• Checkin to Starbucks

    Coffee and a pumpkin scone

  • The Week #322

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    • 🗡️ After a couple of years, but we finally got the master sword in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I think we've still got another month or so in the game. 
    • 📚 Always thinking how can we foster a love of reading, I don't know why it took me so long to realize I should embrace Leo's current boom and get books about that. Embracing the Zelda boom, I picked up an Ocarina of Time manga. And he's already finished it just 2 days. My next task will be to figure out how I can transition from comics to actual books.
    • 😋 We went to a friend's house for lunch and they made us some Sri Lankan roasted chicken and potatoes, it was soo good. I really need to visit Sri Lanka.
    • ☔️ While we were at our friend's house we got notice from the school that due to the expected level 5 rain school would be closed on Monday.  It rained a lot overnight, but not too much out of the ordinary. And on Monday itself. just light rain. I appreciate the caution, but also working while the boy is stuck indoors has its challenges.

  • The Week #321

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    • 🍫 As we're reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory before bed, I tried to see if Leo would watch the original and to my surprise, he watched all of it! He's a huge fan of the oompa loompas. As we're still reading the book, he's remembering the dialogue from the movie and repeating it.
    • 🍂 We had the first states of autumn in Kanto over the weekend with a low of 20 degrees. It felt fantastic and, despite me not drinking pumpkin spice lattes, I found myself wanting a pumpkin spice  latte. It's meant to cool down Friday this week, but I doubt it's for good.
    • 🏫 School is back in session. While it is nice to get back to routine, that routine also brings with it routine challenges. I know it's summer camp school vs regular school, so it's not fair comparison, buuut when he got home from school this summer he'd blurt out and tell us what he learned i.e. he was excited and having fun, while at his regular school even if you ask him what he learned he doesn't remember. Something must change.

  • The Week #320

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    • ⚽️ Ted Lasso is back on (🎉). I'm very glad it's been renewed and given he's coaching the women's team in Richmond, it opens an entire new storyline. The first 3 episodes have been fantastic.
    • 🍕 We had one of Leo's classmates and family over pizza and it was a success. It was nice to be able to talk with other foreign parents about school, raising families in Japan and the like. I also have a sudden unexplained urge to visit Sri Lanka. Maybe a good use for the miles I've been accumulating.
    • 🧽 The dishwasher broke. During the dry cycle it just made some beeps and started flashing. As it broke on the weekend I had to wait for the manufactuer to open so I could call to get someone to repair it. I was expecting to have to do all my dishes by hand for a week, but they were able to come out and fix it same day. There was a leak somewhere in it that had been going for a while, so replacing a part fixed it up. They're meant to last 10 years, so hopefully this repair gets it another 3 to actually reach the target lifespan.

      The repair man was fairly soft spoken. As we were finishing up, I got semi-nihongo jouzued, but it was in the context of when he saw my name and called he was nervous because...would he be able to communicate. And that I could communicate and communicate well, he was relieved. Recently he's been doing a lot of repairs for Chinese customers and that's been difficult.

      Yay for me, but also,  I can't help but wonder if experiences like his bubble up and is one of the drivers behind the surge with the far right in Japan and the increasingly strict requirements for permanent residency. (No idea where he stands on all of it, it wasn't a political conversation and just something he said in passing.)

  • 🔗 They're Made out of Meat

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    Rather than say something was/was not written by AI, should we instead say it was "made by meat 🍖". I kinda like it...
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