• 🏃‍♂️ I ran 51 times this year  – which puts me more than halfway towards my goal. My 51st run was on Ocean Day. Initially I wasn't quite feeling it, but decided to let fate take me where she pleases by means of  traffic signals. I went into a neighborhood I've never been into, found a cool forest, and before I knew it, I ran 6km and a bit. Running is easiest when you're just looking around at the world, taking it all in.
• 🚲 While Facetim-ing with my dad about our upcoming trip, Leo suddenly put on his helmet and said "come on Dad, let's ride bikes while we still can!". I like the gusto, but the timing could have been better. We rode over to Ito Yokado. This time we went a different route this way that has us, except for the crossing the big road, entirely on neighborhood back streets. This route feels much safer.
  
  While there I played a crane game with Leo and scored a rhinoceros beetle keychain. Leo's first idea for how to use it was to wait for mom to fall asleep and put it near her. As amusing as that might have been, I shut that idea down.
• 🧼 I've been starting work a bit "later" than usual, 9am (like I used to before Leo started primary school). So why the bar of soap? I remembered I have a power washer and have been power washing the balcony as long as the battery lasts,  15 - 20 minutes. The balconies are clean as can be...and I need to find my next target.
• 🎂 We celebrated my father-in-law and sister-in-law's birthdays with sushi. Leo wrote a card for Jiji that said, "Jiji, thank you for always toasting my bread. Congratulations!". :chef-kiss: of a message. It was a treat watching him think and write the message out.
• 📺 I had a rare free Sunday morning and used a few hours of it to binge watch the rest of Bear season 1. Really good show. You should watch it.

Thank you for joining me on this journey. A journey full of many discoveries... and many regrets. I now own enough sunscreen to protect a small village. Than...

1. Tagged with
2. video
3. skincare

• 🍣 There was a time when all sushi didn't rotate and rotating sushi was different. But times change and now most sushi in Japan is of the rotating variety and sushi that doesn't rotate is different.
  
  Which is a very roundabout way of saying we went to our local kaiten-zushi place. I enjoy sushi but it's never something I crave. If I get sushi, it's usually at a local sit down place.  I can literally count the number of times I've been to kaiten-zushi on one hand: once in uni on exchange at Tokyo station, once with my brother (while also on exchange) around harajuku...and this time.
  
  This was Leo's first time, a late bloomer amongst our peers, as they all seem to visit conveyor belt sushis on a semi-regular basis. These days though, there isn't a chef making sushi with a conveyor belt shuttling sushi around them and you pick from what's there. Rather there's an iPad that you can order from and a bullet train carrying the sushi is sent on a track that stops at your table. There's even 3 decks so multiple orders can go out at once. It's probably more efficient and safer food safety wise (how'd they monitor the temp of that raw fish rotating about?), but also another tablet (whose camera is always on...). On the plus side, they now offer fried things as well, so if the sushi didn't work out for the little ones (it didn't), there was plenty of fallback.
  
  Unrelated, but if you're interested in the history of conveyor belt sushi, I recommend this episode of Begin Japanology.
• 🏊‍♂️ We changed Leo's swim class to the weekend. While initially it seemed like he could ride the bus on Friday with his friends and we could have at least one-day a week without something on the schedule, turns out not to be the case for now. The class was too big for him.
  
  The practice this time was how to swim with your clothes on (water safety). Odds are you're not going to fall into water in a full swimsuit, so you should learn what it's like to be in water in clothes so you don't panic. If you did in a full swimsuit, it's probably on purpose and called "swimming". They also learned how to use a plastic bottle as a flotation device.
  
  The point of all this, while Leo was busy learning how not to panic when he falls into the water, I was out busy shopping at the drug store nearby and found this: Legend of Zelda™: Tears of the Kingdom™ Boss™ canned coffee (not ™). I almost bought it, but then I remembered, I don't drink canned coffee.
  

  

• 🥵 You may have heard, but the climate is changing. Things are getting hotter. Weather isn't climate yadda yadda yadda, but it's been 36 degrees with 60%+ humidity for the past few days here in Yokohama and it's the pits and I need a moan. You have to get out before the sun rises (which rises at 4:30am) if you want to do anything. And even then it's 25 degrees with 90% humidity. Summer, I'm so over you. I need to introduce more latitude and altitude into my life.
• 🏃‍♂️ This week I beat the number of runs I ran last year and we're only a bit over midway through this year. This puts me almost 50% of the way towards my yearly goal. If all goes well I'll be able to report being 50% next week Still, I'll need to keep up the pace of runs to hit my goal comfortably, but well on my way.
• 📺 I started watching The Bear and I'm really enjoying it. It has an appropriate number of f-bombs for being a show about working in the kitchen. ( I've got a thing for chef / kitchen shows. I enjoy cooking, but being a chef/kitchens seem  so similar to building product and programming (in my mind). For both cooking and programming, quality isn't an accident (2016)).