Skip to main content

That Sleeping Guy

Kenzo and Osamu’s cousin Yuzuki told her mom that she thinks it would be good to give that sleeping guy a blanket. Apparently she either forgot or never knew my name. It’s not her fault. We don’t see her that often.

Today is Eri’s dad’s birthday and also the first day of a five day weekend, so we headed up to her hometown to have a celebratory lunch.

We figured every place would be jammed with people so we did a magnificent sushi lunch at grandpa’s house.



With fresh corn as appetizers of course.



After getting very full and catching butterflies in grandpa's garden with the boys and just being sort of generally exhausted I retreated to the back room of the house and laid down on the tatami to take a break and ended up napping for an hour. 

It wasn’t until we got in the car to leave that I realized I missed birthday cake time.



Then it was off to baba's house, where we are staying the night.


Eri's mom lives in a very remote part of deep Miyagi Prefecture. There's a small park with tons of dandelions and bugs and even the occasional rare bird sighting. Today we saw a black cat and Osamu asked for his picture to be taken after getting upset that I wasn't pushing him high enough on the swing.




The boys settled in and played in grandma's living room while I went out to walk and grab a piece of the quiet countryside sunset.


I came across this old couple working in their garden and listening the baseball game on the radio.



When Kenzo was born and I stayed here for a couple of weeks I walked all over. This evening I found a new part of this little town. There's a walking path next to a creek with a gorgeous sunset view of Mt. Yakurai. Plus there's a public bathroom with a sign above the door that proclaims it is "everyone's toilet."


Then dinner.




The boys were fading out fast so Eri did their bath and they were conked by 8.

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 ...

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...

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...