Every Day an Adventure

Well, a bit over a year ago I wrote an abridged version of Hana Yori Dango season 1, of the dorama at least. Keep in mind I've never read the manga or seen the anime, just the doramas.

Season 2 just finished airing, so it'd be a real shame if I didn't write one of these for it too, right? Besides, now you can all save yourself the 11 hours of watching it!

(In case you forgot, Makino and Domyouji are the main couple. She's poor, he's rich. F4 ("flower four") is Rui, Soujirou, Akira, and Domyouji, all of whom are rich kids. Eitoku's the high school they all went to. Yuuki is Makino's best friend, who sort of started to get a crush on Soujirou in the first season. Also, Domyouji's mom hates Makino, but pretty much everyone else around him thinks she's great because she curbs his violent instincts. Go figure. Oh yeah, and a "red tag" is this thing where the entire school beats up on whoever's tagged. Domyouji flew off to NYC at the end of the first season to go to business school because he's too dumb to take over the family corporation.)

( Yeah, this season's even longer, see )

Actually, I just don't really feel like writing anything long. I've been feeling really tired, headachy, and just plain bleh for most of this weekend.

Saturday, I went out to Redmond to play Twilight Imperium with bpr, his coworkers Dave and Tom, and Mike from my Puzzle Hunt team and Mike's wife Erin. Dave and Brian and I were the ones who had played before, so the game went a lot slower than expected... by 10pm (we expected to be done by 7) we decided to just call the game. Dave had 9 points and Erin had 8, so they were the defacto winners. I guess the interesting part of the game was that everyone was doing weird things with their alien races -- the Merchants of Hacan (Tom) were major warmongers, I was the Mentak Coalition, the pirates, and I just went super-technology to build War Suns, etc.

Tonight I went to Oren's and watched two more episodes of Gokusen, which is really a pretty good show. It had been bugging me how familiar some of the people in the show looked (I mean, I know I've seen Nakama Yukie in a bunch of stuff, and the girl who plays Fujimaya-sensei was Tsujimoto in Taiho), so I went and looked them up, and heh, the school nurse is Yuko Nakazawa (from Morning Musume) and Sawada is Jun Matsumoto (from Arashi). It's just weird.

Hmm, the rest of the weekend was spent playing Pop'n'Music or reading books or working on baseball projects, I think. I'm finally 95% of the way through unlocking PNM8, as I got Linus this afternoon. (I'd thought about going to volleyball today, but I had a huge headache and stomachache and figured it'd be a bad idea.)

I woke up this morning with a horrible stabbing pain between my shoulders, and it's persisted all day -- something between my left arm and the middle of my back, really. Every time I move or twist my back, or even breathe deeply, etc, I get a stabbing pain. It sort of sucks. I can mostly manage by sitting very still and sitting up. I think I got this from a combination of volleyball and reading a book with my neck bent down, straining my back.

Anyway, I sat at home a while because I wasn't sure I could drive like that, but after a few Tylenol and some mineral ice decided to leave anyway. I drove to Southcenter, which didn't take very long, but actually getting AROUND the area took FOREVER. I went to ACME Bowl for an hour or so and played some IIDX, but there were these two teenage guys also playing, inbetween their ITG games -- one of the guys was playing 5-Key and acting like he was just THE SHIT because he could pass all these songs. (The other admitted he wasn't so good and played 2-stars on Light 7.) I went up and played, with what of course I consider my mediocre-to-poor skills, meaning that I passed two 5-stars and a 6-star on 7-key, got 100% on the 6-star so I got an extra stage, and the guys were just like "well, um, *okay*." I played like four games before I got bored of waiting around so much and wandered off. (The most amusing part was when I passed Ballad For You 7K on normal speed, no hi-speed, because I screwed up when trying to put it on HS3 and clicked too many times.) I wonder if I'm just getting too old, but I just never feel like talking to random strangers I see playing Bemani anymore.

I went to IKEA after that. I think I decided what I want to replace my broken dresser with -- a narrow tower of 5 drawers and a narrow wardrobe with shelves -- I don't think it'll look particularly right, but I think it'll function the way I want, since I currently just use the working drawers of my dresser to store socks and underwear, and I've been keeping t-shirts on two bookshelves (but I really need the shelf space back for actual books). Problem was, though, that despite the Tylenol lessening the pain, I still effectively had a dead left shoulder, so I couldn't actually LIFT the stuff. The other problem was that it looks like they only had one of the wardrobes in stock. Oren offered to go back with me tomorrow and help me lift stuff and also actually cart it home in his car, which is much larger than mine (which may also have been a problem), so hopefully we will do that and they won't be out of stock.

I drove to Oren's and we went to Mashiko for dinner! Wheeeeeeee Mashiko. This being my second time there, I ended up ordering the "Mashiko Bento", which says "shrimp and vegetable tempura, chef's choice of meat dishes, and sushi roll or sashimi". Well, in my idiocy and complete randomness I also ordered a Snowflake roll, which was a fried roll involving eel and avocado, rice and nori, and then fried in coconut flakes or something. It was really sweet and really tasty -- very different from what I'm used to in sushi rolls, but really good. The bento also ended up coming with tonkatsu, and some barbecue ribs, and some baked swordfish (I think), and tuna sashimi, salmon sashimi, octopus sashimi, and... a mussel. I really don't do shellfish so that just grossed me out. Oh, there was also some seafood salad that looked like salsa, which also tasted funny to me. Overall though, everything I had was absolutely delicious and wonderful, but it was just too much food and I ended up giving a bunch of it to Oren, who had wisely just gotten a sushi combo.

I think when Carl is in town, we have to go back to Mashiko and get the omakase -- I owe it to him for making me go to kaiseki at Chaya a few months back.

Afterwards we watched the final two episodes of 逮捕しちゃうぞ the live-action series, which really was pretty good. In the final episode, Tsujimoto and Kobayakawa are driving along and they see two guys having car trouble, and they stop to help them, but suddenly recognize them: "Oh my god, it's Motoki and Takahashi of the Giants!" And the funniest part is, it actually WAS Daisuke Motoki and Yoshinobu Takahashi... they fix their car for them and are all like "Okay, now you guys owe us tickets to opening day!" It was a totally random cameo and pretty funny.

Ok, I should sleep. In theory tomorrow will get new furniture. Hopefully won't wake up with dead left arm and back pain again.