Skip to main content

Awoken By a Ghost

Mama's onigiris in the park are the best. Seaweed-wrapped and filled with salmon.



A ghost woke me up this morning. Turns out it was just Kenzo with a blanket over him. He was very pleased with the fact that my reaction was actually genuine surprise.

When I made my way downstairs the boys had already gotten their soccer uniforms on and eaten pancakes. I got them set up with their toothbrushes and did face washing and thermos filling and final departure check.


Kenzo and Osamu love soccer Saturday. I know part of why they love it is because the coaches are great. Osamu especially loves Coach Ono. He's such a good guy, and always humors the kids when they ask him to kick the ball so it bounces off the roof of the dome. He might be a show-off, but he's forgiven. He just likes playing soccer and teaching kids to play. Coach Hama is a super big guy that commands a serious presence. The main dude, Coach Ike, told me today that Osamu seems to be showing serious improvement. When I asked for details he said Osamu now seems to get that the ball should go into the goal. That made sense to me. The boys just love kicking the ball around without any sense of purpose. Which I'm not against.


Months ago I marked on my calendar that the Rifu park playground remodel would be done on March 24th. So today after soccer we had to head over there.


The new playground did not disappoint.


The boys made a friend of course, so I chatted up the mom. She asked me the usual questions about where I'm from and the boys being half Japanese and how I teach the boys English. I ended up talking this poor woman's head off for nearly 45 minutes. She must've been so tired. I even went into how much plane tickets cost these days and she told me she's never been outside of Japan so I said hey Korea is so close and such a good place. She said she was nervous about overseas travel but that talking with me gave her courage.

Comments

Post a Comment

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 ...
1 comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Friends and Co-workers

Taking a random Wednesday off from work means Thursday is going to be extra busy, and today was that. I was in meetings for a little over five hours and just barely managed to reply to emails that needed attention and attend to tasks that require daily steps forward. I have it so good because the people I work with are my friends. We even talked about this today in a meeting about our team culture. We do a solid amount of professional development and core values driven discussions. Officially, I am the manager, so my position has a certain nuance. For example, I know I'm not part of conversations that team members have amongst each other. And that's fine. It's natural. I trust everyone, as I would trust any friend, that they all have the best interests of each other and our organization at heart. They never let me down. The first meeting of the day was a two hour book study session. My team is passionate about growth, so we choose a book regularly, make a schedule, and meet...
1 comment
Read more