Skip to main content

A Feast

Nine o'clock on Sunday morning and I'm strolling into my neighborhood association meeting, thermos of coffee in hand. When the chairman called me last week he said it would go until noon, so I figured I better bring supplies. I'm so glad I did. They provided hojicha, which is basically the same as chamomile tea except meant to be thirst quenching. Not great for boring meetings.

I knew this was going to stretch the limits of my focus and attention, and knowing the demographic of the attendees (the average age was probably around 76) there was zero chance there was gonna be coffee. I am also addicted to my Aeropress coffee maker. It makes a perfect cup of coffee. And every day is a new chance to improve upon it. So I showed up with a freshly pressed thermos of goodness and gave my full attention.

The meeting was over by 10. I still had coffee left.

Most likely due to the fact that they can't find anyone else to do it, I was pre-selected to be the vice-chair of the neighborhood association with some other duties attached. I was texting Eri the whole time and she was telling me to tell them to shove it. I'm paraphrasing of course, but that's basically what she meant.

As of next April I am the unqualified vice-chairperson of our neighborhood association who has already stated to the chairman that I will do my best to wiggle out of any major events and responsibilities.


Eri's sister and her husband and daughter came over for lunch and ended up staying until early evening. They even napped. Everybody did. I went for a walk.

And they brought food - bento boxes of a local delicacy, salmon rice with cod roe. Eri made pork and vegetable soup. It was a feast.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...