Mid-May Updates

I don't have any single, monumental event or subject to talk about, so I'll cover a bunch of little stuff.

Pt. I Talk About the Weather
May, known as "Satsuki" (皐月) in classical Japanese, has long been seen as a lazy sort of month, famous for warm, muggy days. As I mentioned before, it was that way for a while, but then a wee typhoon skipping just off the shore made things really nasty. After a few days of that it went back to being May again for a while. However...

Last Thursday (May 14) I made an important decision. I have long relied on Firefox on my desktop computer back home, but on my work laptop I'd been using Safari for Windows for at least a year. I rather liked Safari; its elegant, streamlined (BLUE!) design appealed to some aspects of my personality, its quick loading speed was nice, and I thought it looked clearer and easier to read. There was one nagging issue that bothered me, however: plug-in compatibility. Ironically, the plug-in that had the most problems was Quicktime, like Safari an Apple product. That wasn't so bad, though; what really got me was the fact that, after one update, it started crashing frequently when I entered text. After the last update the problem got even worse. It got to the point where I was having to exit Safari (using Task Manager) and restart it two or three times whenever I wrote an e-mail or blog entry. I had a couple of theories as to the source of the problem and tried uninstalling some things and reinstalling others, but nothing helped. I finally gave up, opened Control Panel, went to Install/Delete Applications, called up Safari, and hit the "nuke" button.

At the exact moment that I clicked the button, there was a loud BOOM outside. It sounded like thunder, but when I looked out the window I saw only blue sky. As I installed Firefox, the booming began to increase in frequency and intensity. Next thing I knew, there was a monstrous-looking, black thunderhead blotting out the sky, and lightning bolts were going all over the place, many of them hitting the ground with less than a second till the (rather unnervingly blaster-like) thunderclap. The school's LAN then shut down completely, every hub and every server tripping. After that came the rain, gushing down in sheets for several minutes. Then, as soon as it had come, the big, evil cumulonimbus from hell vanished into the distance. But it wasn't over yet.

I went to the junior high staff room after that. As the sky cleared up again outside, the teachers set about the task of resetting the hubs and restarting the computers. As soon as I sat down at my desk, there was a simultaneous BANG from all the windows, and the building shook under the assault of a sudden, intense gust of wind. This kept up for between five and ten minutes. Then the trees stopped their slam-dance, things calmed down, and it went back to being May again.

Weird. Maybe I need to find out if Apple has its own Shinto shrine here somewhere so I can go and humble myself...

Pt. II Extra Totally Cool
My ETC card finally arrived yesterday (May 15), so I celebrated by making a totally pointless and wasteful trip out to Makuhari and back. There was a discount on the tolls, but it wasn't one of the extra-cheap times, so it wasn't much. Still...what a concept! It's nice to roll right on through the toll gate without having to stop and fish around for money!

The only problem is that now I won't have a very good idea of my expressway driving expenses until they show up on my credit card bill.

Pt. III Girl Politics
We hoped my daughter's friends would grow up just a bit more once they got into junior high. Apparently not. On the brighter side, however, her junior high school seems to be doing a much better job of student guidance.

For the past two years, my daughter has had one extremely problematical "friend". Her habit was to be my daughter's friend only until she started hanging out with someone else. Then she would start sending my daughter anonymous hate messages (of obvious origin), saying bad things about her behind her back, playing vicious pranks like throwing my daughter's gym shoes outside, and following my daughter around with her new friend like a gang, demanding my daughter apologize for some obscure slight and give compensation. Then, when the girl invariably wound up pissing off her new friend, she'd come running back to my daughter and tearfully beg to be her friend again. We went through this cycle several times.

My wife and I brought the matter to the attention of her 5th and 6th grade teachers repeatedly. Her 5th grade teacher's response was first just to dismiss it, saying it was my daughter's own problem to solve by herself (i.e. no action). When the bad cycle wound up coming again two more times (causing thousand yen figure damages) and we confronted the teacher again, he changed tack and said that the girl writing the messages claimed she hadn't done it, so she was obviously innocent (i.e. no action). He then refused to discuss the matter any further. The 6th grade teacher actually called in the troublemaking friend for a conference, but the latter promptly burst into tears and said she only did it to show how badly she wanted to be my daughter's friend. (She later told my daughter that she always cries to get her way, and it always works.) The teacher then advised us just to leave the "poor girl" alone. The problem escalated, and we contacted the teacher about it again. This time the teacher asked the problem friend and a couple of her sidekicks about the pranks, which they naturally denied, so the teacher tried to claim that my daughter was making the whole thing up. The girl then begged her way into my daughter's friendship again.

Cut to junior high, and the same thing happened. The problem girl got one of her sidekicks both to stick a nasty hate letter in my daughter's desk for her and to write a similar message of her own. This time, however, the story turned out very different. Some of my daughter's new classmates caught the courier in the act and immediately showed the letter to the homeroom teacher. They also caught the problem girl trying to carry out a prank against my daughter and stopped her. The 7th grade homeroom teachers examined the letter, confirmed it as having been written by the problem girl, notified me, and summoned the problem girl and her friends in front of a whole panel of teachers. Crying got her nowhere. Her parents were summoned for a conference with the principal. I don't know what disciplinary action they decided on, but we got a pretty lavish apology from both (very shocked) girls (but not a peep from their parents).

I hope (but don't quite expect) that it'll be the end of it. At the very least, the problem girl and her sidekicks have learned the hard way that their junior high school isn't putty in their hands. On the other hand, my biggest worry is the fact that the problem girl and her sidekicks not only live in my neighborhood, but are all members of the same extended family with the same last name. I would hate for this to wind up turning into a family feud.