('blog posts I won't put on my rl blog because i don't want to have to explain doujinshi to my parents')

Comic City was as fun as I'd thought it would be :D And actually, surprisingly spacious, whereas I'd expected to be crammed into some hall. I wish large gatherings of fangirls in other countries were a calm and well-organised!

I was quite restrained in my purchases. Just 6 books:( cut for photos )

There were definitely more I could have bought, but I had to think about both my finances and my shoulder from carrying the things around.

Reading them all properly will largely have to wait until I get home though - lack of furigana means a lot of time spent with my electronic dictionary XD

As for now, I have to write a 1200 word essay about the 'social activity involving pop cultural forms' that I witnessed DX

OMFG I've been haemorrhaging money for the past 3 days, someone help! I need to have some money left when I actually reach Japan!

~~~

As I had expected, my problem with packing isn't so much the volume of stuff as the weight... My big suitcase is only about 2/3 full but about 16/17 kg already... I think I'll just end up having to pay excess baggage, because none of this stuff is unnecessary.

But... $40 per kg O_o REALLY?

I'd gone and spent way too much money on all the toiletries I'll need, but now I'm having to get smaller bottles to try and reduce the weight. What a waste of money :/

~~~

When I get back from Japan I might change banks, because mine is so useless for travellers. I went in on Monday to get travellers cheques (late, I know) and the woman on the counter wasn't sure, but didn't think they did them anymore. She checked, and sure enough the National Bank doesn't sell travellers cheques, only the new travel cards (well then why does their website still say they sell them...) And those travel cards? They don't sell them in Yen. So what am I meant to do, take a huge wad of cash? Well I couldn't get cash at that branch either. How are they so useless?

Anyway, I went up the road to the ASB and they were very helpful and ordered travellers cheques for me, which should be in today or tomorrow :)

~~~

Since it's less than 48 hours until departure (!!), I was able to check in online just now. It's so good to know that my seats are already confirmed - window seats in the front part of economy, near the wing, just like I wanted :D

~~~

Did I mention LESS THAN 48 HOURS?!

Yesterday was my last day at work, so now I'm unemployed for the first time in over 3 years! I didn't get very much actual work done, since nervousness has fully set in so I was largely trying not to shake or throw up (it's gonna be a fun week...) But I got a morning tea shout, as well as a card and some nice ( gifts )

When I finally got around to going to the Alumni Shop last week to get a Waikato hoodie, it turned out they had no stock and won't be getting more in until after I leave. So that's a bit sad. I've looked in a few other places for a decent top to rep NZ with, but none of them are very nice.

I've made up a ( day by day itemised to do list for this week ), since it feels like there are still hundreds of things I have to remember. Hopefully I'll be able to stick to it!

Today I've been doing a preliminary sort out of my clothes, so that I can wash &/or mend anything that needs it. It actually looks like everything will fit in my suitcase okay, just that if I actually fill it it'll be too heavy :/ My bags consist of ( one huge check-in and one carry-on that only just fits inside the carry-on size limit ), as well as my laptop bag.

Some time this week I'm going to have to do a flist-cut :( I have this thing where when I check my flist I have to read back to where I last left off, and since I don't know how limited my access will be in Japan I need to shrink it down. I'll probably friend people back after I get home.

Anyway, while I'm away I don't know if I'll be posting much on here, so if you defriend me you won't be missing much. My main priorities will be my Japan Blog and Facebook, but I'll try and keep up with LJ as well if I can.

ETA: I was just looking through the course listing, since I hadn't since this semester's version came out, and there are so many interesting-looking ones! My list of 'classes I could take' is like 15 long (not counting Speaking and R+W). The one I really want is "Popular Culture as Social Practice: Producing pleasures, styles, identities", but it's impossible to choose between the others. Why can't I just do my whole degree there and take them all? :P

I was finally going to contribute something to a Big Bang by signing up as a Groupie for americanbang, since that seemed pretty low pressure (just one picture or whatever required). And now americanbang has been discontinued in favour of idol_bigbang, for which all the due dates occur while I'm in Japan. FML.

