downtime day sunday

I was originally going to go to Seibu's minor-league park for the Fighters-Lions ni-gun game today, but decided to scrap it in favor of just kind of relaxing, after a looooong busy week.

So, I did laundry -- about 4 loads' worth! It was sunny out, so I put a pole over the window in back of the house and hung some shirts to dry out there. Not sure why there was no pole there before -- hope there's no danger of my shirts flying down and landing in the neighbor's tree or something... the fourth load of laundry I did was towels and sheets, and I took those down to the actual laundromat to throw in a dryer, because I don't have somewhere to dry those out, really. (I put my futon outside, though.) So that was good, though I didn't really accomplish much other cleaning per se. I did move my laptop up to the stand so I can sit on a chair and type instead of the floor -- it's warm enough for that now for sure.

Could not get the Fighters game to work consistently on Yahoo Douga, which was sad. They lost, too.

In the evening I rode my bike to Jujo and got dinner at Ichibanya, chicken katsu curry. I wanted the Grandmother Curry recipe, but the guy told me that it's over. WTF! It was really good, they should bring it back, dammit!

I didn't write enough today :(

Also, unless something bizarre happens, tomorrow night (Monday) I'm going to go to Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara after work and just go ahead and buy the fucking 18-200 VR lens, as well as a new IXY or some other cheap Canon point-and-shoot. The way I figure it, the 10% points-back on the lens will almost be enough to pay for the small camera, and if I'm going to buy a new lens, better do it earlier rather than later in the baseball season. And I guess I'll just have to try to be more careful with my cameras from here on in... I still have no clue how the 18-55 lens got broken, but I can certainly avoid having the little camera in my pocket during Inaba Jumps.

A camera wuss is me

After work I went to Yodobashi Camera and wussed out on buying the 18-200 lens. I dunno, something about the lump 88,000 yen seemed really big to me, plus that I won't be using my big camera for a week or two most likely... but a point-and-shoot is pretty important for me to have immediately. So I just bought a Canon IXY 920. I don't know why I still insist on Canons for my little cameras, especially since I'm entirely Nikon for my SLRs, but I just do. This one has a slightly different interface than my last few and I think it can do a lot more, and it ran me around 25,000 yen after a discount or two -- turns out if you give them your old digital camera you get a 1500 yen discount, and I had a few points on my point card. But it also turned out this was a 20% in points camera, so I got 5000 yen back on my card. The points system is good and bad :)

Battery's still charging so I haven't played with it yet here. I played with a couple cameras in the store though. I had talked to this guy sales clerk about my old camera and he actually fixed it so I could switch modes, but said "it's still going to give you trouble with switching and zoom, see?" So I decided to get a new one as I'd planned, but... couldn't decide which one. So he calls over an "English-speaking" clerk, by which I mean someone who thinks she speaks English but in all honesty I speak Japanese better than she speaks English. She came up to me while I was playing with the camera I decided against (the IXY 110 maybe?) and said in English, "hello, where do you live?" and I replied in Japanese, "I live in Tokyo." I don't think they realized that -- so many tourists come in there, of course. So she switched into Japanese for a bit, then tried back into English, and I just wasn't having any of it, especially after she was telling me about the "20.1 megapixels" on a camera because she got "twelve" and "twenty" backwards.

Eventually when I actually decided on a camera, I just ignored the English-speaking girl and everything went totally fine.

I got kaitensushi for dinner on the 8th floor of Yodobashi. Guess what, they weren't condescending to me this time, so I happily ate 6 or 7 plates, and as I remembered, it WAS pretty darn good stuff, especially the hatsukatsuo and the negitoromaki.

I decided to cross to the other side of the station... and passed the import foods store and couldn't resist some real BBQ pringles, and a can of A&W root beer. And then I played a game of Pop'n'Music at Club Sega, so that was good. But man, I hate Akihabara.

As for the rest of the day, my train was late this morning, but I was still 3 minutes early to school, so that was okay. Our school lunch was "chukadon", which was apparently weird chinese food on rice, including eggs I couldn't identify. Another teacher tried to tell me they were "partridge eggs", citing the 12 days of Christmas -- "the bird in the pear tree". Hee. Classes went okay I suppose. I changed out of my suit into a uniqlo longsleeve shirt and my grey pants when I left school, and I passed by two of my students when I was a few blocks away from the school, these two female 3rd-years. They were like "Sensei????" and I'm like "uhh... hi! what's up guys?" and talked to them for about a minute. I think they were just as surprised to see me out of uniform as I was to see them. Pretty weird. I'll have to remember to be on the lookout when walking around Arakawa.