that the first drink be beer. After we finished a glass of beer we could order other drinks.

I do not understand why this was so but I suspect it was a way to force us to do the Japanese tradition of everyone pouring everyone else’s drinks in the spirit of camaraderie.

Then the food started trickling in and we quickly discovered two problems: 1) the food was only trickling in and 2) the drinks were only trickling in as well. We quickly learned to order extra drinks, but the wait left us with little to do but converse. Those of us who’d gone to the pre-party were, of course, relaxed and brilliant, but everyone else was way behind and, quite frankly, struggling.

Eventually, even those of us who’d attended the pre-party found ourselves struggling to remain relaxed and brilliant without the distraction of food.

The food itself posed an interesting problem. We had to grill it ourselves and, at one point, we were served fresh clams. They went on the grill and sat there doing very little until a couple of them decided to explode and spray shell fragments around the room.

Luckily no one was injured. The truth is, though, if the drinks had come faster, we’d have probably laughed about it and done our best to make the rest of the clams explode. Instead, we just ended up talking about how dangerous it was.

Deservedly Mindless Distraction Day

In the past, on days like today, I’ve pretended to care. Today I couldn’t be bothered. Today I put my butt in a chair and started playing.

Well, I did something resembling work, sort of. But I did it in a way that allows me to deal with it at another time.

Using the excuse of resting my injured foot, I decided to play a game for a good portion of the day, especially as it was the game’s Asian anniversary weekend and that meant there were lots of special rewards.

That, however, turned into a much longer gaming session than I’d planned, even though I was’t playing particularly well.

At some point, however, I managed to inventory all the ink I have in stock (exact amount: a lot) and then put off doing things that will get it off the floor in the variety room.

This, of course, was the real reason for all the gaming: avoid making decisions. However, I didn’t just play games to do that, also cleaned a pen, which took longer than I though as it had collected gunk from the past and from the ink I was cleaning out. In my defense, it’s one of the pens I plan to sell and I want it in the best shape possible.

At some point during the day I made lunch for myself and our youngest and then told the youngest to do dishes. (I consider this work as it’s my job to teach “self-reliance” and “responsibility” and lots of other polysyllabic words like those.)

Oh, and in keeping with my tradition of watching final episodes of television series, I watched the final episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. That seemed to be an important thing to do today.

Nap Attacks in Odd Positions

For want of a sofa I fell asleep in my hands at my desk. How I did this I do not know, but I think it was because of my rolled up sleeves.

One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve experimented with upping my carbohydrate intake a bit is that I’m once again starting to get the insulin produced carb crash at work. Today’s manifested itself in odd ways. I set my elbows on my desk and fell asleep sitting up with my face resting in my own palms. I do not know how this was possible except that I must have had the perfect balance of angle and weight distribution. It also helped that it was warm enough that I’d rolled up my sleeves. This prevented my elbows from splaying and my face from dropping to the desk.

It is more or less understood that falling asleep at your desk is acceptable in the office of the school where I work. This is pretty cool, however it was better in the past.

My office in the old building had a pair of sofas that were old and as questionable as the used sofas that end up on the porches of rental properties in college towns. They also were comfortable and it was easy to lay your head back and take a short nap. Other teachers would just lie down and occupy an entire sofa when they napped.

Unfortunately the new office, despite having better lighting, better chairs and less ancient dust, lacks a proper place for a properly questionable sofa. There are a couple sofas out in the main office, but they are way too public. There is also a “rest area” downstairs, but one colleague says it is occupied by janitorial staff and when he walked in the reaction was something like this so he didn’t stay very long.

This means, if we want a nap, we have to sleep at our desks and rely on a lucky convergence of rolled up sleeves and proper angles, or put our heads down and risk drooling on our desks or using our arms as pillows and ending up with odd patterns on our faces.

Or we could go to bed earlier, but that’s not likely to happen.

The Pain That Lessened the Pain

I had my first ink order cancellation today and that meant I had to refund some money. This was disappointing but it probably saved me a lot of pain.

The order started out larger, then got smaller. I’d even agreed to sell a bottle of hard to find ink I’ve been hoarding (note to self: don’t get “high” on own supply). I’ll probably still sell the bottle, but maybe in a different way than I’d planned.

