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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 between the parties has developed even a tiny bit. He thinks that unless a meeting has produced a clear, actionable result it was a waste of time.

From his standpoint, though, he's right. He's a businessman. I'm a former kindergarten teacher who is now in middle management for a medium-sized company navigating the treacherous waters of the current education market. I have certain luxuries, like being a foreigner who gets certain passes for things that a Japanese person would for sure be censured for.

After jumping from one meeting to the next all morning, I headed out for a walking lunch. That's where I walk and occasionally stop at Family Mart or Lawson for an on-the-go bite to eat. As I turned to lock the front door I noticed that Eri had changed out our wreath.

She is wonderful about accenting our lives with subtle cues about the seasons and all the other things we should be celebrating and not taking for granted. I saw this and was struck with a feeling of, "It's September! Autumn is about to start. Only a few more weeks of this and then we can start enjoying that."

The boys had mama's amazing omu-rice for dinner. Osamu requested a ketchup happy face and Kenzo asked for an angry face.

He was pretty busy replacing the batteries on his remote control car though.

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