lost

Today was a good one. Beautiful, sunny day as my sun-burnt arms can attest.  I started off by trying to get a picture of the boy in his most embarrassing outfit to date: My plan was to get a shot for blackmail purposes  later in life but couldn’t really get the perfect shot that would instill fear into him with simply the mention of it… Might have to try again another day.

After he was (graciously) changed out of this penguin? attire we took a little walk to the park and then the wife and boy headed into Ikebukuro for lunch with ママ and the gang. I stayed home because I couldn’t pass up the chance at a free day at home!  I changed my clothes and hopped on my bike and headed to the place they keep all the lost/stolen bikes down by the river.  The sign said it didn’t open until 1 and it was about 11:30 so I thought I’d head out on a ride to kill some time.  I’d planned to do some riding around and look for the wife’s bike but I ended up heading off along the river away from the house for a bit.  Now I have always had a pretty good sense of direction but somehow, I got more lost than I think I’ve ever been in my life on this ride.  I didn’t get wildly far away from where I wanted to be, just in a place entirely different than where I thought I was.  I didn’t really have an objective in mind when I set out, just thought I’d head out for about 30 mins and then come back about 30 mins and then sit down by the river for about 30 mins before the bike lot opened.  It seems that when I reached a dead-end along the  local river I headed back and somewhere took a wrong turn finally happening upon a road parallel the river.  Turns out it was a different river.  I followed it for a good long while and then finally climbed up a hill to the bank of it to get a better look.  I had no idea where I was but I figured I’d just gone a lot further upriver than I’d ever been.  Wrong.  I was really really upriver (however in the opposite direction from where I thought) on the Arakawa, not the Kuromegawa.  I headed back along a very nice bike path but just never seemed to find any landmark that I recognized at all… Finally I took out the phone and checked Google Maps to get my bearings and realized my mistake.  But, I was at least heading in the right direction, just a different one than I’d thought. After I set my course it only took about 15 minutes to get back to the bike parking lot at just about 1 o’clock to check on the wife’s bike (no luck, said to come back next month). I’d been out for about an hour and a half with a couple of short breaks for water or to watch some dudes testing their drag racing scooters and what not.  I went a bit over 20 km and had an average speed of about 24 km/h.  It was a great ride.  Here’s the map: I ended up crossing through 3 different cities and traveled along 3 different rivers.  Hope I’ll have a chance to get out and actually head upstream of Kuromegawa sometime like I thought I’d done today. I thought about taking the camera with me but I’m kinda glad I didn’t. Some cool stuff but it’ll be fun going back and trying to find it again some other time too.

After I got back home I hung out at the house, laid on the couch for a bit, ate some 冷やし中華 and a cup of coffee and then I headed out to meet the wife and boy when they returned from lunch and then we went grocery shopping. I was finally able to get a picture of MJ’s rad ショッカー t-shirt ( that his dad bought for him for 500円 and talked about in this post) with his ever-present tongue sticking out:

So finally for dinner I finally got my chance (the wife’d monopolized the meatball market the last two times) to get my hands on some meatballs and make some (hot dog bun-ed) meatball subs! Woulda been better with different bread… but still they were pretty tasty but the best thing were the cheese-stuffed peppers I baked for a salad topping, those were badass!

Hopefully we’ll get some good news about the wife’s bike when I go to check the lot next month.  Might be doing some baby clothes shopping on my next day off but if not maybe I’ll finally head over to Saitama city to get my US driver’s license translated at JFA (wish they’d just let me do it myself, they can trust me!).  Heck, maybe if I wake up early enough we can do both.

Back to work tomorrow with my glowing red arms, good day.

finally, my parade wasn’t rained on

Off the top I’ll say that today has been a horrible, sad day (in case the wife reads this because when I got up, the wife and baby were gone.  I’d planned to go to the Frontale game with Melvis today but he bailed to go to the beach… hmmm… oh well.  The wife went to her folks’ house by herself to discuss our possible plan to tear down their house and build a new mega-structure in its place because I was gonna be at the game.  It’s actually about 20 mins till kick-off so I could still go but the wife is now on her way home and I just got an e-mail that she’s at 戸越銀座 station so I gotta head out to meet her and the kid at our station for some dinner grocery shopping so I’ll finish this up when I get back/have time tonight… by the way, today was a very good day (except the wife and baby being gone part).

Back.  But might get pulled away as ママ’s here and MJ’s pretty close to bed-time.  They are practicing drinking (and giving) milk because the wife’s gonna be out of the house for several hours at the end of this week for some school thing… we’ll see how that goes…

So today, I woke up at sometime after 1, which was great and was finally able to get a little bike ride in, really little, just up to the next station and back to pick up a scythe for my afternoon plan coming up.  I was finally able to get some glamor shots of the bike since it finally wasn’t raining and I didn’t just take a ride at night. None of the shots turned out exactly how I wanted them to, mostly because I wanted to get really low shots down from the ground but the street was ON FIRE!!  So, here it is finally, バイクん3000!As dude? commented to me, looks like I’m a big Giants fan, which I’m not, but I still love this bike.  Think I might eventually paint the frame white so it’s just white and orange but that time has yet to come.  In case you don’t remember, this was my previous bike and where the new bike’s name comes from. After I got home I got started on the garden. The garden this year has been pretty fruitless but here’s one picture of a tomato that we picked the other day and MJ was in love with, there’s a whole series of pictures of him chasing it around the table and trying to eat itThe garden had been getting a bit wild but while we were in the US it went into full wilderness mode and this is what I walked into today:So I spent a good hour and a half to two hours chopping things down, trimming things up and then throwing it all into garbage bags. I spent most of the time in the garden listening to these guys and these guys.  When I was finally done I was drenched in a stupid amount of sweat but the sweat of my brow produced great results:Not perfect but a shit-tonne better.  It became tough at the end to find handfuls of stuff to whack (ha) because it had all been fairly trampled down but I’m pretty happy with it.  Look how much my grass has come in too!  Compare this. Pretty much the rest of the day I listened to some more music, a couple more podcasts a watched some more videos while I cleaned up the house.  I also tried to baby-proof a few things around the living room but I’m sure it’s not enough.  And that was my day, still fairly early and the wife and I are gonna watch シルシルサンデー now and I’m gonna drink a chu-hi or beer or two.  today was a good day, rock on!