These pics are from the massive Koenji Awa Odori Festival a few weeks back. I love the Awa Odori dance and music, and it has a great history, full of debauchery. A perfect summer evenings activity.

It's a gorgeous day in Tokyo today but I'm a little worse for wear after last nights rather fabulous rum cocktail party at Alyssa and Steve's sumptuous western-sized luxury apartment in the Canadian Embassy compound.... So I am nursing a mid-sized hangover and caffeinating and re-hydrating my system and staying close to itunes and my computer. It's a Sunday which means anywhere worth going in Tokyo on such a beautiful day will be like riding the Chuo-sen in peak hour and that will just not do. I must say that having a sunroom to laze around in, one that steps into a big traditional Japanese garden with grass and trees and stone lanterns makes staying at home on days like today really easy. I do love my house. I'm a lucky girl.

Anyway, I wanted to share some of the things I've been wasting my time on so far today.

The most exciting thing so far is a new browser that I fell in love with almost as soon as it opened its first webpage. Camino is a mac-only broswer being developed by the good folk at Mozilla. It's fast. Really really fast. It imported my bookmarks from safari no problems, something firefox doesn't do, and just FEELS good. I made it my default browser after 2 minutes of playing. Yum.

Not far behind the new browser excitement is the fact that pink is the new blog has a new entry up. I love this site - Trent is a total sweetie with an hilarious take on gossip. It's all totally mindless giddy trash and it puts a smile on my face every day. Thanks Trent.

Another excellent blog I've been enjoying lately is Waiter Rant. Written by a witty waiter in some 5 star bistro in New York, it appeals enormously to my inner waitress (I spent many years waiting on complete arseholes in a variety of restaurants up and down the Queensland coast). It also reminds me of my brother who was a professional 5 star silver service waiter in a number of classy joints in Port Douglas, some of them with quite a celebrity clientele that included vacationing world leaders (like Bill Clinton), movie and rock stars of all ilks. The stories he has from that time are priceless. Both he and I became the WORST kind of restaurant customers because all we would do is rate the staff performance: waiting and restaurants were all we knew for a while. I *heart* Waiter Rant.

I have been taking a long hard look at the newest version of Gallery - Gallery 2 and it looks pretty damn sweet - very customisable (er - is that a word?). I'm going to embrace the inner bulldog and do the upgrade. Yay.

Happy to say that I have been feeling much better this week, I seem to have kicked my blues and rejoined the human race again. Which hopefully will translate to some activity on the websites backend to make the frontend look much prettier and fresher.