Mild Annoyance Over Holidays

I find it kind of annoying that my Japanese-themed calendar* that I have on the bulletin board over my desk at work does not actually make note of any Japanese holidays. This has become an actual inconvenience because I am in the midst of coordinating a complicated group order of temari books and supplies from a seller in Japan, and she mentioned that it was going to take her a bit longer than anticipated to hear back from her book wholesaler due to it being Golden Week, and them appearing to have shut their office down entirely for the duration of the holiday period. Which I should have known, darn it, except Golden Week the year I was there failed to register because almost all of the national holidays it encompasses fell on the weekend anyway, cheating me out of cheap and easy vacation time, and my current irritating calendar isn’t making up for my lack of awareness.

Asian holidays are actually causing me a great bit of difficulty lately. There’s a long-weekend holiday period going in China right now, too, May 1 being Labor Day and May 4 being Youth Day. Unfortunately, this means that those incredibly irritating official forms I need so all my 80 summer study abroad students can get their visas so they can actually go to China and stay there this summer are being delayed yet more, and all the panicking students call me to ask how they can get the forms faster. And all I can do is tell them that they have to wait, because the forms are in China and I am in the US, and there is nothing any of us can do. (And because of the Olympics, no, they can’t just go on a tourist visa, because it won’t be renewed after July 1, so they’ll all be thrown out of the country.)

I do have the suspicion, though, that holidays in other countries would strike me as a lot less bothersome if I got them as holidays, too. I think I could use one about now.

*Hokusai prints, since you ask