I'm a baseball card junkie

Today I mostly relaxed. Kind of. I slept in (wow! 10 hours sleep!) until noon, spent some time chatting with Carl on AIM, wrote a slightly more coherent review of Smile elsewhere, and then eventually wandered down into the city, where my mission was to get some baseball cards and eat something gratuitous.

I started at Korakuen station and walked through the Tokyo Dome, which was PACKED with about 50,000 women (and maybe 5000 boyfriends who were dragged along) who were all there to see the Kinki Kids concert. It was pretty crazy. It kind of freaks me out that I started listening to Kinki Kids TEN YEARS AGO and yet they are both a little younger than me (Koichi will turn 29 on New Years, and Tsuyoshi will turn 29 in April).

Despite the violent fangirl revolution at the Dome, I still managed to stop into the Dome shop and get a Fighters tag which I'm going to put on my jacket to replace my broken zipper tag, and went to Yamashita, which had ALSO been taken over by Kinki Kids crap, but still had cards, so I got two more packs of the Rookie Edition which is what I was looking for.

I walked all the way to Jimbocho after that and parked myself in a nice chair in the language learning section of Sanseido Bookstore and seriously started going through JLPT prep books looking for some decent ones. I read through the advanced dictionary of Japanese grammar but just learned things like "私は夜１１時になると頭が働くなる", which IIRC meant something like "When it becomes 11pm, my brain stops working." I bought a JLPT 1-2 test book and I'm going to take the 2 sometime to see how I do.

Stopped by at Mint. Went through card singles to check out what some sets that I've been considering buying really look like (for example, the Nippon Series set, they had all of them out there as individual cards). I'm really not impressed by the Back to the 70's set, and if I really want some of the particular players I'll just buy them separately I think -- the only OB card I really really want is of Hisashi Yamada, I think. I looked up the Consecutives for the Dragons team set and they apparently have them of Kenshin, Kosuke, and Masa. I have two of the Masas and one of the Kosuke, so I might buy the others just because they are REALLY awesomelooking, but I have no interest in buying more Chunichi team packs. After rifling through their card sets for like half an hour I felt obliged to buy something so I got another Fukubukuro, but it was the exact same as last week's -- three Seibu packs, three Touch the Game packs, one Tigers and one Carp. Alas.

I found my way to Kua'Aina and had an avocado burger and fries and salad set. YUM YUM YUM.

Came home and cleaned my bathroom. Yeah, I know, exciting. I really only did half the cleaning but it's still better than nothing. I also dropped off laundry at the coin laundry around the corner and went over to Max Valu to do some grocery shopping and buy some more cleaning supplies. Wheee.

After that, rather than being productive, I sat around making Chunichi Dragons cellphone wallpapers which I am pretty sure will only be of interest to firearmofmutiny and the2belo but hey, whatever. And now I should be sleeping, I think. Carl and Oren show up in Japan in like 14 hours!