-
We went to Disneyland on Sunday! It wasn’t really apropos anything—I suppose if you wanted to squint you could say it was for Emma’s birthday. Really I saw on the Friday news that the weather was meant to be unseasonably warm on Sunday, was surprised to discover there were tickets readily available for Sunday, quickly discussed it with Eri and then booked. I was also fortunate to find a car available for all of Sunday and we were all set. The weather was indeed good and the overall experience was fun. I say overall, though, because John had a lot more difficulty handling some of the rides than I anticipated (Star Tours, the Western River Railway, the Castle Carousel) and Rowan wanted to go everywhere I did. All of that meant that while I had imagined being able to go on some of the rides together with Emma and John (like Star Tours), instead, I ended up mostly babysitting John and Rowan while Eri and Emma went on things. Still, it’s Disneyland. I do think this might be the last time we go as a family; at least until John and Rowan are a bit older.
-
It was an action-packed weekend all round because on Saturday, we took the kids to Tokyo Station after Emma’s Yoyogi Chapters class (John’s class wasn’t on). Rowan’s still deeply fascinated by trains so this meant that all up we rode on the Seibu Ikebukuro Line, the Yamanote Line, the Sobu Line and the Chuo Line. On top of that, we went up to the garden on the roof of the Kitte Building and saw a number of shinkansen pulling in and out.
-
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’d bought an iPad (8th Generation) for Emma and John so that the iPad Mini they use could be handed down to Rowan. I particularly called out being concerned about the 32GB capacity. I was right to be. It felt like every day I needed to offload an app so that Emma could install something, or John had more space or I could upgrade the system. And then on top of that, the iPad didn’t run as smoothly as the iPad Mini does (maybe a result of needing to push around a larger number of pixels on the screen?). Despite being just outside the two-week return period, a very kind person on the English Apple support line allowed me to initiate a refund. With that done, I then bought a new (!) iPad (9th Generation), this time with 64GB of storage. This model cost ¥49,800, a significant increase over the ¥38,800 price of the refurbished model I returned. You win again, Apple, I guess.
-
Jon Stewart returned to the Daily Show. The New York Times has a good write-up.
-
I’ve mostly kept up the 45 minutes of Japanese study a day but I’m not doing much more than catching up on my flashcard vocabulary. Hopefully as the cards move through the SRS algorithm, I’ll have less to review and more time to spend doing study that feels more productive.
-
Generally speaking, I find music analysis YouTuber Charles Cornell’s high energy personality a little too high energy for my liking. But as someone who has always been curious about why the producers of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies went away from Klaus Badelt when he (apparently) wrote the iconic score for the first soundtrack, I forgave the all-caps ‘INSANE’ in this video’s title exploring that story.
-
The ‘He’s a Pirate’ piece is what’s being analysed in the above video but I’ve always preferred ‘One Last Shot’ (Apple Music).
