Well, it’s been fun, but wordpress is not for me.
I’m moving back here. Please update your links.

On the brighter side, at least I am learning something new and it’s actually quite interesting; let’s just hope I don’t end up destroying things.

Needless to say I was prepared for major shopping this weekend. But apparently when your brain is really really tired it also gets finicky. And I guess given my current stress level I shouldn’t have gone to Shibuya – it’s just too damn crowded.

Actually, I wanted to try out the Shu Uemura Nobara cream foundation, but when I got to the store they didn’t have it in stock. Apparently they’re repackaging it in a stick form which will be out on September 1, and if your purchases reach a certain amount you get a free kikay kit. So I decided to pend all makeup purchases for now. After finding this out I kinda lost interest in everything else – I even ventured inside Shibuya 109 but I didn’t quite like it. And then I tried out a couple of perfumes in PDC and I ended up with a headache.

So long story short, I spent the entire afternoon shopping and all I managed to buy is – wait for it – a stapler.

It’s actually quite nifty – it doesn’t use actual staples but instead punches out tabs from the papers which are then threaded through from the back to the top paper to bind them.

Front:

Back:

The conventional stapler still works better, I think, but it’s such a hassle to have to remove the staples every time I have to dispose of my printouts so I find this really handy.

And that’s that.

Well, no, actually I also got a stainless steel coffee filter from Starbucks, because the drip coffee addiction is becoming expensive (disposable drip coffee packets do not come cheap).

It fits nicely on top of my Sapporo mug. I have yet to try it out, though.

And then I caved and got the Cher shopping bags, since it seems like every other woman in Tokyo has them.

It’s the same concept as the Marc by Marc Jacobs bag, except that I get two bags free with the catalogue. I’m thinking the small one would make a good lunch bag and the big one would be for… groceries? Anyway I really shouldn’t be getting any more eco-bags after this, although I’m still lemming for the Dean and Deluca black totes because they’re just so cute.

At any rate that rounds up my quite pathetic haul. Now I have to go clean. The chaos in my apartment increases in proportion to my stress level. Right now it looks like it’s been hit by three tornadoes and an earthquake and I can’t stand it anymore.

This morning I did get a bit of de-cluttering done. I really really wanted to buy a new Muji drawer for organizing my stuff but it’s just not practical at this point. So I ended up with this:

I figured since I had a shitload of shoe boxes in here I might as well put them to good use. Apparently you never outgrow craft projects.

So anyway, in celebration I headed off to Shinjuku, as always.

I got so incredibly dark over the past couple of months and my current foundation shade no longer cuts it so I got a new Mineralized Skinfinish, this time in Medium Plus. I actually got colormatched this time (usually I just pick out what I “feel” is the right shade), and the make-up artist and I both agreed that this was the best one. And I also got MAC wipes for when I’m feeling lazy. I would get the Body Shop ones as per Anj’s recommendation but they’re not sold individually (you had to buy a set with a bottle of body wash which I do not care for) which is annoying.

I really wanted to pick out a new perfume and I spent quite some time sniffing a couple of candidates but Lanvin Eclat d’Arpege still takes the cake so I thought what the hell, I’ll just get a second bottle of this one because it smells really really good sans the headache.

Oh, and then, on the way out of Subnade where PDC (the perfume shop) was I passed by this store called HeartDance and it has all these pretty pretty dainty earrings and necklaces and rings and oh my God my EQ just dropped to the depths of Hades. But I was able to recover and I left with just these:

And that’s that. Now it’s Monday again. Howell.

And then this:

And then this:

Not as spectacular as Chofu but, well, it’s the last one. I’ll post the pics later when I’m done cropping out the baby stroller (the most annoying baby stroller ever ever ever). I’m all for family bonding but bringing your baby to an insanely crowded fireworks festival just doesn’t make sense to me at all.

I still love it though.

(Tokyo and Yokohama at Night by NASA Earth Observatory)

May bonus pang madaming commercial ni Manny Pacquiao (Magnulia Melk!). Panalo in more ways than one. ^^
Thank you punchsports.net.

P.S. How to print-screen with Macs: Shift + Apple + 3, and the image lands on your desktop.

First stop: Shoes

L-R: Charles and Keith (all the way from SG!), Nike maryjanes (comfiest shoes in the planet, I swear), Zara pumps (because I am in the habit of buying office shoes and destroying them after a week).

White Chucks which I wore in Hokkaido. Pretty but not really for long-distance walking. But, well, pretty.

Next Stop: Bags (sort of)

I finally caved and bought this clutch after lusting after it for months (I’ve blogged about this before, I think). It’s already 50% off, so I figured it’s time to buy, yes? Close-up:

It’s made entirely out of aluminum can tabs which makes it the coolest coolest bag in the world.

Best pasalubong ever from the two gorgeous maidas who turned my apartment into a shopping bag storage space:

Tin Tang is the tiny pink blob on the air bed and Anj is sleeping on the floor beside her shopping bags.

This is my only loot from Hokkaido and it’s a Marc by Marc Jacobs fall/winter catalogue with a free canvass bag!!! It’s the cheapest Marc Jacobs bag ever and it’s preeeeetty. I actually bought two, but Anj sequestered the other one.

Last stop:

Philippe Starck for Fossil. ^^

Tokyo to Sapporo. 12 trains, 26 hours.

Start: 2009.08.09 0448h JST

End: 2009.08.10 0607h JST

14:02

Aboard the train from Sendai to Ichinoseki. 7 down, 5 to go. This is turning out to be one hell of an adventure.

