avant_goya

While I was back home before I went to America I learned that the wife of one of the older men I helped in the fields near Higa sometimes passed away. Her husband died a few years back, so their old house was empty and their son was talking about selling it.

I’m not sure what drove me to make the decision, but I’ve bought the house. I finished signing the paperwork this morning. It’s been a long time since it has had any work done on it, so renovating it will take time, but I don’t need it to be in a liveable state until I finish school anyway. I’ll have to ask some of the locals to take care of some of the work, and occasionally fly home for a long weekend if I can.

It’s time to start planning what I want to do with the layout.

My parents have recently decided they'll be moving, so they asked me to look through the old things I didn't bring with me when I moved out to see what I want to put in storage and what I don't need anymore.

One of the things I found was the old tennis club logbooks from my year as captain, alongside with a photobook some of the team made me before graduating. I wonder why I didn't bring it to America with me. Perhaps I was worried about damaging it? Either way, it was a touching find.

Looking through the club logbook makes me miss... well, a fair number of things, certainly. It was a good year, spent with a good team. It really makes me miss my goya-garden, though. Back then I used a large planter with a tennis net that had been too old and damaged to use for tennis as a trellis, and kept track of my planter garden's progress in the club logbook.

Perhaps I'll post some excerpts of the logbooks sometime. I'm sure Hirakoba-kun can help me pick out some entertaining ones, since he doesn't appear otherwise inclined to make himself useful.

It's a sad day a cockatiel is more useful than your friends. Especially if all the cockatiel has done to try and help is hide in a variety of shoes.

Working on precision work in this weather is honestly a menace. I caught myself seconds before almost putting a needle through my hand at my sewing machine because I was spacing out earlier. I’ve worked through worse weather than this, I’ve no idea why I’m so off today.

It’s frustrating because I’ll be limited to my travel sewing machine for over a month soon, so I feel compelled to get extra work done now. Even so, rushing clearly isn’t doing me any favors. Clearly I’m needing that vacation.

Kamio-kun, I appreciate that exam season is good business for you, but with the current weather you need to remember to both eat and drink enough to maintain such an active lifestyle. I’ll leave an extra smoothie to go in the fridge, in the blue thermos can.

I was expecting my summer to be a busy one, but even I got a little caught off guard with how much I ended up planning out after the lull in activity with my decision not to participate in Wimbledon. Not that that was ever a true consideration, all things considered.

At the start of next month, Hirakoba-kun and I will be spending a week in Seoul. Kai-kun, if you want us to purchase anything for you while we're there, let me know. It would be nice to be leaving with things other than more fuel for the gaping black hole that is Hirakoba-kun's wardrobe.

I was initially going to travel straight from Seoul to Okinawa after, but one of my sponsors called me with an interesting deal for which I'll have to meet them in Tokyo on the 9th. After that I'll be staying in a rental place near my parents' until my flight to America for the US Open. 

While I'm in Okinawa though, I'll finally have the opportunity to get my hands on some genuine handmade bingata fabric. It's quite expensive because of how labour intensive it is to make, but with my winnings from France I can afford it. Obviously my knowledge on textiles isn't anywhere near extensive enough to be making my own at this time, but just getting to work with some of the genuine fabric will be an interesting twist to my upcoming projects.

My plane has landed in japan and im questioning whether or not time is a real thing at this point. I envy people who can sleep on planes, hate timezones and have been awake long enough to wonder if I hallucinated the entire french open. If it turns out i dreamed up my own personal best I will probably actually kill something.

I want to go to bed. I also want coffee. It’s a dilemma.

After some deliberation about what outfits to bring to Paris (an important matter. It is Paris, after all) I finished packing my clothes and essentials. My tennis equipment and tournament clothes have already been confirmed to have arrived ahead of time, which is my most pressing concern taken care of.

I won't be leaving for another few days, but after a fiasco in China last year I developed a habit of making sure my luggage arrives at my destination before I do, and my coach is already there anyway.

Since I finished packing sooner than expected, however, I decided to stick some time into doing my share of spring cleaning on the wall Kamio-kun and I have appointed to serve as our post-it wall. Perhaps if we want to continue using it as a means of communication as well as a personal bulletin and reminders space we should implement some sort of ritual preening habit to periodically clear up space for new entries.

( There's a few mystifying entries I'd like to get context on. )

P.S. I didn't take the adventures of Goya-kun the cool goya down because of my spring cleaning, I decided to bring it along for moral support. I'll put it back where it belongs when I return.

I'm most certainly not regretting my choice to try and balance both my tennis career and my schoolwork, but I wasn't expecting the biggest hurdle I'd face to be my coach. Of course I should have realised it would be difficult to stick to his training goals and expectations while he is on a  different continent entirely, but it is quite frustrating to learn that someone I assumed trusted in my ability to look after myself actually seems quite doubtful whether I am following his instructions while outside of his direct general vicinity.

To give this post some actual substance beyond complaining, I figure I might as well show another old design. It can't live up to Pi-chan's excellence, of course, but it is a fond memory nevertheless.

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It occurs to me I should probably give a better overall picture of what sort of clothes I typically create, seeing that I am actually here to study fashion design. Perhaps from next week onward I will try and do some form of throwback thursday posts, as I sort through photos taken across the years and the kind of stories that inspired me to create what I made at the time. 

I am aware it isn't a thursday, but seeing there is no time like the present to start, here is a personal favorite of mine from back in middle school.

 ( Ft. The most charming model )

I'm also never returning to KFC.

((ooc: Kite, under influence, punched a Colonel Sanders statue at some point during during Rin's birthday celebration. Clips of the riveting confrontation have made it onto the internet.))

(Who most certainly has time to check social media considering the number of hours he must be spending browsing various housing ads, so do not even bother pretending you haven’t seen this entry.)

While I appreciate the assistance(?) in finding a place to stay in Japan, I’m afraid in your zeal to accommodate me you may have overlooked a number of zeroes in my budget. Fortunately, I’ve since managed to find a place that suits my needs for the time being.

That said, I figure it’s rude to let your hard work go unmentioned, so hereby a comprehensive list of features picked from the advertisements you forwarded to my email that I do not actually need or want to pay extra for;
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