My mom and I unofficially moved into my grandparents' unoccupied apartment and spent a weekend of freedom eating, sleeping, walking, studying, to our hearts' desire.

Since I took Friday off of school, my mom and I remembered to take the school phone number back to the apartment with us on Thursday evening. If you have an unexpected, excused abscence, you have to call the school before nine o'clock to let them know why you're not in your first period class. I didn't expect to sleep past nine, seeing as I haven't for the last semester (fucking dog...), so when I woke up to go to the bathroom, I was shocked to see that it was nine fourteen.

"Mom! It's past nine! We've got to call the school!!"
(in a sleepy stupor) "Don't worry, I already called them..."
"No, mom. It's past nine."
"What?!"

So yes, we got in touch with something other than the automated response system and all went well.

To celebrate our freedom, we took a long walk, including intrusion onto the property of another apartment building, exploring their cutely nature-filled grounds. After stopping by one of our favourite restaurants for 'ja-ja-men' (cold, delicious noodles) brunch, we went back to the apartment. I read The Things We Carried for my English homework and my mom worked on a lecture draft that she has to turn in to evaluate her competence as a Christian Science lecturer in Asia.

When we finally decided that the apartment needed a cleaning, we realized that the only broom we had was a piece of crap. On the way to the all-purpose store, I noticed that the eighteenth was the last night of The Incredibles at the discount theatre, lowering the price to 900 yen, so I called Kikko to ask if she was interested. In my mind, it's important for her to get her mind off of her loss, little by little; try to ease back into a readjusted, normal life. She accepted my invitation, and my mom and I skipped off to the store to get our cleaning supplies.

We walked out of the store with everything but a broom and suddenly, a passing rain storm boomed down on our heads. (Japan only has midget brooms. Japanese people are short and sweep with one arm. Don't ask...) We rushed down the street when my mom noticed a Chinese restaurant that she hadn't been to in years and said that we should have a late lunch, pointing out that the fried rice was exceptionally yummy. Which it was, along with the pot stickers. They brought us all sorts of free mini-dishes like soup and dessert, probably in hopes of luring us back. Aaaand the rest of the day was fairly uneventful, other than going to The Incredibles, which rocked a second time and seemed to be quite enjoyable to my aunt. The computer graphics are so ridiculous in that movie. A lot of times, you catch yourself thinking "wait, this isn't real, is it?"

Yesterday, my mom and I woke up at ten thirty and returned to the house fairly early to go to lunch with my grandma and Kikko. I had my favourite garlic and pepper soup spaghetti at the Italian restaurant down the street and that was probably the most exciting thing to happen. Wahoo! I also started to clean up my space in my grandma's room and brought some of it back to the apartment with me.

Today, we also woke up pretty late, the first few times my mom has done so in a long, loooong time. I burned some of the pictures from my digital camera on to a CD, which we took to the film developers on the corner to print out. We picked them up on our way to yet another late lunch, where I pigged out, once again. The quality of the photos was a big crap, but surprisingly, I don't think the pixelage had much to do with it.

Goin' rock style. Leave the rest you want rock style, rock styleeeummm give it up.

How sad I am to finally discover that Soul Coughing broke up five years ago. Woe is me!

There was a big earthquake in south-western Japan: magnitude seven. We felt no sway, but I saw the news flash this morning. Surprisingly, for such a large earthquake, only one person has been declared deceased.