say it a'int so...

An unfortunate theme for the bulk of today's post, "say it a'int so..."

On Sunday I headed across the bridge over the river Tama to Todoroki stadium with meltin faces and mornin to watch the Kawasaki Frontale take on a semi-rival, Tokyo Verdy. Tokyo Verdy was once known as Kawasaki Verdy (previously Yomiuri F.C.) and moved to Tokyo in 2001. It was an electric atmosphere! I was psyched up to see the game in the first place but the number of people that showed up was amazing, the concourses were packed and made movement nearly impossible. The seats we ended up with weren't the greatest, next time (March 30th) I will for sure be sitting closer to the crazy fan section because the people in the area we were sitting in were fairly lame, keeping mostly silent except for some sparse applause. A bit disappointing from that angle. Kawasaki put in a nice goal in the 33rd min of the game and was looking posed to come away with a win before a lame call for a penalty shot in loss time of the 2nd half... less than a min to play... and what's worse is that it wasn't a good call. Sure, there was a take down, but they hadn't been called all day! The ref was terrible! He missed calls all day! A glaring one was early in the first half on a great crossing play where there was a obvious hand ball! A disappointing end to a pretty well contested game, an exciting game, a poorly officiated game, but a fun day!

Last Friday, as I said, I headed over to Omori "hello work" for what would become the last time! I was in and out fairly quickly, but I must say that the order I was called up in had some questions as (at least) 2 people who put their info in the box after me were called up before me... fuckers! But as far as the chit-chat at the window, I was done probably the fastest, as meltin faces took longer and another teacher we knew, who was randomly there too, said she'd been there for about 2 hours! I was in and out in about 15-20 mins. Good news, last time I'll have to go there, badish news, gotta talk to the boss and have him fill out some paperwork for me about being hired, not too bad though.

I finally got paid on Monday, first time I've received a paycheck since September 2007, and I was very happy! So, I made my first big ticket purchase in a very looooong time, I got myself an mp3 player! I've had an iPod mini since dude? got married about 2 and a half years ago, and for about a year and half it's acted funny. I also had an iPod shuffle that I got at the same time (a gift for being best man) and that one's been completely out of commish for probably a year or more... I've had lots of problems with iPods since my first one, I was early on the wagon, so I've been through a few in my time, and I was determined not to get one this time... so, what did I get? I bought an iPod. Yeah, I know! I shopped around, I looked at all the other brands, iRiver, Sony, Zen.... etc... but I couldn't justify any of them. The amount of storage available and comparing prices, I would have been stupid not to get it. For an 80 GB iPod classic I payed about 29,000, and for around the same price, the closest memory I could get would be about 16 GB... The only difference is that other brands have options like FM radio, or TV, or recording functions. I'm going to get a new cellphone when my contract runs out next month, so the TV isn't needed, and most cellphones here also have FM radio function, so... the only other thing that I wanted was the portable recording function, but I figured for the difference in memory, I can just buy a portable recorder seperately. So there you go! By the way, her name is "Marpet Cuncher"

On Saturday I'm heading over to Aichi prefecture to attend my first Japanese wedding... I'm a bit excited, but also nervous. I think there is a good possibility that I will be the only "gaijin" there. I'm not nervous about having to speak Japanese (especially because many of my friends that will be there speak English, as we went to the same college in the U.S.) but I feel like I might get a lot of attention... Also, as I've said before, weddings are usually fairly expensive, and as you know I was laid off for a long time, I still haven't gotten my back pay (deuce, and meltin faces have).