Just now Mum was like "okay get off your bed, Eric's coming to take it away :D"

Our new beds aren't coming until tomorrow.

I feel like I'm in Japan already, sleeping on a futon or something.

At least cleaning out the accumulated crud under my bed distracted me from my emo whining on the ontd_ai anon post XD

My sister likes Kris's Heartless :D This has somehow made my day.

In fact she said "this CD (my "Adam Lambert and the ~Idols" mix) is okay" as well :DDDD

So who here uses Twitter? I just found out that I can now use it from my phone, so it's finally worth actually adding people :O

Don't know if I'll actually end up tweeting very much, since I doubt I'll have anything interesting to say. But it's good to know I can if I want to now :D

ETA: yeah, so if anyone wanted to add me i'm steffish there too XD

I'm a little nervous. Tomorrow I'm meeting my new cousins-to-be for the first time!

My Uncle is engaged to a lovely Brazilian lady, and she moved over here a few weeks ago. Tomorrow her 3 kids are arriving in NZ for the first time (as well as her parents, though they're only here for a little while).

So yeah. My family are the first Kiwis that they'll meet. I feel a bit sorry for them :/

My sister keeps bugging me about why our internet's gotten so slow that she can't watch TVNZ on demand at the moment... Could have something to do with the fact that our usage for the month ending tomorrow is 39,059MB already :/ I blame AI fandom: endless GIFs, episode downloads, cellcasts, livestreams, epic 4-hour sessions listening to Philippines radio etc.

Just got to keep ignoring her complaints until the month resets on Friday XD

For once I actually think it's a good thing that I don't have internet access at work, because if I did I probably would have ended up making a post on ontd_ai today. As much as I love those fierce benches, I just don't think it would have ended well for me.

(indulgent post would have been indulgent. basically MY FASHION ~INSPIRATION FOR TODAY WAS EP10 ADAM, WHEN HAVE YOU BENCHES DRAWN INSPIRATION FROM HBIC?? so yeah. considering I don't even -go here- I should probably not go making dumb posts XD )

Okay okay, so I have a problem, and that problem is American Idol. (If I had been writing this post two days ago said problem would just have been Adam Lambert, but Kris has grown on me? Also I have spent this morning reading TWOP recaps of the entire season, so it seems I have a larger issue than just one fabulous guy).

And so now Adam is imminently going to move into my overall top artists on last.fm, and I don't know what has happened to my life. SOMEONE HELP ME. I am not sure which way I mean that.

Some excellent Aussies who felt much the same way I did about the fact that our Kansai Gaidai Fall '09 group were relying on Facebook for all our interaction decided to rectify the situation by setting up The Kansai Gaidai Hub, a site where we can centralise all our blogs as well as having forums, a chat, and who knows what else in the future. It's pretty handy~!

Also, since it's externally hosted rather than on WordPress.com, I can now customise the theme of my Japan Blog, rather than just picking one of the preset themes. So I've spent the last 3 nights working on that :\ My CSS skills are nonexistant so it took a lot of trial and error. I still intend to tidy up the background image, I just shoved it up so that I could work on the actual code and get it out of the way.

Even though some of the preset themes are much shinier, I like having one that's unique :D

ETA: On the topic of design: as much as I like my new icon, it's freaky scrolling down my main journal page and seeing my own face looking back at me over and over o_o

...I'm sick of looking at CSS. Clearly web design is not my calling.

The weird thing about keeping a non-fandom blog is that you don't have to be particularly good at anything to get readers. I'm so used to fandom, where the popular people are the ones who write, or draw, or in some way create content for others to consume. And then in contrast to that there's our growing circle of Kansai Gaidai blogs, where all anyone has to do is write about what they did today and they'll be added by everyone else. I mean, it helps to be able to write in an interesting style, but in the end it doesn't seem to make much difference. I suppose it has to do with the fact that we're such a small group anyway, but it's just so different to what I'm used to. It's almost like I can finally be one of the cool kids. I'm just going to make the most of enjoying it until we all arrive in Japan and people find out that I'm actually a pathetic nerd :P

A week and a half into BBB posting and I'm already 6 days behind in my reading. I forsee all this fic consuming my time for a long time to come.

