A tale of annoyance, yum and cool anime
Ehem, another gap, ooops. I just haven’t felt like doing daily updates lately.

Well, Nana is still driving Mum and I slowly nuts.



Richard drove me nuts on Wednesday though. I was meant to meet Tim at the cinema after work to book tickets for Indiana Jones. I tried to find a shorter route to the cinema from the Foyer, but it didn’t quite turn out t be shorter, just more complicated I think. I met not Tim, but Richard there, because Tim was still at the flat, waiting for Paul to come back from work and to get his friend who was also coming. That kind of buggered up the plan, because the reason for Tim meeting me at the cinema early was so we could get tickets with our Unlimited cards and get normal tickets for everyone else. But because he’d been daft, Rich and I had to get him a normal ticket which he had to pay me back for.
I got to the cinema at about 5:20pm so once the tickets were purchased, Rich and I had quite a bit of time to kill before the movie started at 6:15pm. We went to ASDA to get some cinema food, but once we had picked up something to eat, he decided he wanted to just wander round and round ASDA until it was time to go. Gawd, talk about dull and pointless. We got back to the cinema by 6:15pm and left the remaining tickets with the guys at the door and the name of the person who’d be claiming them and went in to get our seats. Rich got up again to complain about the crappy sound quality and it was almost immediately fixed. The others made it in before the trainers eve started – we hadn’t expected them to make it until about 5 minutes into the movie itself, which was great fun, though a tad predictable.

I think I finished making the cover for the second needle tube on Thursday, while watching the second Ghost in the Shell series. The pattern turned out rather well I think, though the cap did give me a bit of trouble.

On Friday Rich sent me a link to a website where you can watch anime online through Veoh. The series he recommended was called Vampire Knight – typical shoujo fluff-n-angst, which put me in mind of a gothy Fruits Basket with hints of Ouran High-school Host Club (and creepily enough, Tamaki’s VA also voices the angst-magnet, Zero). Enjoyable enough to look out the manga, but nothing spectacular. My efforts to download the manga was frustrated by mIRC not connecting. Thank-you Pipex, buggering about with the DTS (or whatever it was).

I managed to download it on Saturday morning though, and just had time to finish reading it before it was time to go out into Aberdeen. I had booked a table at Jimmy Chung’s for lunch at 1pm and we got to the shopping place in good time to park and make our way up to the beach front, though Nana did shuffle all the way. I personally thought she was sulking or something. We only managed to coax her into trying a couple of ‘foreign’ things in Jimmy Chung’s, but Mum and I enjoyed it despite the air-con unit on the wall behind us suddenly leaking. We then walked back to look in Comet for new phone units (because our current ones were getting rather tired) and a new TV for Grandma Ethel. Ex-display models for both – the phones were in a box and the TV was the last one they had of that type and was on display when we went in. It doesn’t have bells and whistles, but an integral freeview box is just about what Grandma Ethel needed. We got those purchased and into the car boot, then Mum wanted to have a look in the Dunelm Mill, though she wasn’t impressed with it in comparison to the branch down south.

We went right to Grandma Ethel’s to sort out the new TV. Turns out she managed to get the old one working again but didn’t tell us – oh well, it’s her money. Of course, it falls to me to remove the old TV because it won’t fit in the boot of Mum’s car. Bah.

Since it was the 31st, I thought it would be a good idea to get out my gift certificate and sign up to Love Film to nab those free three months – I’ve had it since Christmas when LoveFilm sent it to me. My list is not full of stuff I’d like to see.

I couldn’t quite wait for some of it though. One of the things I put on my list was a series called ‘Utawarerumono’ (The One Being Sung – yeah, the title doesn’t make much sense until the end of the series, and even then only if you think about it), a series I had heard of when the fansubs first came out but for some reason I never quite got around to watching. I think perhaps the animal-girl thing both put me off and attracted me to it at the same time, plus I think I had read somewhere that it started out as an ero-ge title. Since then I’ve watched and guiltily enjoyed Demonbane, so I decided I’ve give Utawarerumono a shot and headed for AnimeCrazy to watch it online. Once I had started, I regretted ‘wasting’ part of the day watching the first few episodes of Get Backers, because I ploughed through that series almost in one go, getting all the way to episode 24 before having to turn off my computer at midnight because I had to be up on Monday morning, worse luck. I had read the series’ page on Wikipedia before seeing a lot of the series, but I was still very impressed and I liked the tone – sort of like Escaflowne and Scrapped Princess with a dash of Princess Mononoke. I’ll be highly recommending it to the guys in any case. I think Paul will enjoy the pre-feudal Japan feel to it. I read the series had a heavy Ainu-influence, and perhaps that is one of the things that interests me in it. I wish there was more information on those people and their culture available to read about.

I finished watching the series on Monday evening when I got back home and after I’d finished making and eating tea (chicken in hoi-sin and plum sauce – Nana practically cleaned her bowl, so that’s a win there).

The first DVDs from LoveFilm arrived on Tuesday morning. The Get Backers one went right back in its envelope, and I watched Utawarerumono disc 2 (yeah, typical, eh?) and got that packed up to be put in the post the next day too. Disc 3 was finished last night and that went in the post this morning – hopefully I’ll get the next batch of DVDs from LoveFilm by the end of the week!

Yesterday I got the go-ahead to order a new shredder for the offices, so some people should be rather chuffed at the beginning of next week. No more whinging about the lack of working shredders FTW!

I’m currently kicking myself hard because I took my headphones out of my bag this morning to put one of the ear-pads back on…and promptly forgot to put them back in my bag. So I went to wire myself for sound while waiting for the bus this morning and realised I’d be without my music today. Which is especially annoying because I out new tracks on it last night and I have a lot of stuff to do this lunch time so I’ll be walking around for an hour with nothing but the sound of the idiot masses in my ears *sigh* Maybe I need to leave an ‘emergency’ pair of iPod headphones here in a drawer or something, because this is the 3rd or 4th time I’ve done this, and it sucks!