Ok, so this week I went to see the psychologist for my preliminary before I head to the psychiatrist in a couple of weeks (it’s a busy time of year). I managed to make it on time, despite sleeping through my alarm as I’d left my headphones in from the night before. She was pretty nice, asked me a bunch of questions that seemed fairly standard and gave me a diary to complete as preparation. I wasn’t really expecting to get homework but hey, whatever. I have to monitor times that I’m in bed but not sleeping, in bed and sleeping, and when I have my meals. Apparently this will help the psychiatrist glean something about my sleep patterns, or the state of my health, or something. We’ll see, I guess. As it stands, I’m slated to go see the doc right before Anastasia is due to arrive here in Japan. This week I talked to her as much as I could, she’s been busy studying, doing assignments and preparing for her end-of-semester exams, which has been pretty stressful for her.

My sleep this week has been ok-ish. The drugs I got from the doctor last week do seem to be helping, at least a bit. I’m not sleeping the whole night through, but at the very least I’m getting some solid hours which makes me a bit more functional during the day, hurrah! It does leave me with a pretty severe bout of being groggy though, which is less than fun. I’ve also been having lots of weird dreams. I don’t really remember them as usual, but the fact that I’m more than peripherally aware that I’m dreaming at all is pretty unusual for me. I wonder if that’s to do with the meds as well, or just my brain being weird?

This week on the school front a few things happened. I chatted with Todo-san a bit about some potential research to do with creating animations or animation-ready models from image scans. I’m not sure how feasible it is, but it’s something that I’m going to be looking into a bit more when I’ve got some headspace for it. He might be able to swing me a visit to OLM Digital, where he does a lot of his research in collaboration with them. I spent a fair bit of time talking with him about animation work-flow and going over a book that he brought in to show me. I’m hoping that after a bit more thinking, I should be able to come up with a secondary research idea that helps animators.

I had my first Monday Japanese class this week now that it’s regulated, and I got Tajiri-sensei as the teacher. She’s a whole lot of fun, so I’m really happy to have her for this semester as well. Since I’ve been doing a whole lot of paper reading/reviewing for the reading group that I’m in (which takes a really long time), I’ve had to revise my initial timeline for the booking software usability research I’m doing as I’ve hit a bit of a wall… I’m not going anywhere particularly quickly, and as things from my classes start to pile up a bit, I’m not sure how quickly I’m really going to be able to progress. We’ll see, I guess. I actually had lunch with a Thai student named Mio in my Human Interfaces class this week and chatted about some of the difficulties we’ve both been having.

I also talked with one of my friends in the lab about our supervisor a bit. I think he’s a great researcher, but I don’t know that he does particularly well with students that don’t already have a lot of their own research ideas, which is a bit frustrating. I need a bit more guidance and examples of things that I can do to get my head in the right space, or projects I can cut my teeth on, I guess. It makes the research side of things a bit more of an uphill battle than I was expecting it to be. I think one of the new students this semester is having similar issues in trying to come up with ideas that are appropriate/feasible, actually.

This week I’ve been trying to talk to a few people online, send out a few more emails than usual since as everyone knows, I can be complete rubbish at sending email replies to people. I have emails sitting in my inbox that are months old that I still haven’t got around to replying to yet, which is pretty appalling. Anyway, one of the things that came up for me when I was emailing my brother was that lately I’ve been kind of wishing for a lifestyle where I actually know what I’m doing. It’s a challenge trying to keep pushing myself with my research, to keep going with all the class stuff in Japanese and to maintain some kind of semblance of sanity/a life on the side. I still don’t really have a lot of good friends here, despite getting to know more and more people. Working somewhere and applying my knowledge seems like a really nice idea sometimes. That being said, I do still know that it was the right choice to come here and I can feel that I’m where I need to be, which is a good feeling. I just wish it was a bit easier!

I listened to a bit more of Ian’s music this week, and was inspired by one of the pieces to try my hand at making a sort of video for it. Unfortunately, my video-making skills aren’t quite on par with what I can envision in my head, so it might be a while before anything like that of mine actually surfaces on the web. Until I can at least get something looking more like I want it and less like pop-art threw up on my computer screen, that is.

For those of you that wanted my writing, there’s a few more pieces up on my writing page. Oh, speaking of writing, I also uploaded a somewhat tongue-in-cheek review of a concert I went to quite a while ago now.

On my day off this week, I played a couple of missions of Heroes of Might and Magic V, which I’ve been quite enjoying slowly but surely playing my way through. I actually have both of the expansions as well, although I think it’ll take me quite a while to get through them as well, so I’ll have to content myself with the occasional scenario if I want to use the expansion sides and maps. I also spent some more time fixing various bugs and adding new things to my LeithBank system – it’s getting pretty good. I can certainly see myself getting rid of my spreadsheets entirely soon and just using my online system. I’m not sure at what point I’ll be able to open it up so that other people can try using the system as well… if ever, really. It’s a personal tool and as much as I’d like to be believe that other people would find it useful and use it, I don’t know if I could ever really customise it to fit the expectations that I would have for a tool like that, let alone other people. Especially since it’s going to be pretty hodge-podge for quite a while yet.

I have some news of not-quite-impending travel! I’m going to be off to the US at the end of this year to go to Anastasia’s graduation, then stay through Christmas before the two of us head first to New Zealand to see my family and friends for New Year, then off to Japan where she will be living with me until I graduate next year. Pretty neat, huh?

I had dinner at this meat place on the way home this week as well. I think it was Korean, but I’m not really sure. I had a bunch of meat and some spicy soup that was pretty damn good. Somewhat amusingly, the little after-dinner mint they gave me was heart-shaped and quite cute. Even more amusingly, I had randomly picked the day of the month on which they give you a discount voucher worth 29% of your bill total – bonus!

Another side note, this time made of awesome. As are the people that made Tex Murphy… I’m happy they’re back into making games!

Yet another side note, I looked into mattress prices online a bit. In Japan, they’re bloody expensive. After a bit more scouting around online and with the help of Kyoko reading some Japanese websites for me, I managed to find a double-sized futon that looks pretty good. I’ll probably need to get some futons to act as a kind of softening layer underneath, but on the whole I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

Last random notes for this week – today I had okonomiyaki and monjayaki, both of which were delicious. I then proceeded to have my revenge in playing pool against Kyoko which included making her do a handstand in the (empty, but public) hallway as punishment. Now I just need to worry what happens next time she trounces me… ^^;