I went to Nagoya

Yeah, so after like 4 hours of sleep Saturday night I took the train to Nagoya, arriving at 13:13pm. teravell met up with me at the station, and after I bought some omiyage, we went to Sakae and met up with kawaru.

The three of us went to Shidax only to find out they were full, so adjourned to Karaoke-kan instead, for about two hours. Craig and I harmonized on HY's AM11:00! And we tried to sing a lot of m-flo. And he did his Jero impressions (but since he can actually sing enka, it worked pretty well). Laura and I did some L'arc, and stuff. And I tried to make everyone learn Moeyo Dragons, heh.

After that we went to the Nagoya Dome, found the2belo, and went into the stadium. I bought some cheersticks since I'd left mine in Tokyo, and put on all my Morino stuff. The game was ok, it was Baystars (Futoshi Kobayashi) vs. Dragons (Kazuki Yoshimi), and it kept going back and forth being tied and untied, until finally in the bottom of the 9th, the Baystars put Yukiya Yokoyama on the mound and Ryosuke Hirata hit a walk-off homer to win the game 5-4. He said during the interview, "Tatsunami told me to do it." I spent the whole game alternately teaching Laura the Chunichi cheers and/or singing the Baystars cheers anyway because I couldn't help it. We got to see a pinch-hitting Tatsunami, so Jeff was happy about that.

I actually bought two sets of cheersticks, kept one because I realized it was a commemorative 2008 set, and gave the other to Laura. She seems to have gotten all of the points of the game without me hammering them into her head -- she was commenting on how cool the songs are and how nice it is that nobody boos the other team, and of course also how cool Doala is :)

I tried to convert everyone to Morinomania of course.



We went to the Dragons store after so I could get Something Masa-related because that was Very Important to me.

In the store, Jeff was accosted by some Dragons fangirls who were like "picture please?" because he was wearing a Cubs Fukudome t-shirt.



Finally got a picture taken in the photo spot in Dragons Road, but I'm too tall:



Jeff and Laura and I rode the train back to Gifu together, and I ended up crashing on Laura's extra futon. Also, she has a cat. I encouraged the cat to notice that cheer sticks are plastic and have string:



This morning we got up ass-early and ate oatmeal for breakfast, which I realized is probably the Japanese equivalent of natto (we think natto is disgusting and can't understand why Japanese people eat it for breakfast, and I think they think the same thing about oatmeal) and then dragged Laura's coworker Will out of his apartment at like 5am to go find some other English teachers that they were going to an amusement park with. I rode the shinkansen with them all as far as Shizuoka, where they transferred, and then I came back to Tokyo. The other English teachers weren't so bad.

Will came out wearing an Orioles t-shirt... "Jones #10". I'm like "Is that an Adam Jones t-shirt? WTF?" and he's like "How the heck did you know that?"

Got home in time to get my delivery though -- the new Fighters fanclub card. Wish Sagawa didn't suck.
Now, off to more baseball, at the Tokyo Dome, industrial league stuff.

More industrial League baseball fun and whatnot

I probably shoulda just gone to sleep at 9pm but I stayed up in the hopes of a good Ainori episode. But Ainori sucked, so oh well. I got to see SMAPxSMAP and they sang with Coldplay... would you believe that I actually have never heard Coldplay before? Or if I have, I'm totally unaware of it? Because I totally didn't recognize the band or their songs or the sound at all.

This afternoon I went to see ENEOS vs. Honda in the industrial league semi-finals. I joked that I cursed Honda because of Hisayoshi Chono, who turned down the Fighters when they drafted him two years ago, and sure enough Chono made some disgusting errors and the team lost 5-4. So there. ENEOS goes on to the finals and now I'm going to have to put up with more Red Sox fans drooling over Junichi Tazawa. It was bad enough when everyone couldn't stop drooling over pro players in Japan, but now they have to drool over the corporate players? Hate.

I went to the game with Simon again and he dragged me to the batting cages next to the Tokyo Dome afterwards, but since they only had one lefty cage and it didn't go slower than 90 km/h I begged out of it, being as I don't know how to hit anything except slow-pitch softballs. I did throw one ball into the speed pitch and got clocked at a super-speedy uh 43 km/h. Yeah, I throw like a girl. Simon hit like 97 km/h, but when you realize that's still only 60 mph...

Anyway, he had made some plan for the evening to go drinking with someone else, so he ran off, and I went around the Tokyo Dome a bit -- got sushi at the kaiten place I like by Suidobashi, and went through the Dome, played some UFO catchers, and... went home. But I stopped in Oji on the way, at the big arcade there, which I'd never entered. It had batting cages, they went down to 80 km/h for the lefty ones, so I decided to go ahead and try. I can't hit baseballs. In 20 pitches I made contact on 3 of them. Given the pitches were REALLY low for whatever reason, but still. I miss slow-pitch softball cages :(

Came home, went grocery shopping... then kind of ended up spending the evening being braindead staying up for Ainori, which was just plain stupid of me.

Also, dry ice is fun to play with (when you buy ice cream, sometimes they offer to let you get dry ice to bring it home in). Haagen-Dahs's new "maple cookie" flavor is actually bit too STRONG for me, though, to be perfectly honest.

By the way, one year ago right now -- today -- I was sitting in an ambulance heading to the hospital after getting hit by a truck riding my bike home from a movie, before going to Nagoya. I can't tell if I can't believe a year has passed because it seems so short, or so long...