Still loving my work, but my goodness 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. is a long stretch of time, and it leaves so little time and energy left over. I'm told one eventually adjusts and becomes capable of doing more after work than just collapsing and reading trashy novels / watching unredeemably goofy anime.

On the other hand, it's kind of nice to finally have the chance to catch up on my year's backlog of One Piece episodes, especially since I apparently left off just before the plot took a turn for the awesome. I mean, really. On the one hand you have an elite corps of sinister government spies, and on the other an insane, cola-powered cyborg who wears no pants. How can it go wrong?

(Where pants = trousers, obviously. Really, you've made me so paranoid, people.)

Vaguely speaking of which, I think I'm finally starting to appreciate the value of HD technology. I never thought image resolution could make that much of a difference on the quality of viewing experience, but the difference between watching One Piece on YouTube and in bittorrented HD form is almost unbelievable. The HD version really drew me in and made the fourth wall so invisible I could easily forget it was even there, whereas with the YouTube version there always seemed to be a distance that prevented me from ever getting completely lost in the story.

...Of course the fact that half the episodes on YouTube had completely illegible subtitles, and the rest were either in German or Spanish could also have something to do with it. Just maybe.