Ow, my aching back

Today was pretty good, I think, although I seem to have injured my back in the last few days. Bleh. It kind of hurts to move around, which is... bad.

I spent the afternoon hanging out with Sam. Our plan was to go get gratuitously unhealthy food, so we started by going up to Kua'Aina and getting huge burgers and fries and all. Yum! I got to play with Sam's Nikon d300 a bit. It is both really cool and really frightening. The LCD is gigantic and it has some interesting new features. The silly thing is that I was probably more psyched to play with his 18-200 VR lens. I'm really not sure which camera purchases I should make this offseason, if any. It seems I'm considering spending over $1000 on a new camera and a new lens (a d200 and a 18-200 VR) and that prospect is REALLY scary when I think about it, especially since I've only had the D50 for 16 months at this point. Eh.

After burgers, we went to the Shiba Batting Center, which is the place near me. However, unlike in America, there isn't as much space for everything, so only ONE of their cages actually had a left-handed batter's box, the others only had right-handed. Also, they only have baseball pitching machines, no softball, AND the slowest setting they had was 80 km/h. Keep in mind I pretty much only ever played slow-pitch softball and this was a bit too much for me. I guess I should be proud that I at least made some bat contact on a few pitches, but overall I swung and missed about 75% of the time. Sam did pretty well, or at least much better than I did, he made some solid contact. One funny thing is that they have a Fighters BB bear on their counter, so I was all like "Whee! Fighters! I'm a fan too!" and showed them the BB bear keychain on my bag. I guess I could go back there sometime, but I dunno whether I'll ever be able to hit 80 km/h pitching, heh.

Then we went to Krispy Kreme at Diamond City. We learned a few things:
1) at 3pm on a Monday there is practically no crowd
2) if you are buying boxes of donuts rather than picking out your own mixture, you can get in really fast
3) they are super-fucking expensive

No, seriously, they said "if you're buying a box of donuts please just use this line" on the right, and we went in and it literally took us all of maybe 2-3 minutes total to wait in line and buy donuts. However, one donut costs Y170 and a dozen donuts costs Y1700. Two dozen costs Y3000. Yes, that's like $1.50 per donut. I'm used to KK's costing like what, $7 per dozen in America? Crazy. Sam bought two dozen, which I believe will mostly be consumed by his two young daughters. I bought one dozen, and I'm probably going to bring them to GEOS tomorrow and offer whatever's left to my students (I've eaten two, will probably eat a third for breakfast and a fourth sometime during the work day). Oh well, it's all for the sake of... uhh... exotic donuts? At least now when someone asks if I've been to the KK I can say yes. Remember that it was the most exciting thing to happen in this part of Saitama for quite a while.

After that I ended up dragging Sam on a wild-goose chase, or more like, a white-shirt chase. We went to Kita-Toda, to the mall there, although we stopped on the way for Sam to pick up stuff at a pet supplies store, for his fish. Then I went to the Jusco at Kita-Toda and sure enough they didn't have white shirts in the big-size-clothes section either. Sigh. They did have some cool dress shirts in the other section but it seemed highly unlikely they would fit me. Arrrggggh. So I didn't get anything at the Jusco, although I did get some custard taiyaki in the mall (and got another "wow, your Japanese is so good!" from the clerks there). I feel really bad for dragging Sam all over the place; we probably would have been better off just hanging out somewhere and talking some more. I guess I had expected the KK line to be longer, heh.

Sam dropped me off at home and then I wandered downtown a little later to meet up with jessed, who is in Japan for business for the next 4 days. We met up at the Tokyo Dome and had dinner at a little Japanese restaurant in LaQua. Because I was all like "OMGEXPENSIVE" at the place, Jesse bought me dinner, which was very sweet of him, and I had unagidon, which was very sweet in general, it had been a while since I got that. I gave him one of the custard taiyaki, anyway, and he hadn't had those before, so at least I can feel slightly unguilty, maybe. It was good to see Jesse again. I know I should sympathize more with my friends who go through insane travel to get to Tokyo, but I'm selfish and just so glad they're up here hanging out with me.

Jesse was at the end of his ability to stay awake by 8:30pm, so I went home. I did stop by Yamashita first and I was really, really bad and bought some baseball cards. I got one pack of Nostalgic (and got 6 new cards, I should email Pau), got another pack of just plain 2nd edition and got like 3 new cards, and got a rookie pack and then two of the "Back to the 70's" set, which are RETARDED, it's half current players and half former players. Aside from an Akinobu Mayumi card I don't think I got anything particularly exciting and I'm not sure I'll buy any more packs of this set.

Unfortunately when I got home and was opening packs and trying to reorganize my cards into the new "trading card" pages I got at Daiso a few days ago, it turns out the PAGES AREN'T THE RIGHT SIZE. Or more like, the pages have two pockets that fit cards okay and two pockets that are SUPER tight, such that I'm not sure I can get the cards back out if I put them in. Who the hell makes pages with different sized pockets? Sheeeeesh. At least I only got them from Daiso so I'm only out like 200 yen for the pages and 200 yen for the binders, which I can probly use for something else and/or look for better pages somewhere.

I watched SMAPxSMAP tonight, and it wasn't all that funny aside from this news parody with the "Kamikami Oji", BUT they performed their new single "Dangan Fighter". Here's the great part -- the title alone made me think of baseball -- of Yukio Tanaka, specifically, whose cheer song had a line about a "dangan liner", and he is Mr. Fighters, after all. So then I'm watching them perform and reading the lyrics and sure enough, the song is about baseball. Later they mentioned it's for the Hoshino Japan olympic baseball team! Wheeeee! It's nice to know that I'm not just imagining baseball connections with everything.

And last, Ainori was sort of funky this week. Seems like everyone's picking on Miya-kun to try to get him to talk. They spent the second half of the episode actually showing footage from an Ainori wedding -- two participants from last summer, Outlaw and Goki, just got married. It turns out that they were actually part of the "Sound Man Scandal"; Goki fell in love with the sound guy, and the sound guy "accidentally" left the sound on in the bus and Outlaw heard Goki telling a female participant about her feelings for Sound Guy, and then Outlaw went on a rampage and got really pissed off and decided to leave the show. Goki realized what the hell happened and ALSO decided to leave the show. The sound guy was sacked, and there were many apologies about the situation. Amazingly, though, rather than being two retards about the situation, Goki and Outlaw hooked up back in Japan, fell in love for real, and got married. Happy endings are nice, even if this TV show is pretty fucking bizarre.

Sho Nakata apparently will wear number 6 with the Fighters, which really pisses me off. On the other hand, Hichori Morimoto dressed up as Michael Jackson at the Golden Glove ceremonies... "because, see, Michael Jackson wore a golden glove, and I just got a golden glove, so I thought it'd be funny to dress up as him. Get it?" ♥ Hichori!