I've got my Japanese exam tomorrow afternoon, and I'm yet to study at all. I have pretty much no motivation since I only need 3% on the exam to pass the paper, or 73% to get an A+, and we don't find out what our actual exam mark is (so I won't know if I break my 'all in the 90s' record).

In other news, I finally got a house for my farm on Farm Town XD

Hey guys guess what~

I'M GOING TO JAPAN :D

I'm not even in bandom anymore, but the fact that the Unholyverse has been finished has made my night. I have such a kink for religious themes in fiction.

Of course, I have to re-read the first two parts of the series before I can go on to the new one. Yay for something to distract me from emails and Farm Town (and study too) ^_^

ETA: wagging class to read fic, I think this is the first time this year. I don't think we were going to be learning much today anyway, probably just revision since next week's the last week of class.

It's a good thing I like Autumn, since I've signed up for a double serving of it this year. (Unfortunately the trade-off is completely missing out on Spring, my other favourite season, but you can't win them all).

Anyway, I'm currently halfway through an involuntary 3 week break from work, since they finally realised how much Annual Leave I'd accrued and forced me to take some. It would be nice if my acceptance could come during this time, so I can organise the flights and other things, and also because soon they'll ask us what hours we want to work next semester, and it'd be best if I could tell them then that I'll be leaving halfway through the semester.

I've really been loving my Japanese class recently, which is obviously a very good thing :D I think that when I was studying Science I got used to classes feeling like chores, and just trying to get through all the work so that I could graduate, whereas recently I've been leaving class most days with a smile on my face. Especially now that we've finished our previous textbook (Yookoso) and moved on to a different one (An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese), and the class structure has changed a bit - most of the grammar in the chapters we've done so far has been revision so Nishimura-sensei hasn't been lecturing so much, but we've been doing more exercises and practice, which is really what I need to focus on.

...focusing less on playing Farm Town would also be helpful. Why did I let my sister get me addicted to it?!

(crossposted from WordPress - and god, it feels weird using a non-lj-based journal site...)

The touchpad on my laptop is currently out of order, so I can only use the keyboard to get around. It's been stopping working occasionally for the last few days, and the last couple of times I've tried to use the computer it hasn't worked at all. This is severely curtailing my enjoyment of the internets :/

I suppose I should search for the spare mouse that should be lying around somewhere, and see if that will work. I'd like to know why this thing's suddenly broken, though. (I think this has happened once before, and it came right after a while? Though that time might have been when I spilt some water on it...)

ETA: In addition, the display has gone into the kind of mode it changes to when I watch videos in Media Player Classic, though I haven't watched anything in it for ages. Also, Solitaire has lost its record of my numbers of wins and losses...

That's all the weird things I've noticed so far, but I guess there could be others.

Diagnoses, anyone?

Well that was fun :)

I already knew that I'd seen barely any anime compared to most fans, but wow. I felt a bit inadequate XD

Nevertheless, good times.

I'm slowly going crazy, refreshing my email every 10 minutes waiting for a message from Kansai Gaidai. They really should take down the sentence on their website that says they'll contact applicants within 3 weeks of recieving their application.

I tried to call in to work and get tonight off so I could go to the Vagabond anime night, but I couldn't get a hold of anyone with the authority to grant AL, and I couldn't exactly say I was sick when I'd just talked to Terrina, who also works tonight, at Uni :(

Damn it, I really wanted to go! Anyway, I've got the next 3 weeks off so I'll be able to go to the next one, but still. Disappointing. Somehow it's not the same, joining after the first night.

eta: BTW, I have a couple of Dreamwidth invite codes if anyone wants one.