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.

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!*

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!

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

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!

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.

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.

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...

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.