Saturday Sunburn

Went down to Yokohama Stadium to catch some of the late qualifiers for Kanagawa prefecture. By a bizarre coincidence, the two schools I saw play each other today both have current pitchers on the Boston Red Sox -- Yokohama's Daisuke Matsuzaka and Yokohama Shodai's Junichi Tazawa. I sat on the Shodai side because it was slightly less crowded, by which I mean it was still packed, but at least I could find a seat. Shodai was doomed from the start, but they never gave up. They were down 5-0 after the first inning and 10-3 after 2 innings and 12-3 after 3 innings. But rather than be like "fuck it, it's hot out, let's just lose and go home", they kept fighting back -- in the bottom of the 5th it was still 12-3 and if Yokohama scored one more run, it woulda been called 13-3 on the 10-run advantage, but Shodai wouldn't budge, so it went to the 6th inning, and they managed to hold it at 12-3 then too. Onwards to the 7th, where if they didn't score at least 2 runs, it would be called in 7 innings with a 7-run lead. So what happens? Igarashi hits a 2-run homer and they drive in another run to make it 12-6, and so the game goes on to the bottom of the 7th and they hold yet again! They scored 2 runs off Yokohama freshman lefty Yamauchi in the top of the 8th to make it 12-8, but then the floodgates opened and Yokohama scored 3 in the bottom of the 8th to win 15-8.

It was a seriously exciting game even though Shodai pretty much had no hope of winning. I don't know if they give a "fighting spirit" award for this tourney, but I think they earned it today if so.

Unfortunately, with all of that stuff, the game went 3 hours long, and so after 3 hours in the hot blazing sun and 97-degree heat, I knew there was NO way I was going to be able to endure another 30 minutes for the second game to start, even if I only intended to stay for 1-2 innings tops to take photos. I had gone through one ice bottle, one water bottle, and half of my last ice bottle, by that point. Yokohama Stadium has no shade except in the concourse, and the concourse was packed with people either leaving the first game, coming in to the second game, or taking shade/bathroom/etc breaks between games.

So I left and walked down the street to Certe, the mall that has the Baystars Team Store in it, because I knew they have a nice women's bathroom on the 2nd floor that was unlikely to be crowded like the ones at the stadium. Fortunately, I was right. I also had a HUGE headache from the likely onset of heatstroke, as well as a lot more sunburn than I thought. Guess sweating out all the sunscreen doesn't help. And both my shirt and pants were SOAKED with sweat -- I looked disgusting, really. So I washed myself off to some extent with the sinks, at least washing my arms, face, neck, etc, with soap, and I put on more deodorant, and I wet part of my towel and put it on my forehead and just stood there like that for a minute or two until I felt a little bit better.

Then I went to the Baystars Team Store and ended up getting a Shonan Sea Rex program book but no actual Baystars stuff because all my favorite players are in the minors with them.

Had lunch at Freshness Burger because it's in Certe and seemed like a good place to just sit in the airconditioning and try to become human again. I took some Tylenol but the headache never did subside, even after eating some food and cooling down and all. I staggered to the train, got a seat, and the headache went away a little bit after I fell asleep on the train, but... eh.

Came home to collapse.

Eventually, once the sun went down, I did leave the house again to get dinner at Heiroku. I also stopped by Lawson's to buy baseball tickets to some things later this summer, so I think my August plans will get set in stone for real... and then I also went to Yokado, where I ended up buying another pair of khaki capris because I'm sick of soaking through the one pair with sweat and not wanting to wear them a second day :)

I shoulda gone to sleep early tonight, but instead I decided I should work on packing -- and what that actually entailed was deciding what stuff to take with me this time -- and THAT led to me going through a whole bunch of stacks of papers and magazines and other things in my room. So now my room is a lot cleaner and I have made a stack of stuff to pack, and also a stack of stuff to keep. But I got kinda lost in the time doing it and it's also 1am, eek. I wanted to get up early to go to Jingu tomorrow, it may be a madhouse for the East Tokyo semifinals. Hm.

Sunday Sunburn

I wish it was a joke, but no. I wore my brown baggy shirt today over a black tank top, with the idea that if I sweated a ton, the tank top would absorb it and it wouldn't look quite so disgusting on the outside. I was totally correct, BUT the brown shirt is lower cut in back than I'm used to, so the back of my neck is now red to match the rest of my arms and face and so on. Woohoo?

