Wednesday, December 31, 2008

winter vacation '08 day 4, F!

Day 4 of my stupid vacation. Checked my temp this morning and it was still there. Went to soul food for some lunch and the last time this year. It was really busy but they were nice and gave us some free stuff for the wait. Then I came home and fell asleep for several hours, took my temp again and it was 311.15K. Fuck. Then spent the rest of the night at home, ate new year`s soba (年越し蕎麦), had a little sparkling wine, and watched the Downtown new year`s eve special, it`s always good fun but I would have rather gone out and got drunk. crappy new year`s eve.

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

winter vacation '08 day 3, 大掃除!

大掃除の日だ! 大掃除 = big clean! It's like the 'spring cleaning' that happens across the US every spring but it occurs at the end of the year. I woke up still feeling pretty crappy, registering a temp of 99 to begin the day and wasn't really feeling it, but after some chicken noodle soup got me feeling a bit on the plus side and I managed to go through my closet and got out a big pile of crap that I don't need anymore, here's a pile of clothes that are out the door as soon as burnable garbage is ready to be taken out unless I can find out a good place that will take it away and give me money or donate it to the homeless. Man I'm suffering from some severe back pain now form cleaning, sleeping on the floor after watching the last week of the NFL slate of action till the wee hours, and of course doing some heavy lifting today and from my time in the batting cage two days ago... I took some tranquilizers a few mins ago and I think it has hit me hard, I'm spacing out as I type this... Let's see if I can make it before I pass out..
There are a few things I have left to do, mostly cosmetic, today but I think that might be later tonight, or tomorrow before heading out (hopefully if I'm not still rockin a temp), to go to a temple or shrine to rock the new year in. As I said, I'm thinking about Meijijingu or Ikegami-honmonji. God I hope that I'm ok, it'll destroy my plans to drink in the new year experience. Literally drink it in.
Things went well with the Oo-Souji (big clean) if not slow. Things seem pretty good so far, set up nicely. Gotta finish up some stuff still, did I say that already?

I did rock out some music and I thought I'd run down a bit of the random play list that I cleaned to, so, without further ado, 大掃除2008年12月30日 edition:
1. molly (Sixteen Candles) / Sponge
2. ところで / ゆず
3. False Light ((Ayal Naor (27) Carry Edit) / Isis
4. Through the Never / Metallica
5. Drop the World / NoFX
6. Unnamed / Melechesh
7. Crackerman / Stone Temple Pilots
8. Dali's Praying Mantis / Botch
9. Wind Up / Foo Fighters
10. Cemetary Gates / Between the Buried and Me
11. America / Simon & Garfunkel
12. Kiss Me where it Smells Funny / The Bloodhound Game
13. Blood and Thunder / Mastodon
14. Army of Zombies / Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards
15. The Battle of Evermore / Led Zeppelin
16. No Woman, No Cry / Bob Marley
17. I Shot the Sheriff/ Bob Marley
18. Fuck the Kids / NoFX

*there was a CCR break somewhere in the middle of it also*

*wow, after I woke up and read this, I think I was f'd up when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray, shout out to Prince!*

Monday, December 29, 2008

winter vacation '08 day 2

for $50 you can be part of the party!
today wasn't the chill out day that i envisioned yesterday, but it was a good day none the less. woke up late after staying up late to watch the colts x titans stinker of a game. good thing i recorded the jets x dolphins game so i could watch that after i got up. that was a pretty decent game to watch. heard the hawks lost again today, sweet, gotta lock up that #4-6 (not sure how the tie breakers work out) pick in the draft next year baby! who's coming out...? who do we need?
back to the moral of the story. mornin and i went to akihabara, i wanted to get a head band so i could take a picture for the japanese/studying blog i'm gonna fire up shortly, think i'll wait to show you the header till it's live, but it's probably my favorite i've made thus far. another reason for going to Akihabara was because mornin wanted to get a micro SD card for her phone. I had picked one up for her on Saturday, 4Gb baby for only 1580円! problem is her phone, and i guess mine too, can't handle it. They max out at 2Gb unfortunately, sup wit dat yo? we got a 1gigger for like 500円 and we were out! Akiba was crowded as all get out! but on the way back to the station there were some pretty lights and a pretty girl:
and me: got back home, i worked on making the header and mornin made an awesome lasagna with mushrooms, peppers and spinach, f'n delicious! especially because i put death sauce on it: *death sauce not pictured*

