Um....

Does anyone know how to make my sidebar stuff move back up the top? When I deleted the Google ads, I also appear to have deleted another key piece of code.

Yeah, yeah, the irony is not lost on me. My paying job responsibilities include publishing a Web site, and I can't even figure out some tiny quirky thing with my personal blog layout.

But I am not an html genius. Sorry!

Tech Update

I just took off the Google ads from the top of this site. I have nothing against ads -- and certainly nothing against Google, which still offers FREE blogging -- but I have grown weary of the idea of c*l*i*c*k* f*r*a*u*d, to take in cash, which I then pass on to charity.

In the future, I have decided to directly appeal to readers to donate to my charity (a school in rural Cambodia, which I named after my grandmother). Any readers who choose to do so can even claim the tax deduction themselves, since it goes through this organization.

More tech news! This afternoon, the tech guy came to upgrade my 1G computer at work, to 2G. Work was suddenly faster and better -- what a difference. I realize that before, what I was doing was like driving a car blindfolded, and now I can see.

And my new Blackberry? Um....I forgot it -- left it on the coffee table.

Oh well.

Technologically Challenged

I have been without a cell phone since returning to Japan. Actually, some days I used Little Son's -- it's one of those ultra-cheap ones that you buy cards for.

Hub said I needed to wait about a month, to qualify for some family plan discount, and then it would be much cheaper. Since we're a bit low in the cash flow area these days, I stuck it out.

Today, he came with a new phone for me, and it's a BLACKBERRY.

Wow. I had given up hope of ever getting one, since my company only gives them to senior managers, and I am certainly not one.

The problem is, I don't have time to figure out how to use it. At least right now.

You see....for the next three days, my boss is going to be on vacation, and I am going to be publishing the Web site. I know how to do it, so it's not doing the job itself I'm worried about -- it's dealing with any tech problems that might arise.

I am not blessed with all that many tech brain cells, and I need all of them to do the tech stuff at work.

So I will figure out how to work my phone AFTER Wednesday.

In the mean time......nobody call me, okay? Thanks!

Rhetorical Question

Sorry to dwell on the centipede.

I gotta ask -- would you rather:

(1) Find a centipede that had been in your hair, or

(2) Find lice in your kid's hair?

It's a tough call, but.....as long as it didn't sting me, I would pick (1). Twice, I have experienced (2). I think (2) is much harder to deal with.

Then again, I am clearly still not over the trauma of (1) yet, or I would be able to stop thinking about it.

The Meaning of the 'Pede

I told Hub the centipede story in the post below, and he was horrified. He said centipedes usually don't live in trees -- plus, I work in a part of Akasaka where there are very few trees, anyway.

But why would it drop from a tree, when they usually crawl in moist places in the ground?

I spent some time last night Googling Japanese centipedes on Hub's computer. There are other stories of people getting bitten after centipedes dropped on them from somewhere, so I guess they do this sometimes. (Come to think of it, we found one in our third-floor apartment five years ago, so they can indeed climb.) Their sting is very painful -- I surely would have noticed -- but is no more poisonous than a bee sting. And the really dangerous HUGE ones are found in the countryside.

Did it maybe fall from the air conditioning vent in the office? I work in the Prudential Tower, a building built on the site of a famous deadly hotel fire -- maybe it's haunted.

Seriously, I was very intrigued by the person who suggested I get blessed at a Shinto shrine. Was it really a bad omen?

It was awful, but it didn't sting me -- and I killed it. So the message I took from that is, "Really bad shit happens in life sometimes, and I deal with it."

The message for the future is therefore, "More really bad shit is going to happen in life sometimes, and I am going to deal with it."

But I could have told you that even without the centipede.

Just in case....I will be hoping for some GOOD omens.

Next time, could a cute puppy or kitten please fall out of the sky onto me? Thank you.

Yet ANOTHER Metamorphosis story

So what's with the giant bugs? Am I cursed here?

Yes, there's another weird story.

First of all, a glorious thing happened at work today. The engineer in Minneapolis spent an hour on the phone with me, logging in remotely to my computer, to figure out why I was having so much trouble using the publishing software for our site.

