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I’ve largely stopped wearing my mask outside of the train. I often carry it on my wrist so that it’s apparent I didn’t just leave the house without it. I’m sure someone has measured the number of people more precisely but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s about 25% without masks. I’d expect that number to increase as the temperature rises.
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We took Emma and John to the third of the three ice skating rinks in Tokyo on Saturday to see what their classes were like. The short version is not very good. The rink was larger than the one at Meiji-Jingu but not as large as the one we’ve been attending more regularly at Higashi-Fushimi. After talking about it with Eri, we’ve decided to switch to a class during that’s on during the week. To enable that, we’ve also decided to give up on encouraging John to skate. We’re not sure what physical activity to encourage John to do. At the moment it looks like either karate or swimming.
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While the rink was a disappointment, we did discover Asobig, an indoor playground almost immediately next door that opened to the public only a year or two ago. The kids of course were extremely eager to go and we paid the rather princely sum of ¥6,000 or so yen for the five of us and spent about an hour and a half inside.
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Another of Emma’s baby teeth fell out and I forgot to replace the tooth under her pillow with a coin from the ‘Tooth Fairy’ as I’ve been doing up til now. She woke me up concerned on Saturday morning that the Tooth Fairy had forgotten to come by. Half asleep, I tried to explain that because the tooth had fallen out so late in the evening, she’s been unable to come by on Friday night but would definitely visit on Sunday night. I fortunately did remember to put a coin down on Saturday so the crisis was resolved without further incident.
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Relatedly, why on Earth did I establish that the Tooth Fairy gives 500 yen a tooth? Did I forget kids have a whole mouth of these things?
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I’m too young to appreciate the music of Kenny Loggins but I am old enough to be a father who appreciates a great Dad joke.
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My favourite piece of writing I’ve read this year is this 2021 book review from Freddie deBoer where he mercilessly applies a critical gaze to Baby-Sitters Club Super Special #7 – Snowbound. I’ve been a subscriber to deBoer’s Substack since he launched it so I’m not sure how I missed this but it’s fantastic. Caustic writing is often fun to read but what really sets this apart is the obvious deep well of knowledge that deBoer has of the series as a whole. It’s long but I highly recommend it to anyone who has an even passing familiarity with the books.
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Somehow I made it three-and-a-half years without YouTube suggesting Pomplamoose’s mash-up of ‘Sweet Dreams’ and ‘Seven Nation Army’ (YouTube). That’ll also be my musical selection for the week (Apple Music).