This morning we had a wee bit of a mishap as we boarded train number 5 (from Utsonomiya to Kuroiso) which had as running across platforms and inside the train itself only to find we were hurtling towards the opposite direction.

We had lunch at sendai where the specialty is tongue but we ended up eating at Mcdonald’s which is quite a bummer. But we only had an hour to eat and the lines to the real restaurants (read: not Mcdonald’s) were extremely long so we didn’t have much of a choice really.

Brief background: this Sapporo trip cost us only 10,000JPY but it involves major sacrifice (i.e. hopping from train to train for more than 24 hours). Sounds like fun? No of course not.

My neck is stiff from power-napping in uncomfortable train seats and my shoulders are hurting from schlepping around what seems to me now as 20kg of unnecessary stuff. And to top it all off, it is now raining. Just perfect.

17:31

Aboard the train from Morioka to Ichinoseki

This is train number 10. Just two more and hello Sapporo and hopefully, cold weather. In the last transfer prior to this one David had us all running up the stairs and then down to the next platform in all of two minutes so we could get seats. So that’s how the Amazing race feels like. I hope to never have to do that again.

This particular line is called IGN, and it is godawfully small; thank God someone went down on the second stop, else i’d have to stand for two hours. It’s so difficult to be without a budget.

18:42 – stuck

We’ve been stuck in this station for an hour now. I have no idea why but my guess is it’s the heavy rains. This throws our schedule waaaay off so now we have to shell out an additional three thousand yen for express tickets.  It’s a bit of a piss off but, well, shit happens.

19:11

We are fucking stuck in the middle of nowhere and the goddamned train seems to have no intention of moving it’s sorry ass. Can you say stress?

19:23

And the train moveth. But the schedule is screwed twenty times over.

20:48

Shinkansen to Aomori

We were forced to take the shinkansen due to the delay in the stupid IGN. It cost us an extra 3.5k, but moving at 200kph is so infinitely better than being stuck.

25:24

Midnight train to Sapporo

To say that this trip is stressful is an understatement. The moment the Shinkansen doors opened at Aomori everyone started running towards platform 3, where we will be boarding the midnight trains. We didn’t have reserved seating and there were very few cars we could board.

Initially we boarded car 3 and we were quite pleased to find that we could all get seats for the eight-hour journey. As it turns out car 3 was reserved seating only, and we were supposed to board cars 9-11.

So after more running we boarded the correct cars which were pretty full by this time and half of us had to sit on the floor. And then there was this guy who refused to let us sit in the vacant seat beside him until the staff forced him to.

Thank goodness a bunch of people left at some station I am too lazy to find out the name of, so now we are all happily seated.

Tomorrow it’s an entirely new adventure; I’m not sure I’m looking forward to it but I am hoping for the best.

But in my defense, I never spend beyond my means – I don’t have credit card debt, nor am I behind on my payments, and I am on forced savings courtesy of my mother (she is a banker so I let her take care of it). It’s just that I don’t see the point of watching my money accumulate while staring longingly at wonderful gorgeous things.

Anyway, the point is, I did some shopping this weekend yet again. I was actually on the hunt for shades for our Hokkaido trip next week. My current pair is one of them super cheap sunglasses, and when I wear them I still have to squint. I also get tiny bumps on my nose. How annoying is that. So I decided I’ve had enough of disposable ones and I should invest on a nice pair for a change. I must’ve tried on a hundred pairs or so – some I could afford, some way beyond my reach. But see, the thing with buying expensive brand-name shades is that you expect them to be the last pair of sunglasses you will ever need. If I’m parting with 50 grand for a pair of Chanel shades they should damn well be perfect. So after two days of scouring (I almost bought a pair from Coach and also a Prada one out of desperation) I gave up. Designer shades are not for me.

But lookie what I found a few minutes later:

Pretty pretty pretty! And not too expensive. The only downside is you had to buy the hard case separately, and it costs about half the price of the sunglasses which is ridiculous. Anyway, I was too happy to mind.

Now on to the rest of the stuff.

The original Canon case for my SX200 is really really fugly, and all the pretty camera cases these days are for the slim type ones, so imagine my joy when I found this. It’s Tokidoki for Hello Kitty which was released a year or two ago but I was able to find one and I laveeet so much I kinda don’t want to use it for the camera because it’s too pretty.

And then I got a baby RooTote because I’m always rummaging through my bag searching for stuff so I thought maybe this would help.

It’s really time to buy bottoms because all my jeans are frayed to death. The two shorts are from GAP. This is totally Tin’s fault because she has a one-time only 20% discount on everything so we tried to make the most our of it. And then I got bell-bottoms from Levi’s. They don’t make bell-bottoms anymore which is a shame – if worn with heels they can make you look ten feet tall (if the pants reach down to the bottom of the heels; if not then they make you look shorter). They’re not the same as bootcut jeans because they’re really fitted up to the knee after which they flare out whereas bootcut jeans tend to be a bit more loose and less flared. Anyway, the point is, I almost bought this particular pair back when it was on sale for 30% off but I passed since I found it still too expensive. But now, it’s 90% off so it’s just too ridiculous to pass up. And I had them shortened by an inch and a half (the inseam was 33 inches and I’m just not that long-legged okay) so I had to wait for 50 minutes in the outlet park but I wasn’t allowed to buy anything more because I was already overbudget so it’s a bit of a torture.

And that’s that. Well I also got two flats and a dress shirt but I’m too tired to take pictures. But this weekend’s haul was pretty great. ^^