The Return of The Bus

We had Yamaarashi-chan over last night, and Omaha said a very strange thing when I arrived at the house. "You picked her up from her house, didn't you? She wasn't at daycare today. I could tell." What is it with women and that psychic ability? I asked her to explain and she said something about how, being around teenagers all the time, Yamaarashi-chan becomes sullen and withdrawn but when she's at the daycare she's spending her time with kids her age and she's brighter and more cheerful when she gets to my house. Weird.

Anyways, we played a few board games and ate home-made sloppy joes before it was time to take Yamaarashi-chan back to her mother's house. All in all, a quiet evening. Not too bad.

( Sloppy Joes recipe )

I don't know what it is with Kouryou-chan though. All of a sudden, she's having this "It's scary alone in my room, I want to sleep in your bed" pattern and throwing absolute fits of sheer panic when we tell her she has to sleep in her own bed. She's been like this on and off, but they seem to be growing in intensity even as she gets older. Omaha managed to calm her down and lull her to sleep in her own bed, but she still crawled into our bed around 3:30 this morning.

This morning I got to take the bus again for the first time in about a month. It's been a real trade-off; in the ten weeks I've been without a laptop, I've gotten a lot of Japanese lessons in. Now, with Omaha leaving the production side of her radio syndicate to concentrate on the business I'm not going te be driving on Mondays, either. I must make new time to study.

The bus was nicely empty this morning, but there was one woman sitting across from me that just kinda crepped me out. She had this weird tic in her face that caused the left half of her face to smile while the right half frowned-- and then it would reverse itself, left half frowning and right half smiling. And it switched back and forth incessantly, tic, tic, tic, at about the speed of a blinking street light. It was way creepy.

The woman who works at the mortuary was there today. She's lost weight, is wearing tight jeans, and has gotten a soft, wavy perm to her very blond hair. I don't understand why she bothers to put all that makeup on while we're driving into the city when she looks much prettier without it.

Another bookstore disappears

Both the anime store and the general purpose bookstore, a Waldenbooks, at Westlake center are gone. The anime store is going to be replaced with some lame beanbag store called Love Sacs, which claims that it's name has nothing to do with sex. Given the bloated human beanbag they have for a spokesman, a smiling Hawaiian gentlemen who has obviously consumed too much spam over the course of his days, I might agree.

I had to go into Hot Topic, despite the boycott (which I now see is lifted), to find some cheap stickers to adorn my laptop monitor now that I've replaced it. I found this cute goth-girl-butterfly-winged thing that's just perfect, but it's not a Hello Kitty sticker. Pout/