Small Non-Adventure #1

Well, this weekend could have gone better. To start with, I lost a crown on one of my teeth a week and a half ago, and last Saturday morning, I was scheduled to return to the dental clinic to have the temporary removed and the new crown put in. Unfortunately, the appointment was for 9:30 AM. Normally, this would be a good thing because I'd be in and out of the clinic with enough time to recover from the dental work by the time I had to start teaching English classes at the school at 1 PM. The problem was that I got very little sleep that night, and I was absolutely dragging when I had to walk the 6 blocks to make the appointment. So, I get to the clinic almost exactly at 9:30, and I'm called to the chair a few minutes later, and the dentist does all the work in putting in the new crown. That part went well, and the two visits only cost $50 total.

I get out of the clinic at a little after 10:30 AM, and as I'm about to go to the supermarket on the way back home to buy milk and some other groceries for the week, I get an incoming text message. It's from the school, saying at all of my classes have been cancelled for the day.

I'm bummed, so I do the shopping, get home, check my emails, and someone I know in Tokyo is asking if I'm surviving the typhoon. Huh? What typhoon? Turns out that typhoon #5 had hit Okinawa during the night and caused a lot of damage. The weather reports were predicting that it would reach Kagoshima at about noon, so the school cancelled all of its lessons so the students and teachers could stay home. But, actually, the system stalled at Yakushima, so by the middle of the afternoon, all we were getting in Kagoshima were strong winds and a bit of rain. At least now I knew why the grocery store had "stock up for the typhoon" signs on the shelves for cup noodles.

So, for the rest of the day, I stay in the apartment, getting work done for my science blog, and being completely unable to take a nap to catch up on lost sleep. At the end of the day, I finally go to bed, but only get maybe 7 hours of sleep anyway. Sunday noon, I get up and check the status of the typhoon, and yahoo weather shows that the system had gotten past Yakushima, and veered east to the other side of Osumi peninsula, missing Kagoshima city entirely. The winds have died down, but we continue to get moderate rain all the way up to about 9 PM. There's no point to trying to go outside to walk around, because any events that might have been planned for the weekend would have been cancelled between Friday and Saturday.

So, I pretty much stay home Sunday as well, reading an autobiography on Les Paul. Along the way, as I'm thinking of things being cancelled, I suddenly remember that Saturday was supposed to have been Yukata Night in Tenmonkan.

For the past few years, the shops in Tenmonkan have participated in a promotional event held during the evening of the first Saturday of August. Yukata are casual forms of kimono usually worn at night, and anyone buying anything in Tenmonkan while wearing yukata would receive a price discount. In the past, they've also had a live stage in front of 7-11, where Bon DX, and Seven Colors have performed. Initially, I had classes scheduled Saturday between 6 PM and 9 PM, and I would have missed the stage events, but my schedule got moved around so I would have finished the evening by maybe 7 PM. By having all the classes cancelled, I completely forgot that Yukata Night was on the 5th. I did go up to Amu Plaza on Saturday as part of my shopping trip, and the plaza in front of the train station was completely rolled up to prevent the astro turf and crafts shops from getting drenched, so I console myself with the thought that Yukata Night was most likely cancelled and I didn't miss anything by failing to go check. The most I can hope for is that it gets rescheduled for later in the month.

The Les Paul book was a good read, anyway.