Several days ago, I showed foreign visitors a wrong way to a restaurant, of course by my mistake. I suddenly realized the fact this morning when I was walking through the cross near there. I should be more careful and check the map at the time. I hope they could get there by themselves somehow.

I found a mind-boggling mascot character today. It's a costumed mascot character for the northern territories issuer between Russia. I'm sometimes confused with the mentality of Japanese bureaucrats. What makes them think that such a mascot character helps to solve the conflict with the neighboring country? However, at the same time, I think that such an approach must be far better than like equipping an army, even though it would never lead any direct short term results.

In the morning, when I went out from my house, the air was dry and rather chill. And now the full moon is so big that I can see the shadow of buildings. At last the bothering humid summer is fading!

I heard today that energy drinks may cause a liver function disorder. I don't think it's too serious to immediately stop drinking them, but feel a little bit disgust about that rumor.

It's the disaster drill season in Japan, since the great earthquake struck the Kanto region over 90 years ago on September 1st. We also joined one with our neighbors today. I mistakenly tried to turn the fixed-doorknob of the emergency exit. To be honest, I didn't know how to open the door. So, at least for me, today's disaster drill was exactly what a drill should be.

Last Sunday I bought a Nintendo Wii U for my son as he had wanted to play Mario Cart 8. From then on, he plays it every night a little before going to the bed. Now he's enjoying playing it next to me while I'm writing this. In childhood, I didn't have any video games and always wanted to possess one, though my parent had never gotten me anything related to computer technologies. I sometimes think that if I had one, I could have been more aware of my interest toward computers earlier.

There was a task I had been reluctant to even make a start. I didn't get round to it, not because of time constraints, but by the mental pressure. Oddly enough, I feel that the pressure was really silly now after taking the first step. I hope I can give up such a timid manner at all.

I attended a technical event all the day. It's on a programming language I used to use. Lisp. Some programming languages have a lot of gravity to attracts engineers than others, and members of the Lisp family are doubtlessly so.

The week has been over at last. It was hard especially because I didn't have time to rest myself the lase weekend. It's also the last day of my son's long summer holiday, except coming weekend. I think we are going to work hard to finish his homework in coming two days.

I bought a new smart phone in Taipei. In Taiwan, you can easily get a SIM-free cell phone at any store. I think it's the way it should be. I want to choose my favorite device from all the available alternatives, rather than from few models some telecom company officially support, even though it's a little bit troublesome to install a third-party SIM into an arbitrary device.

So I came back from Taiwan day before yesterday.

It was my eighth visit there, and was the first visit with our daughter. Bringing a baby to a foreign country is hard and challenging. But actually, there are a lot of fun too. Indeed, everyone made a fuss of our baby and we could enjoy communication with the local people which we wouldn't experience without her. In addition to that, there's often a priority service for people carrying infants. If you prepare well for taking great care of the baby, the joy of traveling with baby certainly exceeds the worry and concern about that.

So, I will be on board within twelve hours. This time I'll go to Taipei with my family.

I woke up four in the morning and cut some discs out of a cardboard for my son's handicraft. Japanese elementary schools give children a bunch of homework during the summer vacation and one of the formidable task is the handicraft and/or study. My son is tackling with a mechanism of gear wheels, so I'm also dedicating some of my time to the aid of it. I think he's really good at exploring some new idea and knowledge, but is a little bit easy to drift his mind when things don't go well. I want him to acquire persistence which I think I couldn't learnt well.

I finally wrote a document which I had to do earlier. Some decisions were required to finish that, but I had been reluctant to make up my mind. The document might lead another decision and I think I was afraid of such a chain of hard decisions. Anyway, I've already taken the last step. All I can do now is preparing for the coming decisions.

In Portland, I drank a lot of IPA, Indian Pale Ale. I drank so much that I finally fed up with their strong flavor of hops.

However, once I came back to Tokyo, soon I've been eager for that. Today I found an IPA at the liquor shop near my house and enjoyed it at dinner. It's less hoppy than those in Portland but was good enough for the family dinner on Sunday.

Today, my son played a video game for the first time in his life. These days he was often watching YouTube videos of somebody playing some video games, and became interested in playing them himself. I don't know why he stated to watch those programs in the first place, but anyway, I promised him that the next time we were going to his grandma's home I would let him play Super Mario with NDS. So he enjoyed it today.

I bought a comic series in ebook form several weeks ago, just after I heard that the title was accused of copyright infringement. I wanted to see what would happen if I posses the ebook version of the title when it's withdrawn from the market. Soon the publisher has actually withdrawn all the paper books from the stores all around the country. They also make the ebook re-seller stop distributing its data. Although I suspected that the data I purchased but hadn't downloaded would become unavailable, I can still get it from the re-seller's cloud server today. Feeling a little bit disappointed at the anticlimax result, I still think that the ordinal thing -- to be able to keep making use of my own purchased book -- is quite vulnerable for now. The future of the ebook market may depend on such an ordinary thing.

