OK, we’ve had enough pictures of cute kids around here for a while. I know you all really come here for closeups of rusty bolts.
Not exactly beautiful, but it had a high haeccity quotient that I enjoy. And, since I endured the looks of all the Japanese people waiting for the same train wondering what the hell the big gaijin was taking a picture of, I feel justified in posting it here.
This is a photo of Genbo (and my old home-stay sister) taken on a cell-phone. He was 10 months old then, and perhaps the reason he looks so angelic is that the photo was taken in a church. With all the thousands of photos I have of Genbo taken with the best cameras and lenses, this one is perhaps my favorite.
He was angelic then, is devilish and just as lovable now at four, and someday he’ll settle into just plain old human….
So the Olympics are over. I am definitely not a big sports watcher, but the Olympics generally make for good background viewing when doing dishes, etc. A couple observations:
- The Russian track and field women are hot! Apparently Anna Kournikova and Maria Sharapova are only the tip of the Slavic athletic beauty iceberg. Who knew? Pity about the whole Georgia thing.
- Synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics are abominations before man and god, the public or private practice of which should be punishable by law.
- Call me a cosmopolitan liberal elitist, but people who get all hot and bothered about whether someone wins a sport merely because the athlete hails from the same country as themselves deserve to be classified taxonomically somewhere under the baboon.
Zoe thought being stethoscoped was the funnest thing ever.
We’re up at Maki’s parents’ house in the country for o-bon, which is almost the Japanese equivalent of Thanksgiving. People make a point of going back to the ancestral seat to spend time with family, only for o-bon it’s because that’s when the dead relatives come back to visit too, and you gotta be there to say ‘hi’ or else when you’re dead no one’s gonna bother to wash your grave and light the incense every year, and guess how sorry you’ll be then.
Other than that, it’s exactly like Thanksgiving.
I made a point of packing my camera bag chock full of a bunch of stuff I wanted to use, but of course forgot to actually bring it to the car. Hence I’m stuck with my iPhone. (I used the word “cell phone” in a conversation with Genbo the other day, and he wanted me to explain what that was. When I got done, he said, “You mean iiiiii-Phone?”
The neighborhood priest comes to say a few prayers for various and sundry dead family members. Zoe isn’t quite so impressed with the gravity of the occasion, but no one seems to think she’s disturbing things.
Genbo has spent an awful lot of time in the water this summer. He’s shaping up to be quite a water-lover. First it was the vinyl pool on our balcony (which I’ll post pictures of later), then it escalated to the condo fountain (pictured below), and finally to the neighborhood community pool near us (again, pictures to come). He won’t even come out of the bath, he loves splashing and playing around in it so much.
Zoe, too, in just the past few weeks, has undergone a veritable phase change from a passive blob of baby-dom to an active toddler who feels quite at home playing with her brother and his friends (regardless of whether they might want her to).
Here are some shots of Genbo playing with Nao, his best friend in the building, while Zoe gamely participates.
They are building a new condo in the lot behind ours. The developers lied to everyone in our building, of course, saying that it would be a retail space of only a few storeys, but it’s a condo just as tall as ours (15 storeys). They just didn’t lie on paper, and the wheels of Japanese justice turn excruciatingly slowly, so it’s not worth it trying to do anything about it.
Pictures of Genbo in the same fountain last year are here.
Today we celebrated Genbo’s birthday. It was actually yesterday, but his mom couldn’t make it home until late, so the cake was today. Yesterday he did get his presents, all of which involved either trains (trains, and more trains), bulldozers, dinosaurs, or pandas. You gotta love having a four year old son…
We tried to explain the concept of making a wish, but soon gave up.
Zoe had a good time, too.
Really the only thing I like about summer more than any other season is the clouds. Summer brings magnificent clouds just about anywhere. Since I was already taking photos from my balcony for the previous post, I had my camera handy to take these at sunset today.
Ever since we moved into our “mansion” (as they call condos in Japan) they have been repairing one of the main buildings of Mii-dera, a major temple nearby. We could see the big steel superstructure they built to protect it during restoration, and now it’s in the process of coming off. I’ve been wondering how much of the temple we were going to be able to see from our balcony, and unfortunately it’s not as much as I’d hoped…
This past Friday was a huge fireworks festival held every year on the lake we can see from our balcony. As with last year we invited a bunch of people, only this time I decided to check out my cooking prowess by making everything by hand instead of buying stuff at Cosco. Of course, we ended up with way too much food. I invited about 20, cooked for 30, and 12 came. And, some people brought their own dishes as well. Still, somehow everything got eaten, but only because I wasn’t above making people go home with souvenirs of about a quart of pasta sauce.
I also cooked enough potato salad (recipe taught me by my Japanese mother-in-law) for an entire army regiment, but I didn’t bother shooting that.
If you’ve read through this post in the hopes of seeing pretty pictures of fireworks, I’m sorry to disappoint. Right at the end of an entire day of cooking I grabbed a steel pot lid, having forgotten that it had been in the oven for the past hour. And, I didn’t just graze the thing, I grabbed it hard to pick it up. I think Genbo learned about five new words in the ensuing pain-induced swear-fest. So, I had one hand permanently encased in ice for the remainder of the night, and wasn’t able to take pictures. I refer you to last year’s post instead.
