Ran Day

So this post is late again.  Strike two.

One good thing today: the weather was pleasant, sunny and clear skies, not so cold, just perfect "air-conditioner" weather.  Day-time high was ~19 degrees.

But it wasn't my day.  Now on to the bad stuff:

1. I woke up surprisingly very late - around 11am!  Apparently my alarm was set to alarm only on weekdays, I think.  Well actually it was good that I got some rest, but I might be late for the mass!  Then...
2. I missed the bus by a few (say 5) minutes, and the next bus would arrive not until after 30 minutes!  If only I were a few minutes earlier, I would have made it to the 2pm mass just in time, and maybe even slightly earlier!  So now I'm probably 35 minutes late!  Buses are 30 minutes apart on Sundays.  This was a day I wish I had already bought/gotten a bicycle!
3. Anyway, so what I did was, because halfway along the bus route to Hon-Atsugi, a second bus route comes along so the bus frequency increases (maybe every 10 minutes).
4. So I ran for 30 minutes to get to the halfway point of my bus route.  Alas, 5 minutes earlier, I saw the other bus line a kilometer away already.  Pointless running!?  Well, of course, the exercise was good, and as I said it was a pleasant day to be outside...
5. Problem was, I was not able to change shirts not until I got home...  Which caused a little sneezing.  (Just a little.)  And, this was the first time I was exposed to low humidity + cool temperature, and so it was also the first time I felt my lips really dry up!  But anyhow, good thing I had lip balm with me.
6. When I got to the church, I was probably 15 or 20 minutes late, it was homily already.  Guess what.  The mass was in Spanish!  That was bad, but not so bad, so I thought I had to worry about #1 to #5 above when in fact I was too early for the English mass!
7. So I asked one of the Japanese there "Eigo de kyo wa nan ji desu ka?" which literally should translate to something like "Today what time is in English?"  She checked and said "Kyo wa eigo de nai desu!" which meant "There is no English (mass) today!"  Argh!  So anyway, there I was in a Spanish mass in Japan.  I know some Spanish but it was still difficult to understand...  Oh well.
8. And then my computer just suddenly crashed.  I was working on something and then boom!  Blue screen of death.  I tried all sorts of things - starting in Safe Mode, etc, reinstalling the OS, and so on, but to no avail.  Goodbye, files.  Anyway, my diagnosis was that it was a memory problem, and surprisingly the onboard BIOS has a Diagnostics tool and it also made the same diagnosis....  
9. Sigh, no Skype date for tonight with Mara.  Actually I could use my laptop but because I did not bring it to school and it was getting late already, I thought I would just call it a night.  What a day.

Anyways, I also did what hopefully would be my last day for home-stuff shopping...  At Daiso.  Actually before going to Daiso, I went around this "department" store or mall where there's a shoe place, Eddie Bauer, Uni Qlo (apparently a popular Japanese casual clothes brand, like Gap), and many more.  There's this store that sells furniture, home stuff, some clothes, some school and office stuff - that I immediately fell in love with.  Japanese, minimalist design for everyday stuff.  Similar to IKEA, and I like IKEA, but I like that with this brand there is just one color theme, neutrals - white, wood/birch, silver, black - and so I don't have to mix and match and all that.  If I bought all my stuff from this store, I could achieve a really nice design for my interiors.  Of course...  The prices are generally on the expensive side, except maybe for some notebooks - comparing with those I found at the school store.  Or maybe I was looking at a different size that's why it was cheaper there than at the school store.  What is the name of the place?  I don't know, the store sign is in Japanese, but I think there's a branch of the store in Singapore but I forgot the name.  I think it's MUJI. :-)

Today also marks the first day I used my rice cooker.  The night before I asked for help from Kim-san, the Korean PhD student, on how to use it.

And also today I bought from the supermarket what looked like Yakitori, 6 sticks of it...  And then I found out that 3 out of the 6 sticks are all chicken skin and chicken fat.  Yummy but, unhealthy.  Oh well.  No, I didn't eat most of it.