Blog's on the what now?

It seems it's been a while since I updated this ass. That happens. It turns out that happenings as fun and interesting as a close relative failing physical education are few and far between...unless of course you're in Japan.

(Keith graduated, by the way. We're all very proud of him.)

At any rate, here I am, back in Kanazawa, but this time instead of stealing wireless from the neighbors to blog while I should be doing stupid homework, I'll be blogging from my desk at work when I'm not busy doing important intern things like...stapling.

I got in to Tokyo on Thursday. It was rainy, just like last time. Except this time I didn't walk around lost for an hour before finding my hotel, which is nice. Overall, I'm feeling way more competent with the whole speaking Japanese thing and the whole not screwing up everything I try to do thing, so that's cool.

On Friday, I had some free time before my night bus to Kanazawa, so I took in a ball game: the Yokohama Baystars vs. the Orix Buffaloes. My seat was good, probably about 20th row, looking right at first base, and just a few seats over from a group of pretty young Japanese people who appeared to be there blowing off steam after a hard week of work. I knew they must be awesome when they had a Jan-Ken-Pon (rock paper scissors) tournament to determine the order in which they would be buying rounds. By the fifth inning, the home team Baystars were down 5-0, and my neighbors were drunk enough to ask me to come sit with them. Cool! New friends (and a chance to get my brain back in Japanese mode before I got to Kanazawa)! They, like most Japanese people I've met, were super nice (especially after a few drinks), and a couple innings later, the Baystars still hadn't scored, and they were tanked enough to start buying me all kinds of Baystars crap and just maybe a couple of beers. In the eighth inning, Yokohama scored five runs to tie it up, and the game went into extra innings, so I'm like "Holy crap! Free stuff, free beer, and now free baseball!" It was pretty much the best day of my life. Unfortunately for me, I had to leave in the middle of the 10th to catch that pesky bus, but checked the score later to find out that Yokohama won, 7-5.

So I rode said bus, got to Kanazawa, etc, etc. I met the host family on Sunday (a 75 year old woman who lives alone). She's about 4'6", and if you've ever played the GameCube Zelda, she looks just like Link's grandma. And then on Monday I started "work." They started out by introducing me to everyone in the office, set me up with a desk and a laptop, and then basically told me that my job was to sit at said desk and in front of said laptop and look sort of busy. Oh, and sometimes I get to staple things.

That's pretty much it for now. Japan's still beautiful, the US still sucks at soccer, and your mom is still a loose woman.