Today marks the beginning of what the Japanese call Golden Week. It’s actually just Monday (today), Friday (3rd), Saturday (4th), Sunday (5th), and Monday (6th). Every year the “week” is different. And like Charlemagne’s empire which was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, this week is not golden nor a week.

Every year, our whole church gets together and goes on a 4 or 5-day camp away from Tokyo, a la the annual festivals in the OT. We will be “going up” to Uenohara early Wednesday morning and coming back on Saturday evening. There will be about 90 people, more than 50 children, most of whom are under age 13. I’ll be in a room with a bunch of little girls. There will be serious Bible study sessions every morning. This year’s topic is Christology. Should be interesting.

I’ll be taking my virus-free laptop and hopefully will be able to get some HTML-ing done and finish my book, too.

I got hit by the W32.Elkern.4926 yesterday afternoon. I was checking my mail between classes and deleting all the junk, as usual. On a bad day, I get up to 10 infected messages a day, but I always have Norton AntiVirus running so I wasn’t worried. As I deleted what was obviously a virus (NOT opening any attachments, thank you, I know that), my hard drive suddenly started getting really busy. Then programs in the taskbar started disappearing. It was terrifying. I put the computer to sleep because students started coming in, and as I taught the class, I kept trying to tell myself I didn’t have a virus even though I knew it had to be. To make a long story short, I went over to my cousin’s house after I got home from work and we stayed up all night backing things up and then fixing things.

Call me silly, but I really enjoyed playing around with DOS. Black screen. White letters. All those commands. Ken showed me what he knew about DOS. It was almost worth all the trouble with the virus. LOL.

It seems I had the great honor (oh, yay) of being one of the first people to be hit with that particular flavour of the virus. Norton didn’t have any fixes available until more than 24 hours after I was infected.
225 infected files
223 repaired
2 in quarantine (which I deleted)

The virus should be all gone now, but I can’t get the system to work properly. I’m using Win2K. I’ll probably stay up all night tonight, too. I’m in a serious love-hate relationship with my two computers. But computers are still easier to get along with than most people … aren’t they?

Update
Formatting C:

Update No. 2
Windows up and running now after a nice, clean fdisk. Forgot floppy and CD-ROMS with vital drivers at Ken’s house. Can’t do anything more tonight. Splitting headache.

All Fixed
My computer is all fixed up: hard disk wiped, Win2K installed, all drivers installed, all software installed, all preferences and options customized for the various softwares, etc., etc.

Yay!

My Thoughts Are Scattered And They’re Cloudy …
Tomorrow’s payday. Can’t wait. Several students quit at the English school so this paycheck will be lower than it was last month. I decided not to calculate how much lower it will be and just wait to see it tomorrow. I might get a job as a webmaster at the other English school I’m working at. That should be fun.

Just got two new students today. Am very thankful.

My Tuesday night class at one of the English schools has three men, two businessmen and one grad student. It’s actually pretty interesting and I enjoy it because they are such serious students. I’m teaching them test-taking strategies for the TOEIC test. A year ago, I would have been “freaked out” at the thought of being alone in a room with three young men, teaching them English, but somehow I’m not scared of it anymore.

Started working on the berith.com site yesterday. Completely changing every single page in the entire site. It’s going to be a lot of work. Come to think of it, it’s too bad most of you won’t be able to read any of it. The site is all in Japanese.

Last night, I finally bought a domain for my own personal site. EmethHesed.com should be up and running in a month or so. Then this blog will move to EmethHesed.com/Blog.

Fratres Mei
They’re working at their Whitefield studies pretty hard, it seems. Ben has several hundred pages of math to do in the next couple weeks. Berek also studies hard, but I can’t understand how, for all his high-falutin’ philosophy, he doesn’t seem to be able to give up those internet networked computer games. I have no idea how the games work except that there is a lot of killing and then after death there is immediate automatic resurrection. Boring.

LOTR
Ooooh, almost forgot. I watched this with Ben on Saturday night. It was much better than I thought it would be. Like everyone else, I guess one of my first responses is, “I want to see the sequel.” As much as I enjoyed the movie, I think I can do without watching it for quite a long while. It was exhausting to watch. The length of the movie didn’t bother me, but all the running and fighting and killing got me pretty tired.

Nearly Attacked
While I was on my way to the movie theatre, I was able to get a seat on the train. However, it seems some lunatic on the train wanted the seat I had so he could better read the pornography he had with him, and a minute or so after I sat down, he suddenly stepped on both my feet at the same time and started jumping on them. After he did that a few times, he raised his fist and his leg and was about to hit and/or kick me but I told him I’d call the police if he did. I didn’t want to give him the seat, but I figured it would be better to do that than get stabbed (who knows if he was carrying a knife?), so I gave him the seat and walked away. All the people around me on the train were busy pretending that nothing was happening. (That is typical of Japan. Is it of other countries, too?) He followed me after I got off the train a few minutes later and I was terrified. I went straight to the police box (there is one outside every train station) and told the policeman there what had happened. I was at a big station and it was crowded so I wasn’t able to point the man out, but the policeman let me stay there for a few minutes. I was, ah, really scared and once I knew I was safe, couldn’t stop crying for a couple minutes. Tokyo is such a safe city. In my twenty years here, this sort of thing has never happened to me or anyone I know, nor have I ever seen it happen to anyone else.

The bright side of the whole affair was that I was wearing my sneakers, not my sandals, so I didn’t get hurt. I haven’t seen the man since. He doesn’t deserve the death penalty or anything, but it would have been so lovely if Li Lian Jie had come flying in to twist a few limbs and maybe even break a few bones.

It’s been about a week since my iPod arrived. It’s an amazing little machine. I bought the new 10GB iPod, but I’ve only been able to fill half of it so far. We’ll see if I can get 5 more GBs of music from the new Morpheus, which isn’t as good as the old one, actually.

I think I taught my first homosexual today. He said he was a graduate student studying dentistry and his hobby was bodybuilding. He looked like a bodybuilder, but he was wearing a woman’s perfume, had 4 earrings on his left ear, and wore lots of jewelry. One of the women in the class asked him if he was gay. He laughed and denied it but I found it hard to believe, especially since he wants to spend time in San Francisco training for bodybuilding. Another woman asked him to take off his shirt and show his muscles. He laughed a bit and didn’t say anything. I think if they asked some more, he actually would have done it right there. He obviously enjoyed the attention.

And, in one of the children’s classes, there’s this boy who kept busily moving his finger between his nose and his mouth. Kids.

But all in all, I suppose today was a good day.

The Japanese school year (and fiscal year) starts in April, and today was the first day of children’s classes since the spring vacation. Several children quit, and a few joined. Nearly all the classes have different members from a few weeks ago. I miss some of the children who quit or changed classes. I wonder how schoolteachers teach different children year after year.

Now reading the Second Canto and wishing I had known about this book a few years ago, back when I was a dreamy teenager all wrapped up in Orlando Furioso and The Song of Roland. Not to say that I don’t enjoy it now. But I know I would have enjoyed it a lot more back then, before life started getting unpleasantly complicated, when I still believed in chivalry, and I had the ability to slip in and out of phantasmagorical worlds at will.

It’s so boring to be cynical, but I can’t help it. LOL.

One of my students brought a dish to class today, one she says is commonly eaten in her hometown (not Tokyo). So, I had my first taste of dolphin. Yes, that’s right. Dolphin. Those dolphins who have saved ancient sailors from shipwreck, protected them from sharks, and taken them safely to land, who help autistic children in California … peace-loving, intelligent creatures who are more peaceful than Man and may even be more intelligent.

It tasted like tuna, only a bit tougher.