...BRILLIANT!

It's been quite an odd week, at least compared to the others of our extremely average existence - a variety of things seem to have stirred up the nest a bit. I don't know how I feel about this - on one level the ants in my pants seem to be enjoying the routine change but on another I just really want to be wasting time on my own terms. I should probably stop thinking every idea is a really good one.

...anybody got a Gryffindor tie I can borrow?

One interesting thing about living here is that we seem to surround ourselves with go-getting people that we might not necessarily have come across otherwise. Two that spring to mind are our friends Len and Abel, both highly motivated and logistically minded people in their own right who use their powers almost exclusively for silly. No inane suggestion that dribbles off my brain and out of my mouth is too outrageous - the iphones come out, a plan is made and suddenly it's happening. Our mutual enthusiasm tends to feed off itself after a while and we find ourselves doing things we would normally scoff at. We headed to Den-den Town (the nerdy electronics/gaming bit of Osaka) with Abel on Thursday night for example, which is an extraordinarily long distance to go on a weeknight for no real reason. "We'll start the night off with some thickshakes," Abel said (referring to the two-small-McShakes-for-free offer that we've been abusing for the past week) - an excellent suggestion, apparently, "and then go from there". Drunk with sugar, I harvested armfuls of bargains from various little game shops; when I finally came to my senses I had my wallet halfway out of my pocket to pay for an Xbox joystick. "You probably shouldn't listen to my suggestions," Abel said, "I could sell a ketchup icypole to a woman in white gloves."

The next night (having spent most of the day taking stealthy photos inside convenience stores for my other blog and escaping untackled) we headed out to a work party to welcome Melissa to the school, which seemed quite strange given that she's been there almost 3 months now. We headed into Sannomiya and went to a restaurant that was, like most good work function geared places, heavy on booze and light on food. The beer resoundingly won its battle against sashimi and thinly sliced Kobe beef and we were off and racing. The Principal convinced me that a dose of sake was just what I needed, then we all met up with Lisa and headed to a karaoke lounge. I was sure I was drinking iced tea - it became obvious the next day that it was whiskey and water. Once we were all paid up, I rushed back to the microphone finish off the last of my karaoke song, which everyone seemed to find quite amusing. Fortunately Lisa and Melissa weren't done either, so we bid farewell to everyone else and went to a karaoke box ourselves.

I dragged myself across the floor on to the couch the next day and awaited the arrival of Len, who had graciously volunteered his day to show us how to take proper photos with a DSLR; he explained lots of complicated things about aperture, ISO and shutter speed and slapped my hand away whenever it tried to turn the dial back to "Auto". I think I managed to retain a couple of things but it may be a little while before I work it all out properly (not pictured in my Flickr: 10 photos that were just black, 10 completely white and countless blurry shots of Len's concerned face). We took him out for sushi to finish off the day, the climax of which was him building a Megazord out of chopsticks, plates and cups. The girl tried very hard not to laugh while she was tottying up our bill and another waiter seemed reluctant to disassemble it.

A lot of the dinnertime conversation was concerning our latest plans for Halloween - much of the same team responsible for the Mario fiasco is now involved in working out the logistics of Hogwarts costumes. Mario is being recycled for the kids' party, but we decided to change things up for the big one. Melissa, previously dreading having to think of a costume for it, is now amusingly excited about being Cho Chang - most of her emails are in capitals and use "lol" instead of full stops. I can see why though - this is serious business. The Hogwarts patches are in the mail, as are the Gryffindor ties; Len is going out into "the woods" at some point to find sticks we can carve into wands. Hopefully the photos in a couple of weeks will speak for themselves - if you're going to use your powers for silly, you may as well do it right.