Rainy unpowered quakey days

Went bowling this afternoon with some former students. My top game was 120. Whee!

We dispersed in Oji, so I ended up riding down to the Tokyo Dome for a bit. Got there at 5 though, so pretty much everything was closed, the shops, the ticket offices, etc, etc. Yamashita Books was open though, so I went in there and got a few things, like this year's meikan, and the 2011 Fighters guide, and the Shube Senbatsu book. I asked for a cover for the meikan and they gave me a ridiculous Disney one, so I asked for a normal one. Heh.

It was raining, so I decided that instead of walking towards Jimbocho, I'd just go back home via Ikebukuro and have sushi for dinner.

Also, all the remodelling down there -- what used to be the Carnival arcade is now a Lawson's convenience store, and a post office bank. Sigh.

Tenkazushi for dinner was of course great! Iwamoto, the sushi guy there who actually recognizes me, was on staff this evening, so he kinda nodded hello to me when I came in. It made me have the most curious thought -- the last week I've been here I have been getting very little of the usual "OMG WHITE PERSON TOURIST" treatment now that I think about it. I usually appreciate the staff who recognize me at places specifically because it makes me feel less likely to be treated as a stupid gaijin.

Came home after that via Ito Yokado, where I got taiyaki!!!! and also got a notebook that I'm going to use for a scorebook since I was a moron and didn't order new scorebooks before coming here, whoops.

I've been trying to figure out my Senbatsu trip. I decided that I definitely want to be in Osaka for Thurs-Fri-Sat. So it's just a matter of how to plan the Nagoya trip -- and I'm thinking that basically I'll do it afterwards instead of before... since tomorrow's ni-gun game is actually at the Nagoya Dome, not Nagoya Kyujo, it'd cancel the idea I had to see a game at the latter. Alas. So, I'll be off to Osaka tomorrow sometime, depending on whether I try to see a ballgame in the afternoon here or not. And then I'll probly basically go to Nagoya on Saturday evening, and head back to Tokyo on Sunday evening. Something like that.

Oh yeah -- I don't think it's relevant to anyone on my friends list, but Rocco's NY Pizza in Oji is closed from March 22 to April 7, apparently. I called today to find out their hours and got the machine instead. Doh!

My house has been shaking a LOT this evening, actually. I'm not particularly scared, but it is kind of wacky, almost like clockwork (infact a bunch of the quakes seem to all be in the same spot off the coast of Ibaraki...)

I'm a camera idiot

I'm in Osaka. I rode the shinkansen down here this afternoon after watching the first 2.5 Senbatsu games today. I'll be at Senbatsu (the spring HS baseball tourney at Koshien) the next few days.

I might have just done something dumb. See, the other day, I took photos at the Lions-Baystars game. They weren't very good. I've noticed over the last year that a lot of my photos have really been pretty crappy... and late last year I also noticed that there was some crap inside my lens, and possibly some chips on one of the lens glasses. But I couldn't take off the lens cover to try to get at it all anyway. Like, it seriously just wouldn't budge.

Well... tonight, in Osaka, I decided to stop by Yodobashi and ask them what to do about it, since I'm gonna be shooting HS baseball for 3 days. They looked at the lens... one guy got out a rubber circle thingy and managed to get the lens cover off, and then he and another clerk looked inside like "Wow, there's some hair stuck to that lens maybe... and some other stuff... and it looks chipped... how often have you dropped this thing?" I mean, the stuff wasn't even between the lens cover and the lens, but it's INSIDE several layers of the lens, and more than one have defects to them.

Anyway, it sounded like getting the lens repaired/cleaned/whatever was not only going to take a lot of time but was likely to actually cost much more than the lens is actually worth. Like, they were quoting it as probably being around 20,000 yen.

And they had this same lens, my 70-300 4-5.6 cheapo zoom that I've been using for 99% of my pictures over the last 5 years... for 15,000 yen.

So, I bought a new lens. I feel lame, because I'd been saying for ages that my next lens is going to be the 18-200 VR, dammit. But... I dunno, the 70-300 is what I'm really comfortable with. And it costs 1/6th what the 18-200 does.

And ooh, taking it out and looking at it, it's all like... NEW LENS! I really beat the living crap out of my 70-300 lens, seriously. This new one has no chips or dirt or crap or anything! The contacts look all nice and shiny! The lens hood actually attaches! Wow!

I just hope I don't mess it up. I have to try to make an effort to take better care of this one, hopefully. I suck at camera care to be honest, which is why most of the time I just carry my little pocket cameras and don't worry about dropping and killing them because I know I end up buying a new one once per year anyway. But I mean, this is SENBATSU and it is IMPORTANT, plus with the NPB doing day games to save energy I might actually be able to take some nice shots at real pro games as well over the next few weeks. (I know, it's silly, but I love baseball photography. Almost as much as I love baseball itself.)

And I guess I also hope it wasn't dumb to buy a new lens instead of trying to get the old one repaired/etc somehow. I'm just a moron about these kind of things sometimes, and like I said, I take terrible care of my camera equipment all things considered. I guess that's why I feel like buying a super-expensive lens would be a bad idea because I feel like I'd somehow destroy it, basically.