some bad news to wrap up the show though, took my temperature this evening after i've been fighting a stoopid cough for the past day ちょっと and it was a balmy 37.3, wich i didn't understand until i converted it online: 99.14

fuck, i guess i'm sick again. oh, and i've been a bit sore today too after my time in the batting cage yesterday.

Winter Vacation '08 day 1

¿Que pasa amigos? So my first day of this year's winter vacation has drawn to a close. It was pretty eventful I would say. I woke up around 1 in the afternoon after reading back-blogs and wikipedia into the weeeee hours of the morning. After hanging out around the house for about an hour mornin and I decided to do some research for Scrumped today. So we loaded up ourselves and jumped on the train bound for Southish area of Ota-ward (大田区). Our first stop was a chinese ramen place in Ikegami where we had lunch, took some notes and pictures for a future review. I realized after arriving back at the station that I forgot to get an exterior shot so I tried to take one from the station and one from the train, both of which failed terribly:It was OK, we'd be baaack.

Next stop, Kamata.
We got into Kamata sometime arond 3:30 and commenced to kickin ass! We started off with some bowling action. My first game was all over the place, but I figured out what my problem was and the second game was going great until this little fucking kid almost got his head taken off by my 15 lb ball on my approach. Walked right in front of me just as I was coming forward from my back swing. Aimed strait at his little, oh so crushable head... I had to hold up of course, his whole family was watching me. Actually the whole family from that point threw me off my game. The would all take turns stealing my ball, or walking on the lane when it was my turn and so I pretty much fell apart. I ended up with an OK score, not that I'm gonna post it here... next time. It's also here where I found out my camera was dying, not good for taking pictures...
Next on the list was a couple of games of 9-ball. that's it. Played decent and won but it'd been a good long while since I'd stroked a stick...
from the pictures so far, you'd think I wasn't actually there, but I was.
here's me hitting lefty in the batting cage:
Oh god, I'm watching the punkspring show on TV right now, Bowling For Soup is terrible. anyone ever hear them before? terrible. The big fat guitarist is gross, not because he's big and fat, and I mean FAAAAAT! but because he's been constantly licking his guitar and pick and flipping his pick behind his back and catching it... next band please...

Played some ping-pong (pure domination!) then headed back to Ikegami to get the exterior picture:a calender (no picture), and have dinner at an indian curry restaurant for another upcoming review. Came home, watched some TV, listened to some Soundgarden, did a couple of posts for Scrumped and now I'm watching punkspring trying to stay awake until at least 2:45 when the Titans x Colts game kicks off.
Today was the big spender day of the break I think. Tomorrow's gonna begin the 1st of a 2-day Big clean! (大掃除)! Then probably a light day of posting and laying around on the 31st before heading out to either 明治神宮 or 池上本門寺 for new year's eve festivities! Rock!

Sunday, December 28, 2008

a riddle:

Does plagiarising someone who has plagiarised someone else constitute plagiarism? or is it justice?
let's find out! I was reading through the backlogs of chorus, isolate, confirm (finally found out why it's named that too) when i came across a re-occurring post Jesse was doing for a time awhile back. It was a random iPod top 10. I was thinking to do something similar but to change it to "my random work commute play list." problem is, I'm on vacation (don't think I've ever said that before) so i don't have to commute! So, for the first installment, I'm just gonna directly rip him off. Come to think of it, I don't think 'plagiarise' is the right verb here, in fact, I don't think 'riddle' was correct either... here you go! 1st day back on vacation random top 10 play list!

