What Did I Just Say?

This is the top of the path leading down through the graveyard to Dounji Temple.

I walk through here at least three or four times a week. Today the air was perfect. Hot sun, cool breeze. The cicadas are starting to calm down. A little. Watching the seasons change through the lens of this particular location excites me. I look forward to my visits here. I also regularly come across snakes and get bit by gnats and mosquitos here. Apparently the temple was established in the year 1338. If you come visit me in July I'll take you there in the evening to see fireflies. If you visit at any other time I'll take you just to take you. We can go across the road and have fried chicken.

Eri took the bus and subway downtown this morning because she's enrolling in a web design course. I'm excited for her, but also nervous because the class is every weekday evening for four months. We're gonna have some family adventures for sure.

I showed Kenzo how to use his police pistol to pick off bad guys. We drew bank robber faces on paper cups and placed them around the living room. Then he loaded his suction darts and slowly crept in through the front hall. One by one he failed to shoot any perps.

We laughed and I reminded the boys that pointing guns, even toy guns, at people is a very bad thing to do.

Osamu instantly turned and shot a suction cup dart at me.

Comments

lookin tired/feelin good

I can't even read the clock right. Eri: "You're going to soccer, right? Aren't you a bit early?" Me: "Yeah! We usually leave at this time and get there right on time. We gotta go! Let's go guys!" Soccer club starts at 10 a.m. The boys know that when the long hand on the clock gets to the 8 (9:40) it's time to go to the bathroom and get our socks and shoes on and head down to the car. The big hand was on 8. The problem that Eri saw was the short hand. It was 8:40, not 9:40. I'm going nuts. Slowly . Rapidly. An hour later, after I slowly enjoyed my coffee and disposed of the last beetle (yes, all four beetles have now gone back to the earth) and cleaned his bug box to make room for new bug acquisitions and the boys chilled out on the sofa watching TV, we set off. While the boys played soccer I headed across the parking lot to grab them some juice boxes for a job well done. This is not standard procedure, but Kenzo made his comeback today after ...

Experiences I Will Never Know About

Eri and I were checking out one of Kenzo's school notebooks tonight. This page has so much going on, and I love all of it. It made me realize something that I can easily forget - he's a person. He has a life separate from mine, lives each day having experiences that I will never know about, and has thoughts and ideas that I can't nor should get in the way of. "Thank you for doing everything," she said. Eri walked with me this morning as I went around the neighborhood and delivered planter box maintenance information and schedules to various folks. We stopped at the first house and I rang the doorbell and handed the old lady the three-page information sheet I had made and copied and we exchanged greetings and then I realized this is going to take forever if I ring every single person’s doorbell and chit-chat with them. I’ve got 20+ more of these to hand out. So we started just sticking them in people's mailboxes and made better time. Most folks aren’t home an...

Certain Luxuries

I work from home. My office is in Osamu's future bedroom, though he doesn't know it yet. At some point a few years down the line he will probably start to yearn for his own space. For the time being he and Kenzo share the room next door and sleep in a bunk bed and have a grand time playing, roughhousing, and quarreling. As brothers are prone to do. I started the day with a two-hour meeting with an esteemed co-worker who is based in a city far away. He manages a team associated with mine, and I value our developing relationship. We're both in management positions where people depend on us, and for my part as a relatively new manager I respect and try as often as possible to seek out his advice and perspectives. We're very different, though. We dance around the topic, but it's pretty clear that one of our differences is that I embrace ambiguity and he does not. I think that it's okay if meetings don't end with a clear solution, as long as the relationship be...

This'll Just Take a Minute

Search This Blog