Goodbye-onara

That's all folks!

Chop socky

Based on the assumption that our final few days here are going to be fairly subdued, this weekend was the last shot out of the cannon - two farewells followed by a big day trip out to the country to continue our love affair with dressing up as historical figures and playing silly buggers. With one week to go and counting, it's good to have things organised - we can officially tick off "send boxes", "tidy up" and "walk around a supermarket in a samurai costume".

And straight on till morning

We had the first of our farewells late last week, kicking off yet another long weekend and marking the official beginning of the end. Not a moment too soon, either - we've got two weeks left and still have an almost absurd number of things to think about. With most of the major stuff organised though, we're now down to the "using up stuff in the fridge" level of detail which is slightly more terrifying than it should be.

Boar 'n' beans

Chaos and disorder now officially reign, like that bit in the movie where gravity fails and everything in the spaceship floats up and off in random directions. After a very odd two days at work on Monday and Tuesday which toggled between boredom and blind panic that I wasn't going to get everything done, the week gave out and I started an impromptu 7 day holiday that I'm now through 5 and a bit days of. In that time we managed to get out to Himeji, Sasayama and anywhere else that least reminded us of job applications and looming deadlines. The gravity kicks back in on Wednesday which I'm not at all upset about; at the moment I'm struggling to focus on anything until it crashes down on me in a heap.

Over the worst of it

The conference has now wrapped up, taking with it the last of my workload for the year (touch wood). This seems to have ushered in a weird twilight at work, where half of the office just seem to not show up and those who do consider me part of the furniture. I'm half expecting to discover I was actually crushed under a pile of participant booklets on Wednesday and have since been haunting the office in an exceptionally uninteresting way. I've requested the last of my leave now so we'll see whether they approve it or just shiver and close the windows.

Fruit flies like a banana

We seem to have finally "found the floor" as Lisa put it, having tired of the endless piles of stuff and heaved it all into seamail boxes. Our last effort was a 20kg reminder of why cars are awesome, which the post office fortunately agreed to pick up for us. There are probably two more boxes to send and a bit of slash and burn to be done to the wardrobe, then I can almost imagine getting the remainder into a suitcase. This is a Very Good Thing, because it's just over a month until check-in and that Mario "running out of time" sound is on the edge of my hearing.

On a silver platter

There seem to be weeks when all my frugal urges go out the window and I find myself with an insatiable urge to buy every single meal. This was only partially one of those weeks - I would have been quite happy to cook and eat at home as usual but the wheel of fortune had other ideas. By and large, eating out here is very reasonable but unfortunately 10 times very reasonable is still quite a large number. It does save on washing up though.

Duff Gardens, hoorah

We had lots planned for this weekend but life had other ideas; after what turned out to be an overzealous start, we tripped over the first hurdle and spent most of Saturday lying in a heap of meat-and-booze-induced pain. We were putting on brave faces but I think by 11am everyone realised it was an Xbox-and-aspirin kind of day. I apologise... for nothing!

Something something festival

Silver Week has arrived, little brother to the (in)famous Golden Week - a pair of long weekends with 3 work days dangling in between them ripe for annual leave. Given that we're going to be spending most of next week at K-Mart though, I've diligently decided to come in and try to get at least some work done during September.

Scene missing

It's now officially the last week of work before more holidays, which I suppose makes this "week 10". There's no outward sign of this other than me loudly slurping on a carton of iced coffee, which in your average week 10 would be the only thing stopping me from smashing like a dropped Ming vase. But no, apart from last week lasting about 3 months, things have been almost (but not entirely) unremarkable.

Grindstone cowboy

I was expecting some kind of explosion when I got back to work, or at least opening the office door to find myself washed away by a comical tide of paper. Things were suspiciously quiet though - Monday passed without so much as a rumble and then I went on a brief business trip to Tokyo and came back similarly unaccosted. I can hear the beast lurking in the shadows though, paper skin all a-crinkle. He watches me through hole-punched eyes and gnashes his paperclip teeth, waiting for the moment I drop my guard and say wow, not long till holidays.