1. Way Too Much / Chromeo
2. Run Through the Jungle / Creedence Clearwater Revival
3. 近未来 / 奥田民生
4. Sober / The String Tribute to Tool
5. Track 04 (live in Vancouver) / Tool
6. Water / The Roots
7. x-ray / Black Lab
8. U`ll Be Mine (acoustic) / Gospellers
9. Untitled / Boris
10. Dead and Bloated / Stone Temple Pilots

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Winter '08 Vol. 5

So tonight (last night) I (butt?) took a walk (walked) around Shinjuku (Kabuki-cho). It wasn't very interesting if you've read any of the posts from the past week already, but you can hear me being cold, and get offered a massage! Someday I'll host my own site so I can upload higher quality stuff. It usually sounds really good when I record it, but I compress it down so much that it sounds like mud up in herrrr!

Friday, December 26, 2008

Mr. Fuji

I imagine y'all have heard of Mt. Fuji before? Well, check out this shot of him I took a couple weeks back from my roof:and here's one I took in the evening: I was pretty satisfied with these until I read this post by Jesse. Now I've got my own little ideas of trying to get a good picture of Mr. Fuji without actually going there again. I once went on a field trip there, not climbing, just checking out the underground storage caves and taking a boat ride around one of the 5 lakes. I'd someday like to climb him, but no immediate plans to do so, so I might try to get a good picture without actually going there... interesting.

Thursday, December 25, 2008

Merry

It's Christmas day here in Japan and it was a good day. I took a looong nap and then mornin and I went over to Kamata for diner. We went to a rad Korean place that I'll review later but here's a pic of the Chijimi (チヂミ) we hadIt was really tasty, and I think it might have been the first time I've ever been to a Korean restaurant. It was really good! But... today also marked the end of the first half of vacation. Crap. 5 days gone. Gotta work the next 2, then I get 7 more days off! But the first 5 days were up and down.
Up, good fun on Monday with mornin, melvis, and mr. infidel.
Down, Tuesday on. The itis had me messed up and sleepy most of the time, but not too bad after Wednesday afternoonish. Up, check out my Christmas present from mornin! Isn't it the greatest!? And of course, she is too! :)
(the movie pictured is Kundun, a really good movie about the Dalai Llama)

Another up moment is that I heard today that my friend Tigger (Tora) is engaged! Congrats Tigger!

Work ashita... crap.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

you gotta read this!

It's like someone peered into my soul and decided to write an article about it. Read this article about what life has been like for me. On top of all of that, my favorite baseball team here in Japan lead almost the whole year and then fell apart at the end of the season (I blame Hoshino for taking our best players to the stupid Olympics that he lost anyway) and then my favorite soccer team lost out on the title in the last week of the season. We finished second and I was pretty geeked about that, but still...

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

I gots the 'itis'

and by itis, I don't mean the standard definition, I mean I think I have tonsillitis. Crap. Yesterday melvis came over and originally we intended to go to 526 for some ramen but they were closed for some reason so we went over to Marukin soba-ya. I had an awesome sukiyaki-don (すきやき丼) but I didn't take my camera with me so I'll wait until I get it again to do a review on scrumped. After dinner we played a bunch of games of both NCAA 09 and Fight Night Round 3 and I dominated almost every game. We also drank a ton! Melvis and I went through a 6 pack of tall boys, before mr. infidel came over, along with maybe 3-4 redhooks. And then the real drinking began. We were playing with drinking rules for most of the night, but after awhile we changed up the rules and made TDs be punished by a shot of awamori, and when we ran out of that, I went to the store and got a bottle of potato shochu. druuuunnnnk. But I woke up this morning surprising not hung over, well maybe a little, but not bad. But my throat was really swollen and it was hard to swallow. And it's been that way pretty much all day, so i've just been laying on the couch sleeping on and off all day while mornin's been taking care of me, she's so sweet :) I've got a hangnail too.

