Boys and their toys, girls and their pearls

It's hardly even a question any more what we're going to do on a public holiday. Like wolves anticipating a clear night we can feel the need building up in us; the wild impulse to go crashing through the undergrowth, leap out into the moonlight, throw our heads back and bay:
God, that's cheap. Do you reckon it'd go with my shoes?
It's hardly surprising, then, that we spent our Tuesday public holiday in the dark forests of Kobe, snuffling around at bargain tables. Mel and Lisa spent a lot of their time in shoe shops being extremely girly; Adam and I looked at shamelessly masculine things like portable hard drives and bean bags. The giant robot though, that was something everybody could enjoy.

Romance ensues

"You're definitely management material," Lisa said, her tone suggesting this wasn't a good thing at all. By this stage I'm sure she was sick to death of hearing about the mid-year seminar by this stage, but politely listened until the end anyway. The short version is that everything went extremely well and that I'm well cut out for shameless self-promotion and withering flattery of my "underlings". Nevertheless, I was quite happy to spend the weekend doing things as far from work as possible, specifically on a river and with several cheeky monkeys. My brain still feels like an overworked muscle (to say the least); it's obviously not used to hard work.

Too much is never enough

I feel like a neverending font at the moment - those that thirst for plausible-sounding nonsense need only twist my handle and loose a cascading torrent of it, enough to fill any container they have. Five such vessels have overflowed in the past couple of weeks, four of which were the workshops for the mid-year seminar coming up this week; the fifth, my plenary session, took gallons. They're all officially done and ready to be uncorked.

Those in the front rows may get wet.

Cha-ching

The showpiece of last week had to be Culture Day, a glorious midweek public holiday that I'm not entirely sure of the purpose of; it's probably another one of Japan's many examples of "let's think of a provocative name for a day off". Being the refined creatures we are, we decided to focus our attention on Osaka shopping culture and had what I think was my 3rd successful trip out there in a row. At this rate I might actually start liking the place.

Wit beyond measure

The Harry Potter costume reached its cymbal-crashing climax on Friday night, helped along in no small part by the enthusiasm arms race of the previous few days. It went from "sorting out our costumes" to "dinner and sorting out our costumes" and then kind of escalated from there.
"You have an oven?" said Len. "I'll bring cake." I can't think of too many things he didn't bring.