Had a very bizarre dream last night, where I was either on a boat, or a roller coaster, but in either case, it was rather rocky, though I wasn't worried about it, which makes me think it was a boat, as opposed to a roller coaster. In any case, it was rocky enough to wake me up, whereupon I thought it was bizarre, but discovered that happily I had another 4 hours to go before my alarm, and went back to sleep. In the morning, I realised that it might have been an earthquake, a thought which vaguely occurred to me at the time, and it turns out that indeed there was a quake of 5.7 on the Richter scale, occurring at 3:18 am, 170km below the surface of the earth in Shizuoka prefecture. No damage or injuries or anything-I imagine most people were fast asleep and had experiences similar to mine (IE very out of it!)

Anyway, up at 7 so that I would have lots of time to get delayed an or lost on my way to work, which, surprisingly, didn't happen, so I ended up having an hour to get coffee before I started, which was rather luxurious on one hand, and rather ridiculous on the other - I could have been sleeping! I'm really surprised that it takes me the same amount of time, within a few minutes to bike as it does to take the train, so it's definitely a pretty viable option!

The new Being a Broad came out today, so I spent the first couple of hours at work stuffing and labeling magazines for distribution - not so exciting, but not terrible either, it's pretty relaxing in a repetitive, let's just get this done kind of way. Besides, I thought I'd be doing stuff like this 90% of the time, so really, it's not bad AT ALL! On Thursday, we get the new Weekender, I believe, which is exciting, because I have stuff in there :)

After lunch, I got sent to the press screening of the movie Dreamgirls, which was lots of fun :) It was in a private screening room at the distribution company, and we got very cool (albeit all nihongo) press kits. They basically put all the info on full color die cut paper which looked like records, and then put all the pieces of the kit into a record sleeve - very cool and well themed! The movie was really good, with Jamie Foxx, Danny Glover, Eddie Murphy, Beyonce Knowles, and Jessica Hudson all delivering solid performances, imo (though I'm probably the most giving critic you're likely to come across!). Hudson really did steal the show, which is what all the press has been saying - she was fantastic! If you liked Chicago, you'd certainly like this movie!

I got back to the office at about four, and stayed for about an hour writing the first draft of my review, before heading off to teach from 5:30-7, which was about the same as normal, I'm glad to see that sixth grade math is still within my reach, although I distinctly remember learning about slope in Sr. School, so either grade eight or ten... His math textbook is pretty cool - it looks like it has an online component where you go to the company site, enter in a code for each lesson and watch while it sings and dances for you, or some such thing... Not really sure, but whatever it is, I'm sure it's handy!

Biked home, but made a bit of a tactical error by going via Shibuya as opposed to Omotesando. It probably didn't really take me much longer, but Shibuya was way too crowded for a bike, which always annoys me when I'm just walking/pushing the bike so I don't run people over, as opposed to actually getting to pedal, although I suppose that's what I get for riding on the sidewalk! Listened to a rather disturbing All in the Mind Podcast about Child Soldiers. Did you know they carve out a cavity in their pectoral muscles and fill it with a drug cocktail to put them completely out of their minds before sending them off to the battle field? Eugh!

Peter seems to be on the mend today, so that's good - he went to work this afternoon, and ate dinner, so since I'm not sick yet, I'm hopeful (and determined!) not to get sick myself. I have articles to write and the such!

Work again tomorrow, and then some sort of bowling/belated new year's shindig w/ the Orbitune office... I'm uh, hesitant, to say the least about the possibility of karaoke, but I'm all over some gutterball!

D