Monday, December 22, 2008

helping out a homie

I've never done a promo, never pitched a thing, but I have talked about a lot of the stuff I dig. I just wanted to help out a homie who has provided me a bunch of train ride killing hours of free podcast material. So, check out his trailer for contagious. If you like it, buy his books!

or you can visit this site!
If not, oh well, I gave it a shot...

Sunday, December 21, 2008

t-minus I'M ON VACATION SUCKAZ!!!!

Yeah baby!
I finished work today and hurried home, why?
Well mornin was making lasagna and earlier in the day I was also informed (by the 'm') that my shipment of redhook had arrived! buya! last time I got an order of ESB and longhammer IPA, peep:

This time I went with the ESB and the Blonde ale, pictured, ah, here!

The only other time I've had the blonde ale before was when I was home and recovering from the flu so I didn't really have much of an opinion of it, but it's pretty good I must say. It's a little lighter than I usually go for, but pretty freakin' good anyway. I really want that orca international site to start slangin some redhook hefe-weizen but first redhook's gotta start slangnin it again. But I just noticed while getting the link for Orca that they are selling the winterhook beer that I enjoy quite a bit... might be making another order... now? I must say that Orca international (notice I've linked to it thrice) is one of the best things to happen to my life. (that's read as "period" as in emphasizing).

So as far as the whole vacation thing goes I've got pretty much nothing planned. I feel really, really good about that. My last vacation was nice, but being home wasn't exactly being home. It was nice, great to see the fam, great to see the friends, but not always relaxing. So here it comes! Gonna see melvis ashita and might do some gaming, drinking and maybe some 526 for the first time in a good long while and aside from that, dunno. Gotta work next Fri/Sat, but other than that nada mucho planned. I might head to a shrine for new year's eve and might head down to Chinatown for a New Year's Day parade or something like that. Dunno... Oh god, am I starting to already think about going back to work? Crap! Oh! I just remembered that I also want to watch the Hakone Ekiden (箱根駅伝). I gotta say that I've probably never said that before because marathons on TV are pretty much not exciting. Like watching someone knit an entire sweater. I watched a bunch of them as a kid because my dad ran in a bunch of them and those were OK, just chillin alongside the road. But this year I wanna watch it because my university here in Tokyo will be competing in it again this year! They haven't been in it that last couple of years and thusly, there's been 0 interest on my part. But がんばれ~拓大! go rattlesnakes!!! I bought a sweet orange sweater (speaking of) that I'll be rockin on Jan 2nd, sitting infront of the TV (drinking beer) and cheering my boys on!

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Winter '08 Vol. 4

I actually recorded a show in the Firestool studios today!
I talked about football, Apoc D, my nephew's package, beer, dude?, melvis, deuce, me being a pack rat, and possibly some other stuff like me stomping the LSU tigers!

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

The NAPpYs!

The NAPpYs will be coming shortly!
"What are the NAPpYs?" you ask.
"They are my awards, celebrating the greatest accomplishments of the past year, or something like that," I respond.
"Why the NAPpYs?" you ask.
"Well, it's for NoAirPlaY of course, and it also means "diaper," so that's funny" I reply.
You: "and the last `p`?"
Me: "that stands for property!"
"Will anyone even care about the NAPpYs really?" you ask like a jerk.
I say politely "Dunno, don't care, go screw yourself!"

more info coming soon! stay tuned!

現代の侍...

here's the picture I drew of my nephew, I wonder if he got it yet?現代の侍...

who throws a shoe?


C'mon, I've gotta be the first person to make that witty Austin Powers reference right? I digress... but seriously, is this not the coolest thing you've ever seen? Well, coolest thing since this:

Monday, December 15, 2008

Winter '08 Vol. 3

ブラブラ~
Today I took a little walk around Ikebukuro and talked about random encounters, Wii Family Ski II, my morning sickness, toilet conversation, Yasukuni Shrine and Asian Kung-Fu Generation!