Pissup in a brewery

It's been a very boozy few days which I hope excuses my tardiness and the even-more-laboured-than-usual tone today. Work finished up on Friday and as I keep reminding people with relish, that kicked off a 16 day break that we've now eaten, drank and spent our way through the first 3 days of. We started at the cinema on Friday and ended up at a karaoke bar on Monday night so now it's just a matter of working out what happened in between. A typhoon is rattling the window panes at the moment so it seems as good a moment as any to sit down with a cup of coffee and untangle everything.

Putting the "grace" back in "disgraceful"

It was one of those weeks that seemed like 3, possibly due to a huge "business trip" I had to do on Friday; it was a school visit out to the guts of the prefecture and took 2 hours on the train each way. Being a sensible 28 year old now I shouldn't even dream of drunken silliness but when I crash landed on the couch that evening, the clock struck beer o'clock and the hands didn't move again until Sunday.

Yankee doodle

It's been a patriotic few days, with the celebrations of Canada Day (which exists, it turns out) on July 1st leading into American Independence Day and (far more importantly) my birthday on the 4th. The "Summer Timetable" has kicked off at work meaning that my day starts and finishes half an hour earlier now, so we had a nice early start to the weekend's festivities. A nice late end, too - I took a day off yesterday for birthday eats and shopping, but I spelled it wrong and accidentally wrote "personal business" instead.

Take me out to the ball game

After our last attempt to catch a Tigers game was washed into a storm drain somewhere, we were intensely paranoid of a repeat performance; we spent the better part of the last week playing "what's the time Mr Wolf" with weather websites. Fortunately Friday was a notably sunny break in a string of dreary wet season weather, so we had ourselves a game. Not just any game, mind you - a long-standing grudge match between the Tigers and the Giants to determine who was placed where on the ladder. We showed up to Koshien Stadium at about 5 closely followed by the contents of the greater Osaka-Kobe area, who had all dressed in their best stripey pajamas for the occasion.

It got worse

Beer garden season is officially upon us, which means you can sit atop a building, stare at the uninspiring skyline and eat chicken that's been reheated in a fryer no less than 4 times. At least the beer's good though - it's in an automatic pouring machine that has two separate nozzles for beer and head so I can't stay mad at them for too long. Fortunately the rainy season took a breath on Friday and spared turning our spot into a rooftop pool, so we ended up having a nice night under the stars. The rest of the weekend wasn't quite so successful, to say the least.

Showers everywhere but the bathroom

Last week was what you would call a slow week, with four days taking a record-breaking 12 days to pass. The bathroom waterproofing men arrived on Tuesday and declared that part of the house off limits while they counted down the top ten stinkiest chemicals of all time; to try to stop the house smelling like a fibreglass boat factory, we had to leave all the windows open. And so, with the bathtub sitting in the middle of the kitchen and a precariously balanced pedestal fan drying the concrete, we dined with every insect in the world.

Ticket to ride

"I want to do something fun this weekend," Lisa announced on Friday night, with the outrageous implication that we don't lead lives of constant excitement. We cooked and watched a movie, then stood in the kitchen drying dishes and musing that we could go out somewhere but probably shouldn't - it was approximately the most tragic scene that "married" life has to offer. Fortunately, the predictable didn't last too much longer - I've found a new friend in the automatic ticket machine and we're now booked in for every sporting and cultural event in Japan ever.

Washed out

The weather didn't mesh very well with our plans this weekend, in the same way that salt doesn't mesh very well with slugs. Originally we were supposed to join 200 JETs at a Hanshin Tigers baseball game, followed by celebratory or commiseratory drinks. Fate had other ideas, however - the heavens opened early in the morning and didn't let up until even the most optimistic people had given up hope of the game progressing as planned. Before the cancellation was officially announced, we asked our cab driver what he thought our chances were.
"Mate, you've got Buckley's," was the gist of it. Unfortunately he was spot on.

Obi-Wan Shinobi

As promised, we spent this weekend enjoying our seemingly neverending adolescence - dressing up as ninja and running around making sword noises much as we might have done 20 years ago. We were far from being the only adults in costume and I'm not sure if that's astonishing or completely normal for this country. Once we had dressed up, bought our plastic swords and set out on our ninja scavenger hunt, the answer seemed to come to Sifton in a flash. "Why isn't everyone in Japan doing this right now?"