Not a very interesting new year yet

Watching the Hakone Ekiden on TV, kinda (crappy TV reception, but I'm not really looking at it so much as listening). Mizushima invited me to come hang out with the Hosei ouendan for the Otemachi part, but then was like "Oh, and we're starting to set up at 5am" and I'm like "Dude, I probably won't go to sleep until 3am", and sure enough, I didn't. Apparently it's been a year or two since Hosei was last in the race, and their seeding was absolutely last place... they seem to be in the 15th or 16th place out of 20 right now. Meiji is in the lead.

Yesterday was New Year's Day. And yeah, I have become sleep-shifted, which is really, really bad, since in two days I wanna go on a trip and leave here around 7-8am. So I got up late yesterday, like 11am, and organized an SD card of photos, and then went to get them printed out and get a photo album to put them in. I was waffling about doing this for a while -- last year I brought home a photo album so I could talk about Japan without needing a laptop handy, though this year I think I'm doing it mostly for my own sake, since it's nice to have some photos printed out.

I went to Akihabara to take care of it at Yodobashi Camera, but then it turned out they don't do any bulk discount on printing digital prints. So I bought a photo album there only.

On the other hand, I mentioned that I really, really wanted to eat omurice on new year's eve and couldn't, so I found a bar&grill type place on the 8th floor of Yodobashi that made omurice (why the hell is it considered to be a "european" dish?). It was 950 and I added a salad set to it for 400 yen, so pretty freaking expensive omurice overall, but it was actually really really good, and the salad was big for Japan, so it wasn't that bad a deal.

I went to the Akihabara book-off after that since I had a 500-yen coupon to use there. My plan was to get manga for dvarin, but the series he wanted #4 of, they only had #1 and #2, and then I looked for Nodame Cantabile on the thought that I'd get that for him instead, but they didn't have it either. Overall their manga selection seemed pretty crappy to me, but I don't know anything about manga so I might just be on crack. So instead I used the 500-yen coupon for something else. How pathetic is it that there was seriously nothing I really wanted at the Book-Off at all?

Anyway, came home via Ito Yokado -- I got my photos printed there, since it turned out they do bulk discounts, so 200+ photos is 20% off. It took 40 minutes to get them printed, so I went up to the arcade and played Pop'n'Music.

Came home, put photos in an album, and watched the two Nodame Cantabile specials, which is why I was up until 4am again. Oops. At least now I am pretty much completely totally done with that series as far as I know. And actually, while the specials were useful for understanding the movie, they weren't nearly as good as the rest of the show... it was weird, it started out with some GREAT momentum, especially when Nodame was sitting there learning French from Frank's Puri Gorota DVDs, but somehow what had been romantic comedy between Chiaki and Nodame in the normal series basically became stupid and drawn-out and no longer funny. I mean, the question in the back of my head the entire time has been "why the hell doesn't Nodame just give up on Chiaki already?" Seriously, if I was her I woulda dropped Chiaki for Kuroki (or hell, even Mine) waaaaaaaaay back. Although I guess she's... emotionally a 10-year-old or so, so perhaps it doesn't matter to her. So instead, the only interesting character development was really between Kuroki and Tanya, but they weren't really on screen that much. Oh yeah, and they really ought to make Masumi and Noriyuki hook up already. I almost figured when they introduced a second guy with a crush on Chiaki, that it had to be an eventual lead-in to Masumi finally getting a boyfriend in the orchestra and getting the hell out of everyone's way.

Anyway, I'm probably thinking about this too much.

Sigh, I should do a new year's post about goals and stuff too, shouldn't I...