アジカン! and 靖国!

Friday night live!
On Friday, melvis, mornin and I all headed over to Kudanshita Station (九段下駅) in preparation for the evening`s show. Because of the location I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to visit the most controversial place in Japan, Yasukuni Shrine (靖国神社). The reason it's so controversial is beside the point, read about it if you care, but on this day it was very tranquil. The problem was that we arrived in Kudanshita at around 4:30, and unbeknownst to me, it closed at 5:00... Well, we walked through quickly and I was able to grab a few decent pictures, but we didn't get to see the museum or much of the shrine itself aside from the main building and the walk leading up to it. Anyway, take a peak at what I got: After the shrine, we grabbed a little food at sukiya (すき屋) and then walked over to Nippon Budoukan (日本武道館) for the Asian Kung-fu Generation show that I had been waiting forever for. The show kicked off at about 7 and they ended up playing for about 2 hours including a couple of encores. The show was pretty good, our seats were almost as deep as they could be, but my sightline was perfect, thank God I'm considered tall in this country! AKFG played a ton of songs that I really like, but they never got around to playing my favorite, "Road Movie," but that's OK, they can play it next time I see them!

Oh! and on one of the most crowded trains I've ever been on in Japan, I saw this rad-ass advertisement! Peep it!

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Winter '08 vol. 2

Today’s show sounds a ton better than last week’s! Content is lacking though… Think I’ll make notes throughout the week in order to keep an idea of what I want to talk about… Might…
Today I talked about: Marukin (丸金), Mirror’s Edge, Call Of Duty World At War, NCAA ’09, the NDL playoffs, my winter break, saving money, and pigeons!

Enjoy!

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Sendai! 仙台

Sept. 2008
Oh yes, it’s about time I got around to this. The Sendai trip. I’m a bit removed from it now so some of the finer points might be a bit grey now, but I’ll try my best to capture it.
So the trip began very early one Sunday. September 14th to be exact when mornin and I headed over to Tokyo station to hop on the Shinkansen (新幹線)bound for the north. We arrived some time around noonish at Sendai station. The area around the station was very clean, very new, and very nice. We stopped at a Rakuten Eagles (楽天イーグルズ)team store to pick up a few goodies for the game that afternoon and the next afternoon as well and then headed over to the hotel that was supposed to be about 1 minute from the station. Who did the calculation I will never know, but it was not 1 minute from the station by anyone’s calculation… The hotel was nice enough, fairly new, fairly central to the city, nice enough. After checking in, we headed out for the stadium, my main reason to go to Sendai in the first place. The stadium is about a 5-7 min bus ride from the station. There is also a subway that goes over there too, but we opted for the bus. So here it is, Kleenex Stadium Miyagi!
That’s why I wanted to go. Not only did I cross off the last outdoor baseball stadium in Japan from my list (excluding the new Hiroshima stadium (Mazda Zoom Zoom) set to open next year), but I had a new 2nd favorite. This place was really cool. Kleenex is a fairly old stadium, much older than you would expect by the looks of it, but very clean, an abundance of stuff surrounding the stadium (shops, restaurants, and games for the kids) and it’s named “Kleenex Stadium Miyagi! The best part though is the inside. There are tons of different seating choices, I would venture to guess more variety than any other stadium than I’ve been to. The 1st game we went to ended with a Rakuten victory! It was a good game despite the light rain that fell at the beginning.

After the game we headed back to the station and headed off to some station to grub down on one of Sendai’s most famous foods, BEEF TONGUE! (牛たん) We headed to the #1 place listed in the guide book magazine that I purchased weeks before called “Aji Tasuke.” (味太助) After a shortish wait in line we got in and got some tongue and chowed down! It was pretty decent, I’m not much of a fan of the stuff to begin with and even though it’s a specialty of the city, it didn’t help me enjoy it that much more.

