7:30 came early this morning, but it was a gorgeous day, so that helped me get up! V and I had to walk to the combeni to get milk, and then I got a good Victoria update from Navina (what, is it once one person gets married everyone its suddenly the thing to do? I'm getting seriously left behind here!) before heading off to work. I decided to bike, especially since I didn't yesterday, and it was just such a gorgeous day today - It took about fifty minutes, or exactly the length of this week's This American Life - convenient!

Today at work was more the sort of work I thought I was going to have to be doing every day - the magazine went to print today, and as far as I know, BAB is coming along OK, so I worked helping the sales team all day. The first thing was to find the phone numbers to match up with a big mailing list of addresses. It's amazing how well hidden some companies keep their phone numbers on their websites! Some are so lovely and well organized with easy contact us sections, and some are just terrible! Also, a lot of the Japanese companies don't have English on their websites, so trying to find a contact page was interesting (if you hover your mouse on a link, when it tells you at the bottom what the directing URL is, that's in English - when people name their sites properly, it means you can navigate through Japanese links in English. Kind of.)
Anyway, it wasn't too exciting, but I enjoy researching, and it obviously needed to be done, so that was fine - it was pretty easy and just something to get done... For lunch, Karin, Jen and I walked up to Soup Stock, and stopped by this kimono sale going on just outside and upstairs from Paddy Foleys. I guess it happens on the last Thursday of each month, and they have kimonos starting from Y1000. I didn't find one that I wanted today, but I'll probably try and collect one before I go home, or at least some Obis, which Jen uses as a table runner which is a great idea!

The afternoon at work was finishing up the telephone number hunting and then trying to find businesses in which might be interested in an upcoming special edition of the Weekender we're doing. I also quickly retyped Bill's party line, which I guess was typed and faxed to us by someone in Manila or thereabouts (he's traveling around right now), but needed to be re inputted for us, so that was fine (although those J. keyboards are just different enough to be really annoying! For instance, the " is shift 2, and the @ sign is all on its own with no shift required, etc.)

Got out of work at about 4:30, and went to Hanamasa, which is a 'bulk' food shop (not really bulk!), to see what kind of food they have and ended up buying some knock off cereal and bananas (why are bananas soooo cheap here? It's weird!) On my way back down the street, I ran into Jason, the chef at Suji's (from last night), who remembered me from the party, I promised we'd be in next week (with work), and I also think Peter and I might get brunch there this weekend...yum!

Went to teach, it was fine - the boy is a great artist!! He's decorated his science book and the cartoon-y type illustrations are great - a naturally good sense of perspective, and when he draws something from memory its surprisingly accurate. I told him I really wanted to see something from his art classes! With his sister, we read Aladdin, which they knew from Saudi Arabia... They were explaining to me the different names which they used in the story back home, etc. Interesting! I managed to refrain myself from piping in with 'A whole New World', but it was a weird flash back to the last Tokyo trip, which is probably the last time I read the story!

Biked home (though I really really wanted to just takuben the bike back!! I never want to ride home, but it's good motivation to exercises that extra almost hour - if i wasn't forced to do it to get home, I never would!) and got home about an hour ago...I went past that thing where the road was closed on Tuesday - it's weird, they're filming a mural being painted or something. I rode past there this morning though, and I don't remember the mural, so I'm not sure if they have it on removable panels or something, or if I just didn't notice it without the bright lights and film crew surrounding it?

I think Peter is out for dinner tonight, so I just had a snack, and am now about to collapse into a bath and then bed... Very excited about sleeping in tomorrow!