Then, today after part of the order arrived from the store, I packed the box and made ready to go to the post office. However, sometime during the packing process, as I was moving around the house, I engaged in my periodic tradition of smacking the crap out of the Little Piggy Who Went Whee Whee Whee All The Way Home on the corner of a rolling set of desk drawers. This left me with a cut and an impressive bruise (although a couple ice packs helped remove most of the swelling).

Rather than head to the post office, I decided to have lunch (chili, which is the same thing I had for breakfast; long story) and walk to the post office later.

Unfortunately, and luckily, while I was putting off making the painful walk to the post office, I got an email from my customer requesting a refund because an acquaintance of the client’s will be in Japan soon.. As I hadn’t yet mailed the box, I was able to give the refund and make myself look gracious and save myself some pain in the process.

After that I had to brain storm ideas about the best way to get rid of the growing inventory in order to get some extra cash to rebuild the inventory (oddly, that makes sense to me) and add a couple features/bugs to the business. I also want to move a bunch of it before EMS rates go up at the beginning of June.

However, the important part of that brainstorming was that none of the ideas involve putting on shoes and walking anywhere.

(Tell Me Why) I Won’t Like Mondays

I made a kid stand up today which is not something I usually do during a first class. In my defense, kids usually don’t sleep during the first class.

This was the first Monday I had to teach this school year and the early readings tell me it’s probably going to be my most annoying day. It starts early with a first, second, third period schedule that includes two low level junior high classes and then jumps with only a few minutes’ rest to high school second year. That’s followed by a three hour break and then a sixth period class.

Although this gives me time for lunch and planning, it didn’t star will today.

My first class gave off the “abandon hope all ye who teacheth here” vibe almost as soon as I stepped in the room. Bad classes seem amused by your presence and I had one kid take his time getting sat down. I made a show of watching the time on my watch, which hurried him up a bit but I’m taking bets there is homework in his future (more on that in a future post). After that the class seemed split between those who did the work because it amused them and the “we are not amused” group.

One kid went to sleep about half way through his assignment and after I woke him up he put his head down and tried to go to sleep while I was talking to him. As a result I made him stand up and took his chair. When he sat down during a writing assignment I reminded him to stand up. The hope is that he will remember this little lesson after two or three times of suffering through it. (He won’t, but at this stage in the school year I still have hope.)

The rest of the classes went well although I’d much rather have four classes in a row than have to work three, sit three, work one, especially when my first class is probably going to be bad.

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Pardon the Random Horror Interruptions

I had several things on the to do list today, some of which involved actual time wasting, but somehow a horror movie got involved. Well, part of it anyway.

Things actually started out well. I followed my morning routine and even deferred the time wasting until a later time while I worked on a different project. I researched information about import/export rules and how to start a company in Japan whilst still having enough money to actually operate the company. I also managed, at some point, to sell some ink.

I also managed to send out a couple emails and do a little reading but, at some point, and for the life of me I don’t remember why, a topic came up (and I don’t even remember the topic) that started one of those stream-of-consciousness random connections fits and that topic, whatever it was, led to Miniskirt Police, the Miniskirt Police website, a quick search to remember the name of Luna Nagai, who at one point was a member of the Miniskirt Police, and then a search for her, which led to the name of a horror movie that I managed to find online, in Japanese, with Spanish subtitles.

The movie is called Tomie: Another Face and is a made-for-tv adaption of a manga about a high school girl whose hobby is getting herself murdered so that she can resurrect and haunt and taunt her killer (or killers). Because I had a lot to do, I only watched bits of the movie to get the general gist. The movie is actually three episodes about Tomie tricking people into killing her. The second segment, when she enters the life of a creepy photographer, is the best and shows off Nagai’s ability to go from innocent, to sexy to creepy, to creepy cute all in a few seconds. (Also keep in mind that Nagai was only 17 when she made that movie making it all a bit more creepy.)

However, that gave way to the official time-wasting of the day and then a longer project to make swatches of different inks to aid in their sales. That took an hour and, hopefully, will payoff some day.

It wasn’t a normal day, but, in its own way, it was a normal Sunday.