Gluttony may have saved my pocket book today.

That said, I managed to avoid one form of gluttony, but succumbed to another.

I headed down to Shinjuku in Tokyo today to visit with old friend and former photography teacher Andy Barker. (That interview is old, but worth a read. I also highly recommend you buy his photo book Kamakura.)

We were supposed to meet at Sizzler (more on that later) but before that I took a couple side trips.

The first was to the Seikaido main store. Seikaido is an art supply store and the main store has six floors of art supplies. I was looking for one item in particular (a notebook) but they didn’t have it. Still, Seikaido is the kind of store where once you see an item, you decide you can’t live without it. Luckily I didn’t see anything I couldn’t live without. Although I did look around a bit.

I found those things, though, at my second stop, Kingdom Note. Kingdom note is a small pen shop located on the sixth floor of a narrow building on the opposite side of the station from Seikaido. It is in an especially dangerous location as it’s located near Yodobashi Camera, which has several floors of camera and computer equipment, and above Map Camera, a used camera shop and the former home of my Canon Powershot G9. There, I found some notebooks and some pen cleaning materials I’d gotten a chance to try at the ISOT.

They turned out to be cheaper than I was expecting, so I couldn’t resist buying a couple. But only a couple. I resisted the racks of pens and ink. Although I did look around a bit.

Notebooks and pen cleaning paper from Kingdom Note. I’ll review them some day.

Then I met Andy at Sizzler and proceeded to stuff myself for the second day in a row. (I skipped breakfast today, which I do not recommend on a hot Tokyo day.) Sizzler’s attraction is an all-you-can-eat salad bar that comes complete with pasta, soup, tacos and nachos. It has has a full desert bar with chocolate and vanilla soft serve ice cream, apple crisp and bread pudding (minus whisky sauce, though). For a little more they’ll bring you a couple Sliders. For Tokyo, it’s a surprisingly good deal.

It was fun to see Andy, who I haven’t seen in a couple years. We had a long chat and it ended with him taking a couple photos of nearby buildings. Luckily, after we finished the meal, I was too full to go to Yodobashi Camera and look around. Instead I went home and prevented a possible worse from of gluttony.