Went drinking with some great students/friends on Saturday night at a tiny little izakaya in Higashi-Koganei. It's a tiny little nowhere area on the Chuo, just a few restaurants and izakayas and a pachinko parlour. I teach there at a little community center some Saturday nights, and we've recently taken to going for some otsukare beers after class. Always fun, always raucous.

When we stumbled out in time for last trains, low and behold! A sight for sore eyes: a new, previously unseen Tokyo manhole cover. My kimonoed friend Sachiko was quite bemused when I asked her to stand with her toes on the edge of the hole so I could take a picture of her trad. footwear with the manhole cover... It's exciting to find new manhole covers - it happens less and less nowadays. One day I wanna do a road trip from the northern tip of Hokkaido down to Okinawa in search of the finest jewels of the road.... Ah, these fabulous Japanese manhole covers.

In other news, I'm learning to live in an RSS-free internet. Seems the gods (or perhaps the ghosts of my parents) conspired to deprive me of any forms of RSS reader-ship despite dozens of attempts through different avenues and formats - it became quite laughable as I tried more and more new things only to have each one fail for one mystifying reason or another. I have decided to just give up on it. My parents don't want me wasting my time any more. At least, that's my weirdling explanation for all this...

To be honest, it's been a really good thing. Shaking this heinous addiction cold turkey was tricksy - the ferocity of net rage in the beginning signalled that it was definitely time to step away from the computer and get sane. It's been just over 2 weeks now and I have finally stopped coming home and feeling lost or dribbling because there were no blog subs to read (I had 99 subscriptions)... most of my recent (former) daily reads weren't bookmarked in my browser because I used Bloglines (*you* can still see them if you go to the links page, but hey, my system won't connect with bloglines at all, even embedded link-files within my own website.), and I can't even remember what half of them were.... although most of my Tokyo blog friends are of course, still checked pretty regularly (manually! shock horror). Oh, and of course, I don't go more than a day without visiting the darlin' Trent, Oh god how I adore that sweet and fabulously trashy man.... So there you have it. A brave new, RSS free internet world for frangipani. Maybe now I'll actually start getting stuff done when I'm supposed to. Bwa ha ha ha.