Serving Each Other

Eri's mom texted me with a picture of a box of Valentine chocolates and said she'll give them to me the next time we meet.

After my lunchtime walk I was upstairs working at my desk and Eri came in and gave me a box of chocolates. I love Valentine's Day in Japan. I used to bust my hump in the 90s trying to find flowers and chocolates and get a dinner reservation at a reasonable place that wouldn't break me. Now I am married to a woman who has instructed me not to buy her flowers because cake is more to her liking and we sorta celebrate Valentine's Day every day by serving each other.

I opened some wine while getting the boys' dinner ready and it inspired me to prepare an extra special dessert for them. Usually they get one fruit. Bananas are a favorite. Tonight I filled their bowls with a powerful trifecta of blueberries, a strawberry, and a freshly sliced kiwi. With a squirt of honey on top.

Kenzo was home from kindergarten today. His class is shut for two days due to half the kids having either covid or just generally sick. Eri was tossing stuff in the trash when I came downstairs to make more coffee mid-morning. I spotted two fish sausages with an expiration date from last September. Those things last forever, so I told Eri to hang on to those because I'll chomp them up fast.

And I did. It's amazing what some chopped onions, olive oil, soy sauce, and salt and pepper can do. The boys were actually amazed by how good it smelled. I didn't give them any, though. If this ridiculous decision was going to negatively impact anyone gastronomically it should be just me.

Comments

Mr. Blue Sky

Man, I conked out so hard on the living room floor tonight. Right after bath time, before story time. I barely remember. Completely exhausted. Big adventure day. Another in a long series I hope the boys will remember when they’re older... our first IMAX movie, a downtown city outing, and some life lessons in the game center. We left the house at 9:15 a.m. and didn’t get back until nearly 6 p.m., totally spent but full of pizza and memories. The Wild Robot in IMAX was totally stunning. The scale, the colors, the sound. We could feel every gust of wind and rustle of leaves. I made sure we had prime seats, row G, right in the center. Two big buckets of popcorn too, which, according to Kenzo and Osamu, I absolutely should not be sharing. “You should get your own!” they kept saying. I think a little bit of popcorn thievery is well within my rights as the papa. After the movie, we headed through the cold and wind across to the game center on the other side of Sendai Station. Being...

Not About Baseball

I stayed up past my bedtime again last night. I almost made it. I watched a couple of episodes of Ted Lasso and came to a good stopping point where I was satisfied with myself for enjoying some quiet TV time with my favorite show and even though it was after midnight, I was confident I could still get a pretty good night's sleep. But no. For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to just lay on the living room carpet and put on a movie. I saw the first seven or eight minutes of Goodfellas and then I woke up when the end credits were rolling with Sid Vicious' is cover of My Way . I brush my teeth and I can see the light of day already shining in through the bathroom window. "It’s almost the longest day of the year," I told myself, to at least rationalize why I'm brushing my teeth and crawling into bed at this hour. I was trying to minimize the mental anguish I regularly put on myself for not just going to bed like I should. I told Eri that I was thinking a...

Sendai vs. Tokushima

Osamu said he had to go pee, and I make it a habit to believe him most of the time. Another habit I have is taking him to go pee, much of the time. When we came out of the restroom I decided it was time for a beer, so with Osamu holding my hand we waltzed over to the food concession and I was checking out the selection, and the prices. Seven hundred yen for a draft beer. I had a feeling. It was only 500 for a whiskey cocktail (whiskey with water on the rocks) but I wasn't about to be that much of a derelict this early with my four-year-old son in tow. The tickets were free, the seats aren't bad, might as well spend seven bucks on a beer. The problem was that the dude next to us with his little boy about the same age as Mumu-chan loudly and with braggadocio you don't often see in these parts ordered a Blue Hawaii snow cone for his kid. I heard this and panicked. Last weekend at Michinoku Park I got a Blue Hawaii snow cone for Osamu and he loved it. I looked down at my l...

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