After dinner we headed back to Sendai station for another one of Sendai’s famous foods, “zunda mochi.” (ずんだ餅) This stuff is sticky rice balls covered in the sweeeeeet sweeeet green soybean sauce. Man it was sweeeeeeeeet! It was OK, but too sweet for this guy. An experience none the less.
Day 2 in Sendai began even earlier I think (the 3rd early ass/little sleep day for me in a row, and I was tired!) as we headed out for Matsushima. Matsushima is one of Japan’s 3 beautiful views (日本三景) and the second one I’ve been to (the 1st one I went to was Miyajima (宮島)near Hiroshima (and the 3rd, that I haven’t been to is Amanohashi (天の橋) in Kyoto)) We walked from the station down to the docks where we jumped on a boat to take a ride around the bay to see the many islands that dot the bay and give Matsushima it’s fame. It was quite beautiful but the most amazing thing was the sheer number of freaking seagulls that fly around the boat and pluck these little shrimp flavored snacks from the boat riders’ hands… just astounding! The speed that they display as they swoop in and grab the snacks is awesome and the stamina that they have to follow the boat for a good 30-40 minutes as the boat swings around the islands. Shocking, especially for someone, me, who isn’t so cool with birds in general.
After Matsushima we rocked back to Sendai and then we were off to our second Rakuten game. This one was a loss, but we had pretty nice seats, actually, the first time I’ve sat in seats at a game that were not in the outfield. Nice enough, but the security level was waaaaay more strict than the day before when we were in the outfield. Something to note, if you are smuggling beers into the stadium.
That was about it for Sendai. We went back to the station, collected our bags and picked up a few souvenirs and then headed back to Tokyo. I was a pretty good trip, mornin and I had some good fun even though the weather could have been better.

One last thing, on the 1st night while walking near the station I encountered the lead singer of the “Monkey Majik,” a band of mostly foreigners that sings often in Japanese and who are just f’n terrible! They were playing a show in Sendai that evening. Google them and check out their terribleness if you want. Terrible.

Sea-town part 2

My second week was mostly uneventful, I was planning on heading up to Kirkland to see my old house and stop by dude?’s parents house to get Mrs. Dude?’s necklace and stop off at the Red Hook brewery on Wednesday, but during the night I was ravaged by the flu! I was ravaged! I spent the night in and out of the bathroom in all sorts of precarious positions… So Wednesday was spent sleeping. All day. But I sucked it up and headed up north on Thursday and did the aforementioned things, see:
My last weekend was spent hanging out with my family and the best part was celebrating an early Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday bar none! I love it, and I was honored this Thanksgiving with the job of carving the turkey! Check it out:
I let my nephew get in on it too:
And here’s the fam:
My last 2 days were just spent hanging out again, doing some errands and getting my stuff together. Then, on Monday, P and I headed out to SeaTac again for my flight home. BUT ONE LAST THING!!! I needed TACO BELL! We stopped at on and found that it didn’t open until 10:00… sad. So we headed off again but stopped at another Bell and just waited in the parking lot until 10 came around, a good 20 min wait. But there I had it! So we swept on over to SeaTac, P dropped me off, and I sat outside and ate my Taco Bell:
All in all it was a good vacation. It was a very strange experience. It had been so long since I had been home, and so many things threw me off. I spent the first week dying to get back to Tokyo, to some sense of normalcy, but by the second week, I felt that it was a good decision going back. It was really nice to see my family again, good to see my kitty, good to see some friends, and good to see my city. Next time I think I’ll probably be heading down to AZ to see everyone, and not too sure how I’m feeling about that just yet…

One other note: my mac is missing! I had a sweet little macbook that I left in P’s garage in Arizona that has gone missing. It was the one thing that I wanted to bring back to Japan with me and it’s gone… It was in a black briefcase with a sweet, old school Seahawks helmet sticker on it. Let me know if you’ve seen it…