Yet another delayed weekend report:

Last Saturday was pretty lazy, consisting of sleeping in and cleaning cleaning. We went to the mall to pick up CD/DVD-RWs, chiefly so Sachie's pictures wouldn't end up going the way of Katie's. Since we were out in the 180, we stopped at the Fuji Super for groceries. Sachie made a green salad and meatloaf, plus we had some garlic-flavored cheese and red wine. Thereafter, we watched "House of Flying Daggers", called "Lovers" in Japan.

What the heck is up with these crazy Chinese movies? They have no point! I mean, like "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", HoFD has great cinematography, but the plot leaves much to be desired. The rest of this paragraph contains spoilers, so skip it if you haven't seen the movie yet! Ok, here we go. So Leo (Andy Lau's character) had a relationship with Mei (Zhang Ziyi) way back when. That explains why he went wack when a drunken Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) tried to have his way with her, but since Leo knew everything, it doesn't make sense why he would've carried out his orders at all. He knew the madam at the brothel was a leader in the House of Flying Daggers, and he knew how to get there, so why bother bringing Jin into things? Seems like a major plot flaw if one asks me. Plus, Jin tries having his way with Mei twice, and she turns him down. Funny, she throws off sexual advances thrice in the movie. Talk about a mood killer! The ending was also dumb: why would Leo end up extinguishing Mei? And there's no way any of them would've survived after losing so much blood. This was about as pointless as "Reservoir Dogs"!

Anyway, that was my overly critical impression of "Hitoumon".

On Sunday I found Sachie's lost Memory Stick with the new Campari Club drink menu on it. She'd been looking for it for over a week, but it was just hidden in her junk amongst some Newsweeks. After that we decided to ride our bikes over to a furniture store we'd gotten an ad for in the mail, Area. The ad was actually for a newly opened store in Chigasaki, but they have a Fujisawa store that we wouldn't have to take the car to get to. They didn't actually have much on display, but what they did have was pretty cool. We were looking for a desk for the iMac, but previously hadn't seen anything we liked. Naturally, when we found one, it was super-expensive. As in, nice Italian sofa expensive, or motorcycle expensive. They have stuff custom-made by domestic artisans, out of one of four woods (of course I want cherry), to fit specified dimensions. The staff of three worked on us for about an hour, and for whatever reason, we decided to buy a desk and wagon. Since Sachie will be the primary user, she said she'd pay for half. We made arrangements to have one of the designers come over the following Saturday to check out the setting. If we're lucky, the thing will be here by Golden Week. I guess completing my entertainment center will have to wait another month.... Uh-oh. Having shared property is dangerously close to...the M word....