Strange Days…

I had a strange week. It started with my last post. For some reason, which I still don’t understand, it messed up the format of my webpage. I tried to fiddle with the CSS layout, but I couldn’t figure it out. (My knowledge of CSS is…about like my knowledge of calculus!) You may have noticed my blue sidebar moved to the bottom of the page. The frustrating thing was that I didn’t have a chance to fix it for a couple days (more on that in a sec), and some of you saw the site for the first time like that!

Anyway, I finally just copied and pasted it and that worked…strange! But then the post was too long, so I wanted to insert a break, so you could click on the “show me more” link and expand it. But that broke it again!!! So I am going to leave it alone. Instead, if you want to get that long post out of the way after you have read it, you can take advantage of one of the features of this site, which I wrote about in the “About this site” link in the upper right hand corner of this page. Since you might have missed it, let me explain…

If you look at the top of every post, you’ll see a blue bar. On the right is a white oval. If you click on the oval, you can expand/contract each post. If you want to hide a post after you have read it, you can. Or you can expand a hidden post. Kinda cool.

Anyway, I will try to figure out the reason for that bug later. But for now, it should work ok. The next problem was that I managed to break my laptop power cord, so I couldn’t recharge my laptop! It had some charge left, but on top of that, I couldn’t connect to the internet! So I didn’t want to waste my charge, and I couldn’t get online anyway…My computer is under warranty, so it was just a matter of getting to the Apple Store in Ginza to get a free replacement. But of course, I was teaching on the other side of creation, so it took a couple days. I made it right before they closed on Thursday night. Getting the part was painless; it took about 3 minutes. After I got home, I still couldn’t get online. As I wrote before, we had been having storms, and my internet connection at this apartment has never been as good as my last place…luckily, I decided to check all the connections, and I saw my cord had been pulled out. Somehow, I had accidentally pulled the phone cord out of the DSL modem! I felt like a dummy! But I was relieved…

Ok…so my computer and my website were back in order. Now all I had to do was go to the music college, where I teach every Friday. I don’t remember if I wrote about this, but I teach four classes there. Two weeks ago, my first class was canceled, and no one told me! I finally was able to find out the next week! And the kicker was…yesterday, I was on my way there. Mind you, this school is way out in the country. It takes an hour from Shinjuku…if you had walking and waiting times, I need to leave almost 2 hours before the class starts. The train time alone takes about 1.5 hours. So I was one station away when I got an email from my company, saying that the class had been canceled! So when I got to the station, I called them. They said the school had called them to tell them that classes had been canceled. So I had to go to my company to do office work.

Ok, I know I was supposed to work anyway, but…doing office work burns me. Basically, my company gets paid for the class anyway. And I was inconvenienced because I spent 3 hours on the train. They don’t lose anything by letting me go home. But instead of just going home, I had to go work at the office and proofread materials and check their translations. The thing is, I have a ton of papers to grade and lessons to prepare for my classes, which of course I have to do in my “free time” (<–what’s that????)

Anyway, I finally finished and went home. I opened up my email and checked next week’s schedule, and I got another surprise: I am not scheduled to teach at that college next Friday, either!

Now I am wondering…when they said the class was canceled, did they mean forever? Or is this a mistake? Or do I have a two-week break? Surely they wouldn’t cancel four classes like that…? The lack of information is mind-boggling. I checked my schedule, because I (as a representative of my company) had two interview meetings, and I took extensive notes. According to my schedule, there shouldn’t be any breaks in September. Oh well. I guess I will try find out on Tuesday. (Monday is a national holiday). Or, if I don’t ask, I’m sure someone wlll update me in October.