Is Lunar Eclipse an anagram for Cosmic Letdown?

I got all excited about viewing this damp squib.
Oh well, may the bad luck of the year go with it.
Roll on Twenty Ten - the correct reading.
Here's hoping it's a year of contentment and peace.

Starting a blissed out two weeks without work

I'm home - yay! On the way home I got paged at the airport for the
first time in my life. It was hilarious - she called my name on the PA
system just as I was walking past her. Spooky timing. The long and the
short of it was that I'd been checked in by a trainee and she had
forgotten to give me the boarding pass for my connecting flight. To my
shame, I'd never even noticed: I thought I was supposed to be a
seasoned traveller.

Anyway, this first hiccup did not bode well for my bags arriving
safely in Dublin. Was this going to be the third Christmas where my
suitcase got sent to Timbuktu instead of coming home at the same time
as me? Luckily, I fretted for nothing and all luggage arrived intact.
In fact, my bag was like the fourth one off the plane, so more
trainees in future, please.

Unfortunately, while everything up to London was smooth sailing,
Heathrow once again proved itself to be a pain of an airport. I have
consciously avoided making a connection through LHR for the last few
years as it always seems to be jammers. I don't know what I was
thinking this time around as it ended up being no different: a two
hour delay due to runway congestion and my poor sister left waiting on
the Dublin side with no notification of the delay from the airline. Oh
well, at least I got here.

And what were the first words that greeted me when I set foot back on
this emerald isle, this land of saints and scholars - F@&k Off! (said
by one airport attendant to another as I stepped off the plane and
onto the ramp to bring me to the airport terminal). Charming!

Anyway, I don't want to be the immigrant who comes back and tells
everyone how messed up their home country is and how great everything
is in their adopted land, but please allow me this one mini rant: what
is it with the service culture in this part of the world? "Customer is
King" - my giddy aunt! Both in London Heathrow and Dublin airports, I
could not get over how little attention workers paid to the customer.
The desk workers I encountered didn't even break off their chat about
their weekend conquests to acknowledge me as a customer, never mind
make eye contact or say thank you or any other form of politeness. And
the amount of slacking... The number of people I saw just huddled
around in groups just slacking off and not actually doing anything. I
know I am spoiled coming from the land of impeccable customer service
and a crazy work ethic, but come on people - have a little pride in
your jobs, please.

End of rant and apologies for any tedium induced. So now, to get down
to the serious business of enjoying my time off.

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Reason No. 2 why it doesn't pay to work for a medical company...

They go a bit OTT on the old blood tests.

So I got the results back of my health-check retest, and it turns out that my triglyceride levels were even lower the second time round: there is practically no fat in my body whatsoever. And that was with me eating crisps and chocolate and tempura and ice cream the night before the blood test. I am a freak of nature! And my company wants me to go back and have ANOTHER test in three months.

I say narks to that. I clearly have some terrible wasting disease that I'd really rather not know about.

In any case, in three months there'll probably be nothing left of me but a shrivelled piece of cartilage wrapped in some urine-soaked skin!

Sometimes I wish I didn't work for a pharmaceutical company

I just found out today that the main ingredient in most moisturizers
and hand creams is urea.

From now on, I'm going to cut out the middle man and start rubbing my
own urine directly into my skin. I'll save a tonne of money.

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お手(袋)洗い - Ote(bukuro)arai

My designer gloves - seriously, the only designer item I possess - just fell in the toilet bowl at work. And that wasn't even in the top 5 cruddy things that happened at work today: it's been a long and trying one.

But let's focus on happier toilet-related matters. The video below was taken in the Caretta Centre in Shiodome and is probably the best thing I have experienced in Japan since the musical coffee vending machine with internal camera. This toilet can do it all: here it is relaying some of the days news (those wanting to brush up their Japanese can look at the captions scrolling on the screen behind the loo). But more than that, it can update you on stock prices, the latest weather, play games, sing songs. It even has it's own live weblink. How many of you can say that?

If I were the boss of the Toto Toilet Company, I would so make this interactive talking functionality a standard spec. Can you imagine what a smile it would bring to your face to have this friendly guy welcome you every morning and suggest a game of rock paper scissors. Love it!

PS I think that, with this entry, my love of Japanese toilets has crossed the borderline from mild intersest into unhealthy obsession. But what are you gonna do - aside from work my life here is feeling kind of empty.