While grilling pork chops for his dinner, he simultaneously tried a bunch of things, and finally came up with something that works, until I can get more memory. He even left me with detailed, idiot-proof instructions on what I need to do every time I turn on my computer, to reset a bunch of things to get around other things. Anyway, you get the idea. These aren't the bugs I mean.

I do like publishing the site. I'm sure if I did it every day, all day long, I would burn out on it eventually. But for now, it's still relatively new to me, so it's actually fun.

I'm not particularly talented or speedy on it, so in some ways, it's like working the cash register (see below). But that's not quite the right KFC metaphor, since not everyone at my company has to be able to do it -- in that way, it's more like packing the chicken cartons.

Anyway, I was glad to be able to finally do it again, since it's a part of my job I like.

So there I was, doing it for the first time in months. I had just posted the Bank of England preview, with an image, and it worked fine, and I was happy. For some reason, I took out the big barrette holding back my mop of scraggly hair in a ponytail, and placed it on the desk.

And before my horrified eyes, a HUGE FUCKING CENTIPEDE crawled out of the barrette -- one of these!

It was black and orange and as long as my pinkie, though much thinner, and with those scorpion pincher things on the end.

I grabbed a tissue and squashed it, but...it didn't squash. It was still quite alive. So I took off my shoe and WHACKED it hard. And then I picked up the body in the tissue and ran down the hall and flushed it down the toilet -- just in case it came back to life.

Did it fall on my head from a tree when I went to buy my lunch? How long was a HUGE FUCKING CENTIPEDE sitting on my barrette???

I mean, dear god! It was enough to make me want to pick up my desk scissors and lop off all my hair, just so no creepy crawlie awful things would have anywhere to hide.

Their sting is poisonous. But I figured that if something that big had stung me, I would have noticed.

I got paranoid, when I realized all the glands under my chin were painful and swollen. And then I remembered, DUH! I have a bad cold and a sore throat, so they've been painful and swollen for days.

With the monster dead, I turned my attention back to the Web site, but....every few minutes, I couldn't help running my hands through my hair.

In fact, I have been doing that all night, and probably will for the next few days, too.

Lessons from KFC

I'm still sick.

I asked if I could leave work early today -- I came home and took a nap. I don't feel better. In fact, I feel worse. Maybe it IS the swine flu! That would be exciting.

I can't talk about what's going on at work on this blog. I can just say that things are very different from what I expected, and VERY different from what they were like when I worked for this same company in Tokyo before.

And I can tell the story of my very first job ever.

When I was 16, I got a job at our local Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. A friend of mine helped me get the job -- she was dating one of the assistant managers (and the following year, she had his baby, but that's another story). There were two other managers, both women. I forgot their names, but I think they were something like Carol and Deena, so I am going to call them Carol and Deena.

They were both mean. I would overhear them complaining about the other employees -- how one person did a rotten job mopping the floors and picking up garbage, another one was a disaster at packing the chicken cartons, another was always late, etc.

I was very careful to always be nice to Carol and Deena.

And I tried to put the knowledge I overheard to good use, and not do anything wrong to give them something to complain about. I am a neat freak, so I excelled at mopping floors and picking up garbage. I was very good and FAST at packing those chicken cartons. I was never late -- I had just gotten my license and my parents didn't let me drive their car so much, so my mother or grandmother drove me there every day, always on time or early.

But we all have our weak points, and mine was a fatal flaw: I wasn't so quick at working the cash register. (This was 1982, when registers were more primitive.)

In time, I'm sure I would have been better at it, but on my first day -- my very first time working a cash register EVER -- Carol and Deena laughed at me, said I was hopeless, and hardly ever put me on it again.

Whenever they did let me do it, I was really careful not to make any mistakes. Of course I was nervous, but I took a deep breath and resolved not get flustered, and my cash drawer always balanced at the end of the night. That wasn't always true of the other employees, but heck, it wasn't THEIR money, so they valued speed more than accuracy.

So I was the slowest one on the register -- meaning they rarely assigned me to do it, meaning I rarely got practice on it, and therefore would always BE the slowest one.

All the other things I did so well? They didn't matter. All that mattered was that they had decided I was too slow to be a regular cashier.

One day I called them to get my schedule for the week, and either Carol or Deena told me -- over the phone, with no warning -- that I was FIRED, and that I needed to return my uniform immediately or they would deduct the money for it out of my final paycheck.