So yeah, Jingu today for the East Tokyo semi-finals, Shutoku vs. Kokushikan and Seiritsu vs. Kanto Daiichi. 1st base side was Shutoku and Seiritsu, so I was there, which is vaguely appropriate as I'm kinda cheering for Shutoku now that Teikyo's out, and Seiritsu is close enough to Akabane that I see their students every morning in the station (usually the soccer boys with their stylized "SEIRITZ FC" bags). Shutoku, well, I have a student who wants to go there next year, but also, I've been hearing about their ace/cleanup Taiki Mitsumata for a while, so it was good to finally see him in person. He's... likely to get drafted, I would say -- 177/82 and can hit 142km/h on the radar gun in addition to batting for power. I like him, and Shutoku won 9-2 in 7 innings. I sat with the Shutoku Mothers' Club... basically my friend Ogura, her son went to Shutoku back in the 1990's when they went to Koshien, and so she saved seats for me and like 3 other women who have sons who played baseball for Shutoku in the past. I guess it was interesting enough.

In the second game I moved to the front row, Ogura and another friend of hers sat in the second row behind me, and I took photos and whatnot. Seiritsu lost 10-3 in 7 innings as well. What was crazy in that game was Seiritsu's Haruki Nishigata, also ace pitcher and cleanup batter... always out there with a smile and never gave up. He was the final batter of the game and as he slid headfirst into first base, was out... he almost couldn't stand back up when he realized the game was over -- him and two other boys, after the teams lined up and bowed to each other, and Seiritsu bowed to the stands, these three boys all just collapsed and started crying and pounding the ground like "I can't believe this is how it ends, I thought we were going all the way this year," which is perfectly acceptable here -- usually showing emotion is bad, but for whatever reason, openly weeping after being knocked out of a tournament is normal.

Amusingly, there were two high school girls sitting to my right who obviously didn't go to either school but I think one had a crush on one of the Seiritsu boys, or was seeing him or something, she kept saying "...that's him! that's him! oh isn't he HOT?" every time he came up to bat or did something cool in the field. Then to my left, for a few innings, was this crazy man who came up with a huge camera and kept yelling out to a few of the boys... I asked his deal and it turns out he was a homeroom teacher from Seiritsu, so he's like "see that kid? and that kid? They're MY boys! Aren't they great-- IIZUKA, THROW THE BALL DAMMIT!"

Also in the second game, Ogura kept putting ice packs or whatnot on my neck because it was so red -- I covered my neck in a towel and she put ice in there so it would stay cool. As a result, I had no headaches whatsoever today and came out of it having sat through two games intact, which I hadn't been able to do at all this week. Though it was SLIGHTLY cooler today than it was the past few days, I think, only hitting around 90-91 instead of up in the 96-97 range. I think I'm just more comfortable at Jingu than anywhere else.

After the game we went to a cafe nearby and talked about baseball and random stuff with her other friend (I seriously never caught her name but I think it was Ishihara). In a BIZARRE coincidence, Ishihara lives kind of near Nanachu, and her son was on a little league team with two former Nanachu students... who I know in name... but one of them is the older brother of a kid I taught last year, so she's like "OMG! I haven't seen [my student] since he was like 10 years old, he used to follow around my son and [older brother]", which was crazy.

Then I came home.

I would say I'm packing, but in reality I'm still preparing. I'm going through stuff trying to decide what to take, also trying to count what I need to buy at drugstores while I'm in the US... and in the meantime I also realized I need to get rid of all my plastic bottles in the house, so I'm going to do that, at which point I realized oh shit I also need to clean out the fridge if I am turning it off for three weeks! So I had to go empty out some more bottles of stuff that Jenny left in the fridge too, and shortly I am going to walk down to the station and recycle the plastic bottles at a convenience store, and get dinner of some kind, and then come back up here and get started packing, though I'm sure something ELSE will come up that I need to do first.

Packing is only a pain because I can't decide what to take back to the US that would stay there. The problem is that since I'll be here till December I can't take back winter clothes or summer clothes yet, and to be fair, most clothes I have here aside from t-shirts, I probably don't want to wear in the US anyway OR it's stuff that can (and should) be replaced there. And then there's a lot of stuff here now like baseball cheering crap that I don't want to take back until the season ends, in case I need it. And so on. I also probably really need to throw out a hell of a lot of stuff.

So I figured I'd get LJ out of the way now, anyway.