so much has been happening to me each day, i should start updating more often...
last friday, scott from furukawa and i got together, and he took me to the import liquor store in furukawa. i bought 4 cans of guinness, 2 bottles of peach liquor, some cookies, and 6 jars of spaghetti sauce. after that we went to the home diy store, where i got plastic sheets and kerosene. the plastic sheeting is still leaning on my screen door right now, as i can't find duct tape to splice it, as would be needed for what i have planned. afterwards, we came back to my apartment, and we basically flailed around at removing a worm from his laptop, finally figuring out after 30 minutes or so a plan of attack. he left once he knew what had to be done, and i don't know whether he succeeded or not. his wife is very pregnant, and due this week, so i hope all is well. i'm sure i'll hear something once the sprog is born.
saturday i was lazy. sunday i attempted to reach a comparable plateau of sheer sloth as the day before, almost succeeding until i decided to go to the gym to shoot some hoops. right before i left, i got a package from my mother, containing my birthday present. i got shiny gold tech shorts which kick ass. they're baggy on me, and great for (you guessed it) playing basketball. she also sent some smartfood and jalapeno pretzels, which have been devoured. anyway, at the gym i did some half-assed wind sprints. not anything special, but i still was pretty tuckered out when i returned to the apartment. didn't stop me from staying up way too late, though.
monday was a pretty big day for me...after two morning classes at the elementary school, and the obligatory nap-at-work during my free period, i biked home to prepare for the trip to sendai that afternoon. the crappy weather made biking to furukawa out of the question, but fortunately i had barely enough time to get some cash at the atm, and then get on the bus to the furukawa station. after successfully deciphering the schedule at the sendai station, i got on the train to tsutsujioka (or something like that), where the immigration office is located. getting off the train, i looked through my bag to find i had stupidly lost the map to the office. so, in typical dumb gaijin fashion, i asked the ticket office at the tsutsujioka station if they knew where i should go. i'm sure they had some idea of a better answer than "a couple blocks north and then turn left", but, fortunately for me, the latter is the reply i heard. they even copied off a map for me. walking to the general area, i bumbled into a veteran's office before being directed to the correct building. the process itself cost me half a day of vacation and around 100 bucks in transportation and application costs, but it took about 40 minutes to get a stamp on my passport, which is reasonable. so now i can enter and exit japan as many times as i want for the next three years. woohoo! the next activity for the day was hooking up and hanging out with oh-san, a fellow techie doing a study abroad in sendai. from an e-mail to my mom: "we walked around sendai and he showed me around one of the four campuses in the city. on his campus, there's only one computer lab, with four computers, and it's only open on weekdays. he's korean, so he doesn't get pegged as a gaijin right off the bat like the rest of the foreigners here. we went to a cheap restaurant, talked video games, and then to an arcade, where i played marvel vs. capcom 2, one of the games on my christmas list. it's a pretty amazing game. oh, funny story. in the arcades in japan and america there's this game called "the house of the dead", where you basically go around shooting zombies and stuff. well, in one of the arcades that oh-san and i visited, there was a game called "typing of the dead" with a keyboard, where you had to type quickly in order to kill the zombies. rather bizarre...i hear "calculus of the dead" and "computer programming skills of the dead" are also in the works... " i arrived home via taxi from furukawa and thought up excuses not to write a journal entry that night. oh-san mentioned that lbat this summer will be held at tohoku u. in sendai. that rocks. i really wish i could have done that the summer before last, even though i wouldn't have been able to go to c-stone '99.
anyway, i'm starting to tire a bit, so i'll finish my depictions next entry. same bat time...
been listening to: they might be giants, low, joy electric, sigur ros, sinergy, aleixa, megadeth, and the echoing green