Excuse me, Could you give me the spine?

This weekend was amusing, but sickening to say the least. Saturday started as a fairly normal day, with abnormal plans. Usually, The Wife and I stay inside and just enjoy not being bothered by anyone or anything, but this past weekend we had agreed to travel to Hikone to visit one of our friends up in that area for a rousing session of D&D 3.5. We arrived and decided to do lunch first, and this is where it begins to get interesting. For those of you who have lived in Hikone, you know how strict they are in enforcing their traffic laws. The city does house one of the Japanese historical treasures, and they like to make sure everything around it operates correctly. Well, at one of the crosswalks I veered into the street a little early, not enough to be a true jay-walk, but close enough to it that they sent out two of their jay-walk ninjas to attack me, and "punish" me so I'd never do it again. They weren't expecting someone that had studied martial arts, and my Kung Fu beat their Karate, though it was mostly due to surprise. They were expecting a tourist; big, tall, but not skilled in the ancient art of Kung Fu. I managed to hold them off until we could duck into the Big Boy for a tasty dinner of herb chicken. When we left it was the jay-walk ninjas' turn for surprise as they burst from a tunnel near the Yu Store. Luckily for us all The Wife was a little bit behind us and managed to yell a warning before they reached us. I was fed up with being hassled for the early crossing and decided to let it be known. Using the ancient secrets of Qigong and focused my chi into the Perfect Eagle's Claw Grasps at Prey and ripped the spine out of one of the ninjas, causing the other to flee. The attack was so fierce that there was no blood and the ninja, his own spirit consumed with purity vanished in a puff of smoke, leaving no trace that he'd ever been there, aside from the spine I then held in my hands. Those ninja are tricky, I couldn't even prove they were there, just that I had this spine, which we saw on the street and commented on how strange it was that there was a spine laying in the middle of the sidewalk. It could have belonged to anything, a dog, a cat, a tanuki, or even a small child; no one would believe me that I had actually defeated one of the mythical jay-walk ninjas. After that we went to D's apartment to immerse ourselves in a fantasy realm where we pretend to be characters in a made up world.

This is where the sickening part comes in, D had been getting ill and The Wife had been ill as well, and they passed it to me, so now I have the Flu of One Thousand Highschool Students. I spent pretty much all of Monday in a deep slumber upon our new couch which is wicked comfortable and soft. It was the only one we could find at Midori that wasn't pleather. I spent most of yesterday asleep as well, which is why I'm doing this so late at night. I am getting excited however, I'm starting on that research project I was excited about earlier, but I find out now I can't say anything more about it, only that I'm doing a research project. I'm getting books in the mail and now I'm in charge of purchasing the computers. It feels great; I'm elated, in fact, in the funding I get to go to a conference somewhere about something, in fact, all I know is that it is in March. He He He, I'm giddy.

Watched "12 Monkeys" tonight, and "Man on the Moon," in my waking time yesterday. I enjoyed them both, that is all I will say about them. "The Return of the King," opens here on the 7th of this month, so we'll probably be seeing that again with our Japanese friends, should be fun. Makiko, one of my students at Gambro is reading the Hobbit.

I hope this post wasn't too clever-clever as to offend coming from Aku Ender's blog, or even the author himself, so, in general form to increase my own horizons, give me a good book, movie, or band/song/album. One thing I like about living with The Wife is that she has different musical tastes. In general we blend pretty well, but there are some things that we do that drive each other crazy. For example, The Wife loves to listen to a song or small group of songs, we'll say five to ten, for three days on repeat. Those are the only songs she will listen to... it drives me crazy. I like to take our whole music library, put it on random and hit play and see what happens, that makes The Wife crazy, she likes to know what comes next. I think there was an episode of Dr. Katz where the guest star said something to the effect of, "I listened to your latest album, but not in the order you are familiar with." Also, Smashing Pumpkins, The Wife can't stand them, same with Sonic Youth, or rather, she has to be in a very particular mood to listen to Sonic Youth. It isn't too much of a problem, but just some interesting music listening quirks that work their way into our relationship at various points in time. Those quirks nearly started a fight between Aku Ender and The Wife when The Wife said that Smashing Pumpkins were terrible. It was amusing to watch the fervor with which they both backed their opinions. Ah, opinions, so much fun to argue. Later all.