Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

In the campus, there’s an elevator to a seven-floor building that only opens on the ground, third and sixth floor, despite having buttons for the second and fourth floor also. The official explanation, which I only just learned this year (through a “glossary” feature in one of the school publications) despite having been here for seventeen years (since my freshman year), is that the second and fourth floors are not the same height as the other floors, so that the elevator would always open a foot higher or a foot lower than the floor’s height. So they decided that, to make sure the elevator has enough time to decelerate between floors, it would only open on the three floors mentioned.

Last week the elevator was under maintenance for one day. The next day, I got on the elevator on the ground floor and was surprised when the doors next opened to a view I wasn’t used to. In other words, it was a view that was neither the third floor nor the sixth floor hallway. It was the view of the second floor. For some reason, despite the fact that there were only three of us in the elevator and one got off at the third floor and the rest on the sixth floor, the doors opened on the fourth floor also. Maybe out of habit the woman who got on before us hit all the keys, even if it only opened on three out of the five floors shown. I’ve seen a lot of students do that myself, mostly freshmen, and I’ve had to tell them which floors the lift only opens on. I don’t know why there was never a sign placed beside the panel saying so. Come to think of it, I seem to remember such a sign in my student years, but I’ve taken it for granted since.

Now, that sign isn’t needed anymore. I guess technology is advanced enough that the speed of old elevators can be adjusted to the needed distance traveled.

Anyway, the stargazing pushed through for last night, only for the fact that the students showed up before their teacher did, just when I was going to tell him to postpone it. I spent a little more time in the lecture than I usually would have, knowing that as teachers they would need some extended explanation to provide for their students.

We had a lot of fun on the lecture part alone. I had such topic change lead-ins like, “Of course, if there’s a constellation called Canis Minor, there’s one called… what?” Only to have someone reply, “Canis Senior!” I had the privilege of telling that teacher that was the first time I’ve gotten that answer in the 11 years I’ve been stargazing.

Fortunately, when we got upstairs, the sky cooperated and had only minimal clouds present. Although I had to rush them looking at Saturn and the Moon because of the impending cover, we were pretty much able to see every celestial object I wanted to show them, and the terrestrial sights also that demonstrated the magnification of the telescope.

In fact, today, one of my co-teachers, who is their teacher in another subject, said they couldn’t stop talking about the stargazing, and she couldn’t believe the city sights I showed them were visible from this point in Manila. She wants to see for herself.