Donuts Wreak Havoc on Kawaguchi, Film At 11

Well, not really.

You know, I feel kind of like "man, I didn't really get anything done today", but what that really means is, "Man, I didn't really do much on the computer today."

In the early afternoon I did some laundry and cleaned up and organized a whole bunch of papers and crap that was lying around. In the mid-afternoon I rode up to the Diamond City mall to go shopping. (On the way to shopping I went to pay two of my bills, and I embarrassingly enough forgot to have the complete paper with me and the 7-11 attendant was like "Where's the personal records paper?" and I thought I said "uhh... oops... I haven't paid this yet" but what I think I accidentally said was "I've never paid my bills before" because he was explaining how they work and the stamps and I'm just like "I know, I know, is it ok to just pay it without a records paper?" and he said "Yeah, I'll give you a receipt, is that okay?" and that was that. Sigh. Well, at least I'll never do that again.)

Anyway, the mall was PACKED. Traffic was fucked up for about a good half a kilometer on every side of the mall, seriously. Why was that, you ask? Because it was Sunday?

No, because they JUST OPENED A FUCKING KRISPY KREME AT THE MALL.

I thought it was bad enough in Seattle when you'd have to wait in line for like 10 minutes to get donuts, but here... apparently 3pm was actually a SLOW time, because the wait was only 40 minutes instead of upwards of two hours.

( pictures of Ye Olde Donut Shoppe, and the rest of this entry since it's just about shopping and other boring things )

Awesome day of baseball geekery

Dude what an awesome day.

A few days ago fuj asked if I could go hunt down some special card cases for him at a card trading shop in Ryogoku. Well, I had never been to Ryogoku and I love baseball cards, and Pau and I had been talking about trading cards again sometime, so... I suggested we should go to this R&B21 place.

I met up with Pau at Ryogoku station and we found the shop a block away. It was crazy -- this place has tons of MLB cards, tons of Hockey cards, Basketball cards, FOOTBALL cards, etc, etc -- but no Japanese baseball cards! Seriously! Anyway, we saw some card holders and weren't sure if they were the right ones, so with Pau's help I managed to express that I had a friend in Canada who wanted these big holders for his hockey cards, and they sold me the Phoenix cardholder, and gave me an English paper with it, and said that they actually invented the cardholder and have the patent and are happy to ship worldwide, so... cool.

We wandered around Ryogoku a little bit (glanced at the Sumo stadium and the Edo museum) and then went to our real destination, Jimbocho.

On the way to Jimbocho itself, we got sidetracked by stopping at Kua'Aina for lunch (the Hawaiian burger joint that I go up to Saitama-Shintoshin when I need my burger fix). I had a tuna-avocado sandwich, Pau had a huge burger, and we split a salad... and somehow ended up hanging out there for like 2 hours, going through our whole NPB card collections team by team and giving each other our extra doubles. Wheeeeeeee card trading is so awesome!

Our first stop in Jimbocho was the Mint baseball card shop and we ended up there for a bloody long time of course, looking through old sets of cards from the 1990's and whatnot. I ended up buying a cardboard box to keep cards in, and some single cards that I really wanted from this year's set, and then both of us bought "Fukubukuro" bags. These are basically "lucky bags" where they say something like "This costs 1000 yen but has 3000 yen worth of cards in it!" In department stores or elsewhere it's like, you buy these bags and have no idea what's in it, and could end up with complete crap or end up with complete awesome stuff.

Well, after a stop at Shosen and Sanseido and Wonder to look at baseball magazines -- and to fruitlessly look for a Japan Series program, sigh -- we went to a Doutor coffee shop and just hung out there for a few hours.

( Baseball card geeeking that nobody will give a shit about )

After that, we played a baseball dice game called Replay Baseball for a while. We played a game of the 2005 Mariners vs. the 2005 Athletics. That was so funny! King Felix started against Danny Haren and the A's won 2-1. The funniest thing is that while rolling dice and seeing the results I kept feeling like I totally remembered all of these things happening in real life in 2005, heh.

Anyway, by then it was 9pm and we got kicked out of the coffeeshop, so we went home. Something awesome is also that we had looked at the German board games in Shosen and it turns out Pau likes board games too, so when he gets back from winter break, we totally have to have a board games night! I'm really excited about that. I miss playing board games a lot. Now I just need a volleyball group and a ballroom social dance and my life will be back to normal! Well, er, as normal as possible while living across the ocean and all.