Minor discoveries

I woke up before the alarm went off this morning, to find the cat wrapped around my fiancee's head, like some strange feline crown. I thought about chastising the cat for this but it might have woken either of them up, and I was too tired to really move until the alarm went off.

I shrugged off this lassitude and made it to the office by 8.05, in order to get a good start on the week and let a visitor from overseas into the office, but even after two lunches (one business lunch paid for by outsiders, one baby shower to commemorate the upcoming birth of somebody in the office) I was not operating at full speed, and when I went to see my friend Katarina off at the station, exhaustion hit me like a ton of bricks and I had to go home in short order, to complain about the air conditioning not being strong enough, and then eat hot soup, before complaining that the soup was too hot/the air was too cold/my head was too square. When I get tired, my pain tolerance drops, and I get worried about things that I shouldn't.

Or maybe I should worry about the increasing squareness of my head. It could be a sign of something. Ostensibly because I have chosen to dress as the Invisible Man, and really because I wanted to conceal the cuboid-shape of my cranium, I went to the pharmacist down the street and purchased 12 yards of gauze. From this I learned that gauze is very cheap, and that a man running a pharmacy in Hong Kong may have no idea what length a yard is, but he's quite happy to sell you several yards of anything you like.

When we got back and discovered you only need about 9 yards of gauze (6 yards 4 inches wide, and 3 yards 3 inches wide) to wrap my head up, we also discovered that the cat loves gauze. She then discovered that once her claws are in it, she's pretty much stuck, so I removed the bandages before going to bed tonight, otherwise I might wake up with the cat attached to me tomorrow morning. And I can hardly take that to work.

So an evening of discoveries. I also discovered that it may be quite difficult to enter the Osaka Marathon, as although I have a place, to get it I need to log in to a website, where (a) I don't have a password and (b) there's no way to request a new one or a reminder of the old one. Which hardly seems like a shining example of Japanese efficiency. Ho hum. I have ten days left to remember my password, and then I can start training. Or think about visiting the gym. Or stop eating all the delicious biscuits in the apartment.

And finally, I've achieved something today: I've dispatched my brother's birthday present, and it's not even two months since his birthday! (Well, it's a month and 28 days, but I think that sneaks in just under the dividing line.) I hope he likes what he gets - depending on whether he's excited by strange things from Sham Shui Po or not will determine that. He'll also be a bit confused, because I've given the birthday parcel to my friend to post from Stockholm, partly to surprise him (hey, it's cheaper than wrapping paper) and partly because the post between Hong Kong and the rest of the world seems a bit sluggish these days. Maybe I should have sent another parcel and had them race one another.