One week and one good weekend on..

... and the mood is substantially improved.

Hats off to Casper for most of that.

Friday night, did onsen (not my idea), which had both the normal hot baths, and a merciful cool bath to help combat the summer night heat.

Saturday brought an unusual series of events:

1. went to gym, not having slept enough and therefore was unusually weak (also, not going for 10 days before that probably didn't help ;oD )
2. Casper got word that his lords & lez's beer-garden event (which I was going to avoid) was going to be an afternoon thing and thought about backing out
3. he then asked if I wanted to join in
4. I thought carefully – lack of genkiness (a word?) was making me think I'd be shite company in a mostly Japanese-speaking environment
5. came around to the idea when it looked like we'd just pop in for a little while and then go shopping (original afternoon plan)
6. on agreeing, it transpired that the beer garden was up a mountain. Resistance quickly subsided.
   
7. we went for it, stopping off to get some cold noodles (in my case) and rice bowl (his) and then took the funicularse up the mountain.
8. met Kazu (Casper's mate) and his crowd
9. no lez's turned up :o(
10. we went in anyway and got drunk for 2 hours and the craic was very good
11. I actually saw someone throw away alcohol and didn't mind: it was 飲み放題 (all you can dhrink) after all!!
12. came back and sobered up with some shopping in the summer sales
13. went to bed and slept the heaviest in weeks

So, that was nice. And helped to destress me a lot.

Sunday was more sedate. Got up earlyish, went over to Mr Casper's flat and ordered a Toot summer grab-bag and investigated holidays. Looks promising at this stage, even for OBon season (!)

Then, lunchtime-ish, headed over to gym for a few hours. Then to Sagami-Ono to try and get some fancy suit stuff. In the end, we just had tonkatsu, cos the dept store prices at Isetan (even on sale) were sort of pre-sale everywhere else! :oD

Anyway, then headed back to Machida and to Mina - P.S.FA and Orihica weren't great, but Aoki had several purchase-worthy ties and a nice shirt or two. Quite good fun helping someone else shop for that kind of stuff if you know what they want :o)

Ended the day with an obligatory Doutor cafe visit, and a nice relaxed chat. Good end to a good weekend, and good riddance to a bad week!

that's all for now -- have to give my latptop to Dave so he can finish his talk for Thursday!