Birthdays

It’s been a while since my last update. Sorry about that.

One reason is that I finished the first draft of my first novel on Thursday. More about that at a later date: watch this space!

The main reason, however, is that after finishing the novel I was extremely tired, which is doubly unsurprising. Writing is tiring, six month old babies are tiring, and I have both. However, we did have a good Easter weekend.

Easter is not celebrated in Japan. Yuriko did a web search for decorations and the like, and found that a few egg distributors and chocolate companies are trying to promote it, but it hasn’t caught on yet. That doesn’t mean that it won’t, but for now there are no chocolate eggs on sale in Japan, at least outside the main international market near Roppongi. So we made our own. Well, Yuriko made them. Silver brought us some egg moulds when she came over in October, and Yuriko melted Dars bitter chocolate to fill them. That was a success, and she wrapped the eggs in silver foil, with shiny stickers for decoration. They looked pretty good, in the end. And they tasted good, but then, they were solid chocolate. (Actually, I don’t need to use the past tense; we still have a couple left.)

The other celebration was a joint six-month birthday party for Mayuki and our friends’ daughter. This is the English-Japanese couple who live about twenty minutes’ walk away and had a daughter within a week of Mayuki’s birth. Yuriko sees a lot of the mother (the Japanese one), but I don’t see quite so much of them; something to do with having to work. Fortunately, Sunday is a day off for everyone, so we got together for a joint first birthday party. If you add their ages together, they are one, after all.

The mothers prepared dinner, which was English style, while the fathers took the babies to the park; Shinrin Kouen, in this case. The weather was really nice, so we sat on the grass for a while and chatted about life in Japan, while trying to stop his daughter eating Mayuki. Then we went to their flat, and had the dinner, with birthday cake, “Happy Birthday” songs, and lots of photographs and video.

I’m planning to take things a little easier than normal this week, since I have no looming deadlines and I need to get over finishing the novel. That might just mean slightly more frequent blog entries, if you’re really lucky.


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