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Emma started primary school. I was a little sad that we couldn’t all go to the opening ceremony but Eri showed me the video she took and I imagine I would have had to wait outside with Rowan even if we had all gone.
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Speaking of which, the screaming phase continues. I mentioned last week that I couldn’t remember if Emma and John did this but I realised after publishing that I used to leave the house to go to work and so missed whatever screaming Eri had to deal with for most of the day.
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Parent-Teacher Associations are critical components of Japanese schooling and until now Eri’s handled that. But after discovering that Emma’s school uses BAND, I thought I’d sign up and try to be more involved. As the styling reveals, BAND is run by Naver, the same company that runs LINE, the ubiquitous messaging service that’s the equivalent in Japan of WhatsApp.
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Scrolling through the list of members of the group, I noticed a father with a foreign name. I’m not especially proud of myself but of course I looked him up and eventually found a 2000s-era website that the guy apparently ran during his early 20s. Incredibly it’s still online and I found myself reading the blog entries for his time as a Coordinator for International Relations (Wikipedia) in Niigata Prefecture. It’ll be a bit weird now if I ever meet him because I’ll have all this personal knowledge that I can’t reveal without looking like a crazy stalker.
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In moving news, it’s still slow going but we did make progress on the weekend and I now feel like we will get through the remaining boxes by the end of this month. We also got some deliveries that have made the apartment feel more like a home: a mat that we put in the kitchen to protect the flooring and another for the living room that reaches from the sofa to the television.
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Our new dining table also arrived. It’s a bit smaller than I expected after measuring it out but that has the virtue of preserving more space in the living room. This is important because we’ve reconfigured the ‘play room’ that we had intended for the kids to use to a ‘baby room’ that’s just for Rowan. To that end, Emma and John’s toys have been moved out into the living room which isn’t ideal but seems like the right compromise until Rowan is a bit older.
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Oh, and I finally bought the new printer I’d been eyeing, a Canon Satera MF232w (which I think is a Canon ImageCLASS MF232W outside Japan). It’s a monochromatic laser printer that can also scan/copy documents. I’ve only used it a handful of times in the past week but it’s immediately reminded me why I love laser printers.
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I don’t recall what prompted this but I found myself wondering about the origin of the phrase ‘Get out of Dodge’. The answer is Gunsmoke.
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I watched a few more Defunctland videos but the one that’s really grabbed me is (of course) the 1-hour and 43-minute epic, ‘Disney’s FastPass: A Complicated History. It begins by rashly asserting that the topic of the video, queuing, is not of much interest to anyone. I and apparently 10 million other people (?!) feel otherwise.
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If I’m being honest, sometimes I end these posts with a link to a song, album or playlist that I hope will burnish my indie street cred. Sometimes, though, I share a playlist of easy listening music that was released during the 1940s to 1960s (Apple Music).
