Why do these things only seem to happen to me??

No. 1: At school

So I set my laptop to download a movie in the morning at school...thought I can watch it at night when I go home. Went off for my classes, lunch and more classes. When I got back to the staff room at 3-ish, a couple of teachers crowded around me and tried to tell me something about my laptop (with a lot of typical Japanese hissing sound...which is no good. They usually make such sounds when they only have bad things to say, e.g. Ask a diffcult question "why do Jap high school girls wear their skirts so short?"...typical Jap response: incline head to one side and suck breath deeply in through clenched teeth "SSSSSSSS")

Seeing the problem these non-English teachers were having, other teachers gathered around to try and help/kaypoh. But they are not computer wizards, so they started off by guessing that there was a virus in my laptop that infected the school network. Horrors! But no, it gets worse! After a lot of excitement and miscommunication, it later emerged that the NIIGATA PREFECTURAL BOARD OF EDUCATION detected someone trying to get information from the network through a leak in MY school and CALLED the school...and the leak was stupid ME trying to download a movie!! Good grief! Why on earth would they hook all the schools up with the Prefectural Board of Education on the same network!!

The commotion that I caused in the staff room was extremely embarrassing, to say the least! After I stopped and closed the programme, the teachers explained to the vice-principal (who sits in the same room as us) what happened. I cringed everytime I heard the name Cindy-sensei. And then, the principal (a kindly old man) walked in to find out why the Prefectural Board called and the same story was repeated. I wanted to crawl under my table to hide! Of course I apologised profusely for all the trouble the school got into and promised never to download anything in school again. Thankfully, everyone seemed more amused by the whole episode rather than angry. The principal chuckles every time he sees me now.

You know what, this was my first time attempt at downloading something from the internet...I'm not sure if I dare to try doing so again...anyone with advice on how I can safely download stuff (Gary, Ewen, Jingli?) please email me...THANK YOU!!

No. 2: At home

I left school as soon as I could knock off to go hide in my little apartment. After dinner, I thought I'd toast some chestnuts that I bought to make "kau lak". Autumn is here now and there are just bags and bags of chestnuts on sale. The English JET in my town toasted chestnuts in his toaster oven and told me to put them in for 8 mins, so I followed his instructions. While the chestnuts were happily cracking away, I went to watch TV. Amidst the little cracking sounds, suddenly I heard a huge POP! Followed by another explosive POP! Rushed to the toaster oven...but can't see through the window because 2 stupid suicide-bomber chestnuts exploded and covered my toaster oven (window included) in fine chestnut powder! But the rest of the chestnuts tasted great! My toaster oven is in a mess though... :(