Woke up around nine this morning and spent a couple of hours finishing up my article on Ireland for Weekender. I really really want to stay in that castle, Ashford - it looks so decadent and fun! And riding around on the Irish moors and learning falconry before retiring to my bed chambers with the whirlpool tub. If I ever end up getting married (when I'm 25 according to my new student's mom), a place like that might be a pretty great place to do it!

Peter left for work at 12:00ish and I slowly got organized to go - after I submitted my article, I watched Gilmore Girls on slingbox/TiVo and then listened to the Metpod, which came out yesterday... I liked this week's a lot - it was pretty long again, and even though I am in the vast minority wanting the hour long ones, I'm v. happy to see it at 50 minutes this week instead of that 35 minute stuff. So much for calling in anonymously to the pod classifieds (for a concert review, not a personal :p) when everyone at the met pod knows your name and puts it in anyway :) Handy I don't particularly care when my cover is blown!

I made some pasta and veggies for lunch and then Venus and I walked to Shimo Kitazawa and listened to the rest of the metpod. I checked out a little bit of the part of Shimo that I didn't know existed until last week when I biked past it at 5:30am, and then when Peter told me about it after he discovered it last weekend as well. Its just another part of the neighbourhood, but on our side of the tracks, and for some reason I guess we never saw it. Anyway, I didn't look too closely since Venus was all sniffy and pully and typical dog on a walk-y, but it looks cool-cute cafes and clothing shops and stuff.

I came back to drop Venus off and then walked down to the Library to pick up a copy of Olivia to use when I teach on Sunday. Since I was all the way down there anyway, I stopped in at Starbucks and studied Japanese for awhile. I finally got to start learning some kanjis in this lesson. I already knew most of the ones that I learned today, either from high school (numbers 1-10), or just from existing (yen), but it was still fun to learn a few. I'm sure that pretty soon I'll be pulling my hair out trying to remember, and also learn all the variations on the theme of each kanji, but for now it's good fun.

Stopped by Daiso on the way home which is a great Y105 store here. I've finally figured out why all the pens in this country have tiny little ends - some of those kanji have a lot of strokes squished into a very small space! My regular ball point was all smooshing into itself (I love how I blame the equipment and not my technique), but anyway, I now have the requisite little pen end (I think I'm going to need all the help I can get!)

Came back home and worked on Mom's website for awhile. Its basically ready to launch (well with the exception of three sub pages with the dreaded 'site under construction, check back soon' disclaimer), but I went through and made all the typefaces consistent, added some photos, linked to the pdf, and generally cleaned things up a bit. I was going to get it up, but I didn't want to set Peter's .mac account up without him here, as it involves setting user names and passwords and I figured he might want to pick those sorts of things :) If he ever decides to come home from the office I'm sure we can get it sorted pretty quickly (one click publishing and all that).

Then I studied Japanese for awhile longer (all the while watching season 8 of Friends in the background. I'm going to be sad when I finish the series, since I finished Sex and the City recently, I'm going to be lacking things to watch when studying and otherwise working!) At about 11:30, when I found out from Peter that he'd eaten, Venus and I walked to Circle K to get a bento for dinner. Seemingly they get one delivery in the morning, and by 11:30 its been pretty well picked through! Luckily, I ended up getting a pretty good pork and rice bento, and peach juice which is so good - it tastes like fuzzy peaches in a bottle.

After that, just blogging and watching Friends, its just before one, so either Peter will get home soon, or I'll go to bed, or both... Not sure what's going on tomorrow, but I don't have to teach, so I think we should try and have some kind of outing.

D