Being ill is crap.

Excuse me while I feel sorry for myself. This weekend was supposed to be the one we went off to 木の殿堂, the wood palace up in Northern Hyogo, but my friend had to go to a funeral so that was off. Instead, Fri and Sat were two of my friends' bday celebrations, going out in Osaka and Kobe respectively. But I managed to get sick. After work yesterday, I went to bed at 5pm, and save waking up for a few minutes to txt people (mainly to shamelessly elicit sympathy) I slept through til 10am and still felt shit. I had those horrible dreams you get when you're ill where nothing makes sense and you can't properly focus on anything. Also, swallowing hurts, but as I have practically no food in the house all I'm eating at the moment is cereal I've allowed to soak in milk for a long time to get really soft. Bleurgh.

Anyway, I should stop complaining. Life in general is still good, just sucks being ill. I'm planning to go up to Tokyo in a couple of weeks, and you know that life is good when the hardest decision to make is on the Friday night, whether to see Jazztronik and Shacho from Soil and Pimp DJ with live Piano Trio from Josei (also soil and pimp) at Air, or Grooveman Spot and the Jazzy Sport crew drop their deep introspective interpretation of hiphop at Family. A tough decision.

And watching TV a few minutes ago, an ad came on for some new bottled green tea drink by Kirin. And the music was none other than a string arrangement of Chick Corea's Spain! See the ad (realplayer). From this page. (Slogan seems a bit shit - "Japanese folks know! Sweet is delicious!" but you can't have it all) I really am going to miss how spot on Japan is with the music, it's everywhere, you don't have to seek it out (but if you do what's there is even better.)

See my new toys. I bought them for the elementary school lesson warm up game, we chucked the Monokuroboo (for that is their name) around, and when they caught it, they had to introduce themselves. When I bought them though, it was just me and some very young children in the toyshop, and they were staring at me a little funny - fair enough, I was browsing Anpanman, Hallo Kitty toys, wondering what would be best for the kids. When I went to buy them, the guy assumed they were presents and asked summarily as he started wrapping them. When I said they weren't presents, he asked again, slower, assuming I'd misunderstood the Japanese. (Presumably no grown men buy Monokuroboo toys for themselves, or if they do, they have the sense to pretend they're presents for someone else.) I like them anyway. But don't tell anyone.

Right, going to crawl back to bed. My half an hour of being awake must now be followed by a 2 hour nap.