A Matter of Course

After I tucked the boys into bed and headed downstairs the smell of the bread maker greeted me with yeasty goodness. Later on, for a midnight snack I sliced off a piece of the bread as it was starting to cool and spread some cream cheese on it and gobbled it up like those geese you always see at lakes.

A bread maker is one of those items I would never consider having. For Eri it was a matter of course. And our lives are better for it.

Auntie Grace came over to babysit the boys for a few hours, so Eri and I started our morning off with coffee and cake at Nakao Cafe. I rarely eat cake these days, but when you have a chance to eat some superb New York cheesecake you gotta take it.

Eri loves her shortcakes.

Then Eri had the great idea of heading to a hot spring bath not far from our house. The boys and I pass Sawaoto Onsen all the time when we go play and watch the bullet train in Rifu Town. We should've gone before. It was just right. Simple, relaxing, quiet.

Then Eri had another moment of inspiration. After getting done with the super Japanese activity of a public hot spring bath she decided we should go see The Colonel - KFC. We finished up our date chowing down on fried chicken and made it home just in time. The boys were walking up the hill with Auntie Grace as we drove up the street.

Apparently they had a pretty awesome time as well.

There's a guy down the road who owns a retro Lotus sports car and the boys got to play in it.

They love race cars and collect race car toys and have races in the house and it makes me so happy when they laugh and squeal with delight.

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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