My friend later told me that one of them wanted to hire a friend of hers who needed a job, so she needed to create an opening right away. My job was that opening.

What they told me on the phone was that my poor register skills meant I was "too high-strung for fast food." I just couldn't handle it, they said.

The main fallout from getting fired was....my parents (particularly my mother) were livid with rage at me, that whole summer. Even though I found another job right away, they never let me forget that I had been fired, after only a few weeks, from my very first job ever.

"You should be ASHAMED of yourself! You must have just been goofing around all the time and not taking your job seriously! You must have had a BAD ATTITUDE, the way you do about everything else! They did you a FAVOR, by firing you, so that you finally learn your lesson the hard way! " -- etc.

The night Carol/Deena fired me over the phone, I had to ask my mother to drive me to KFC to return my uniform. I still remember that horrible car ride.

I remember I tried not to cry at all the things she said to me on the way there, because I didn't want Carol and Deena to think I was crying because they had fired me.

I felt bad about getting fired, of course, but I knew I had worked really hard and done my best. I truly believe that if I had worked for managers other than Carol and Deena, I would not have been let go. And the register wasn't all that difficult -- it's just that I was so terrified of making a mistake that I wasn't able to get up to speed on it in only a few weeks, doing it so infrequently.

The main lesson I learned from this experience (other than "It is futile to depend on your immediate family for any kind of support or understanding," which I already knew) was this:

It's important to work for bosses who have confidence in you, and believe that you are capable of doing well at your job.

If your bosses don't believe this.... you might never get the chance to prove otherwise.

And for an encore....

I managed to catch a bad cold -- a shivering, achy, sore-throaty, stuffy-headed cold.

Or who knows, maybe it's swine flu? You have to admit, that would fit better with the theme of this blog lately. But I do think it's just a nasty cold.

Work was fine today. I ought to take Sudafed everyday -- it makes me loopy, to the point where who NEEDS alcoholic beverages, anyway? I wrote a story I really liked. I also wrote up an analyst report about the lemur (ahem!) spread.

But I can't write about work on this blog.

And I really want to write about Daughter today, but since she knows too many people in real life that read this blog, I can't And Big Son generally feels the same way. I know teenagers need their privacy, so I guess I have to stop telling stories about them here.

Good thing Little Son is still fair game!

I can write about Hub, but....there's not a whole lot to say. He's like a leaky roof -- you only wish you could fix it on the rainy days, because on the sunny days, it doesn't need fixing. There have been days he has pissed me off, but I didn't feel like blogging about it, and the happy times (which fortunately far outnumber the bad times) are...kind of boring. We eat dinner, and watch TV together.

And now I don't feel well, and I am going to go to sleep instead of watching TV with the family tonight, and.....I wish I could stay up and be with them.

I miss them all day, you know?

It doesn't get much better than that.

Today...

I had the kind of day at work that made me come home and drink an alcoholic beverage.

Awright, so it was only a reduced-calorie grapefruit Chu-Hai (3% alcohol, 3% real fruit juice) -- but it counts.

Thank god it's Friday! Oh, wait......crap.

Weekend Update

Sunday night. Where does the weekend go? We barely chipped away at the piles of crap.

When I think about going back to work tomorrow morning, I feel slightly sick to my stomach. The last time I worked for this same company in Tokyo, I used to look forward to going to work. But......I have to take a deep breath, and ignore the knot of anxiety right below my rib cage. Things change, and I have to somehow figure out how to change with them.

I wish I could just take a break, and I don't mean another hectic unpacking break -- even though that's certainly what I'd have to do, if I did have more vacation time (and I DON'T -- in fact, I realized I have a week LESS vacation than I thought I did, because when I was rehired by Cow Bones, my vacation clock set back to "new hire" status, which SUCKS!). There's still so much more to be done, and so little time to do it.

I started working two days after arriving here. Sometimes I feel like I'm drowning. I just wish I had time to come up for air, catch my breath.

On the plus side, the neighbors removed the big dead cockroach! Or, maybe its roach friends came and took it away in the night...? In any case, it's gone from the hallway.

And I am happy to report that my washing machine, after I tried various products and homemade concoctions, no longer reeks. It now has a slight medicinal smell, which is kind of strange, but vastly preferable to mold.

Thank god for small things.