I'm BAAAACK....!

[Shia]

welcome back! [img]graemlins/rose.gif[/img] ^^

[Lady Elanor]

Yay! You're back! Welcome! [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Scarlets]

Yo!! Welcome back!!! Okaeri! [img]tongue.gif[/img]

[Risu-chan]

Today has also been effectively 38 hours long for me, having gotten up at 4 AM Osaka time which is on the other end of a 14-hour time differential and a 12-hour plane flight encased on either end by 6 hours of travel from Takatsuki to Osaka to Tokyo Narita and by 4 hours of travel from O'Hare to DeKalb to Champaign.

Needless to say, I'm going to be kinda dead to the world for a while this weekend... ^^;;;;

I'm also going to leave my email vacation message on. WHen I left I had about 105 messages in the inbox. The current count is 324. I promise I'm going to get through everything, just not sure when....

got a whole bunch to catch up on here, and a whole lot of translating to get done too... why is it that whenever I get back from a vacation I'm further behind than when I left...?

Anyhow, I hope I'm vertical enough to catch up with y'all again soon!

*thump* <- me preemptively falling over on face for about the next 16 hours or so ^^;;;;;;;;

[Mikochan]

Hey! Welcome back^^

[Anime Goddess]

Welcom back Risu-chan ^^ I hope you enjoyed your time on your trip ^0^

Oh I wish I could go on a vacation right now....I really need one >___<

<font color="#660033" size="1">[ June 06, 2003 03:04 PM: Message edited by: Yaoi Manga Girl ]</font>

[Reikou Hitakana]

okaeri yo~

Glad to have ya back. How was the trip and all?

-Reikou

[tenjou_sama]

Yay! It's Risu-chan!! Welcome back ^____^ You've been greatly missed [img]cool.gif[/img]

Tuesday I mailed the Blood Hound issue back to you...the post office worker said it would take about 5 days, so keep an eye out for it [img]wink.gif[/img]

Hurry and get rested up! We want to hear about your trip and all the fun you had [img]biggrin.gif[/img]

[Johanna Bresgott]

Yay...finally you are back. [img]biggrin.gif[/img] We missed you so much.

[Risu-chan]

(Waving hi again to everybody) I'm currently fighting a spectacularly UNsuccessful battle with jet lag, because my body is convinced I'm supposed to be vertical from midnight to 8 a.m. and I'm supposed to be horizontal from noon to 8 p.m., which is going to be SO not-entertaining at work. ^^;;; So that's why you're getting a post at 5 a.m. my time...

yay! Blood Hound is in the mail -- it didn't come with the bunch o' stuff I picked up Saturday, so hopefully it'll be here Monday...

Japan stories... @_@ I don't know where to start. I love Japan. I love it for a lot of the same reasons I love Britain. It's a small country with a lot of culture, a lot of history, appreciation of the necessity of almost-worshipping tea and tea breaks, and a GOOD public transportation system! Why can't we be that civilized in the US?

And BENTO! Why can't American fast food be that tasty, nuitritious, and just plain pretty? For $5-$10 you get a cute little box with rice and about 8-15 side dishes -- several kinds of vegetables, pickles, fish, fish paste, carrots cut into flower shapes, radioactive-magenta pickled eggplants and neon-yellow pickled daikon... okay, some of the colors were a little startling, but as long as one can get over one's first impression that eating takuan tastes like licking the inside of a metal garbage can lid, it's good stuff. (And not all the pickles taste like overly fermented plant matter stored in zinc. Most of 'em are very good. It's just that the first takuan I had were pretty skanky. But I like takuan now that I've had some that were properly made...)

Anyway, back to rant. My three favorite bento all cost less than $8 and were completely gorgeous to look at and really tasty to eat -- one of them was sushi, one of them was grilled salmon, one of them was fish paste and omelet -- WHY doesn't anyone in America make fast food like that? They're *everywhere* in Japan! Along with the efficient, clean, on-schedule, and very convenient public transportation system! WAAAAAAH I want to live in a place with civilization! ;_;

I took a couple hundred pictures, literally-- there was space for 580 shots on my CF card, and at the moment I'm down to something like 150 left. ^^;;;; So I need to find somewhere to post a bunch of 'em. Not over dialup speeds though! ^_^;;; Going to have to write a travelogue rambling about where all the pics were from and what it was like being there...

Believe it or not, it actually seems to be easier to find anime-related stuff on the Internet from the US than it does when you're live in Japan.

The three exceptions are used manga, used CDs, and used DVDs, which are EVERYWHERE. And incredibly cheap. I spent $2 to get a two-CD set that's been out of print for a decade and completely impossible to find over here! I'm still recovering from the shock of getting 3 CDs for $10 used, as opposed to the normal 1 CD for $30 new...

But the side items -- phone cards, plushies, stickers, shitajiki -- I never found a single place that sold them! Of course I have the feeling I just missed one -- there was a store called Animate in Nipponbashi (Den Den Town) in Osaka, and I was getting there just as it closed, and the guys I was with didn't want to go back there the next day, so I think that was my chance at true anime geekness lost for good (or at least until the next time I get to Den Den Town ^^;; [img]wink.gif[/img] .

And it was even more amazing to pick up a random phonebook manga while bored at a station and discover that I'd lucked into the first episode of the new CLAMP series... ^^;;;; The trouble is I can't afford to get addicted! The things are too darn heavy to ship this far and too darn expensive to import/subscribe to...

I need to send this or else my dialup is going to disconnect me again because I haven't clicked anywhere. ^^;;; Back to my do list...