Take the recipe for a shounen fighting story and add yeast. XD When this show first started last fall, I downloaded the first episode, then never watched it. I rectified that error this weekend and promptly tore through the next 18 episodes as well. Now I’m caught up to what’s been subtitled and I’m stuck. Lesigh. This show is great. Lots of stupid puns, character designs I can mostly live with, bizarre ED sequences, a guest spot by Hattori-sensei, and, of course, Koyasu. Like most shounen series, the females are not directly involved in the battles, but they manage to hold an interesting spot in the plotline anyway — much better in this respect than PoT, where the female characters, even those in positions of authority, tend to function mainly as cheerleaders. Here, they’re cheerleaders, but cheerleaders with an agenda.

Still adore PoT, of course, but there’s not a lot to be done while waiting for new episodes to be available. It looks like they stopped the anime shortly after the US/Japan Junior tournament arc, which is a real shame. It’s not clear to me why, even if they got ahead of the anime, it was too difficult to predict exactly what would happen and bring the anime through the Nationals, where the manga is inevitably headed. The movie looks interesting but weird.

I’ve been terribly lax in posting.

Why? Because I have the trip to write up that I still haven’t finished, and with that hanging over my head, I feel guilt to log in and not finish those entries.

Stupid.

Also, there has not been a lot going on to write about. For the past couple of weeks, nearly every day would go like this: Got up. Watched stuff on TiVo. Looked at monster.com. Looked at other job sites. Sat on couch. Made dinner.

Yeah. Real exciting stuff, let me tell you.

Also this weekend, mom and I finally got started on the upstairs bathroom. This project is one that’s been hanging over our heads since we moved in, but was not one anyone was looking forward to, so has been put off for the past two years.

But it was either the bathroom or finishing the front room, and I’ve a lack of inspiration for that, since I can’t do with it what I really want yet (which will require a good bit of money and involves redoing the kitchen at the same time). So the peeling wallpaper and disgusting shiny gold light fixture and rusting metal shelves over the toilet were marked for death.

But as every home improvement project tends, the killing was easier said than done. Mom brought the rented steamer over and we started trying to get the wallpaper off. It’ll be easy! we thought. It’s already peeling! we thought. There’s no paint over it like downstairs! we thought. Done by 2pm! we thought. Ha ha ha. As you may guess, we were fools. Fools!

After an hour and half we had managed to get off slightly more than one section of paper. Why? Because the idiots who put it up slathered the wall with about 5x more paste than was necessary, leaving us with gobs of goop and such a layer of cement that the wallpaper came down in bits no larger than a half dollar and quite often took the top layer of drywall with it.

Eventually it got to the point that we had to leave to meet E and Carl and mom wanted to go home. So we decided, reluctantly, to work again today and finish the job. Back mom came this morning and we did finish, but not without it again taking twice as long as we expected.

The wallpaper is now gone. But much of the paste remains. The walls will need to be washed, scraped, sanded, spackled and possibly plastered before we can even think about painting.

When we first went to the Opera House last fall to see The Lion King, one of my first thoughts was that it seemed the perfect place to stage Phantom of the Opera. The atmosphere of the place just seemed right for the piece. So as soon as we heard that Phantom was coming, we jumped at the chance to buy some tickets. And since our Lion King seats had been a bit high up in the mezzanine, we were careful to get some much further front this time.

I had never seen the musical Phantom before I went to see the movie last month. What I had seen were movie adaptations of the story, and I was quite familiar with the plotline. Unfortunately, I think the movie had something which this production lacked. Volume, for one, which was a problem for us throughout the evening and was likely a result of our location — the direct projection of the actors being to the Orchestra seats, and the speakers being aimed at the people sitting above and behind us. There were also some minor changes in the movie script, which, after seeing both the musical and the movie, I must conclude were smart to make. They tied together certain plot elements that were poorly supported in the musical and improved the story by making it more coherent. So, I guess I’d give this version a 6/10. It was good, but not knock you down good. It probably improved after they’d had more than a couple chances to perform it there.

Before going to the movie we had dinner at Shabu-zen. The meal was good, the first time I’d actually had real shabu shabu. The highlight of dinner was the Mishima beef, which I’d been dying to try ever since I first saw the Mishima Beef Battle on Iron Chef 5 years ago. It was goooooooood. And expensive. And I’ll stop now before I make myself hungry.