The center of Tokyo is almost empty because of Obon. Funnily enough, the commuter train going back to home was crowded with recreational people and messier than usual. A worse problem was that a lot of restaurants in the business districts were closed. I went to a familiar Okinawa food restaurant near the office for lunch. Luckily it was open, but with far few menu selections than usual.

It's harder, of course, to restart something than to start. I've had a bunch of work to do after came back to Tokyo from TUG 2014 the last week. More to the point, I think I'd burnt my energy out there. Anyway, I really enjoyed the days in Portland, where the meeting held, and in Seattle to which I made a side trip after the fascinating conference.

One of the reasons I went to Seattle was to visit the first Starbucks in Pike Place Market. I adore their coffee though, what made me want to go to the original shop was the founder's book "ONWARD". I was touched by the atmosphere of the market, and realised that it's the market that had energized the local coffee shop and brought it up to the global brand.

By the way, I didn't know they ask a customer their name and put it down on the plastic cup. I knew that they wouldn't recognize my name just by ear, but I tried to see what would happen. The string the barista wrote on my cup was "Kho", instead of my actual name "Keiichiro". The next day, once again I tried to tell my name at the other Starbucks, and I had a coffee cup with exactly the same string "Kho" on it! I may as well call myself Kho from now on.

Of course I won't!

I spent most of the daytime within the office, again today. It's hard to concentrate on the daily job before visiting a foreign country, especially when I haven't yet finished the preparation for the trip.

It was hard to leave home this morning because my son's summer vacation started from today. Although he also went to the school, all he was going to do in there were reading books in the air-conditioned library, swimming in the cool water pool, and playing with his friends. On the other hand, I had to attend a meeting, which made my stomach sour. This week I must be half-minded to most of my daily jobs, until I finally come through the presentation at Portland next week.

I think I somehow managed to finish my first draft of the presentation for TUG 2014, thanks to my wife for bringing our son and daughter outside during these two days. This time I'm going to use reveal.js for my presentation, instead of Beamer. I could convert the HTML5 slides to Beamer (and to PDF), whenever I need it.

We went to the violin shop to buy our son's third violin. He finally got the one with 1/4 size. For me who cannot play any string instruments, it's almost magic he managed to play the new one even though he had never used that bigger size one. We then popped in the book store near there. I felt that it'd been ages since we last spent such a typical holiday together.

After dinner, we watched the fireworks show being held in sight of our house. There was shower at that time though, I think it ended up washing out dust in the air and made the fireworks rather brilliant.

For these days, in the office, it always takes me a lot of time before getting down to it. I know it has nothing to do with people who I've been working with on the same projects, but to do with someone whose productivity I doubt about. At least, they should not threaten my scarce motivation towards the stupid busy-work.

I started reading "Speed of Dark" by Elizabeth Moon. It's a really fascinating narrative and I was literally forgetting the time while reading its first quarter. Funnily enough, the way the protagonist thinks when he speaks with others reminds me of my own mind-boggling feelings at speaking in English. Learning foreign languages might as well be a kind of challenge as hard as people with autism speaking in their native tongue. Indeed, I'm always frustrating not to be able to put my thought well in English. Lack of fluency makes me upset. Unlike autism, of course, my problem could be improved through sheer effort. That's a big difference. Nevertheless, for instance, when I read his baffling emotion against English idioms like "You can say that again", I cannot help but yelling "You can say that again!" too.

I heard that Starbucks's cool lime refresher will be available from the day after tomorrow! I've missed it for a year.

The typhoon passed away during the midnight and it was so hot when I went to the noodle shop for lunch. A bowl of hot noodle was enough for me to recharge and I could concentrate on coding in the afternoon. Now I think I can convert a variety of source data for books into the epub format with less manual work!

These days I often eat Okinawa food at lunch, because I found a nice restaurant near the office. They offer daily special of the week and I've already tasted most of them. Today I could eat the one which I'd missed the other day. There's only one I haven't yet tasted.

Before the dinner I went to the morning-glory festival at Iriya with my son. It's held on the street in Ueno and was super crowded with people visiting to buy a pot of morning-glory. My son got a nosebleed probably caused by those crowing people.

It's already past midnight though, I just came home from the office. I've been writing codes all the day and finally it's becoming usable stuff.

Tonight I went to the dentist directly from the office. No cavity, but for the monthly checkup. I usually went to the dentist with my family, and on the way home we enjoy eating dinner at the noodle shop across the street. But today I went alone because of the bad weather and the bad health of our daughter. I knew that my son was looking forward to eating ramen as always, so I called him and asked to come out after the dental care. Eating ramen just with him is pretty nice sometimes.

Finally I started to write a code to create EPUB myself. It's not too complicated but is bothered. I swear people who say that EPUB could be a master format for every books will regret. I'm still in doubt that HTML becomes a central format for every books. At least, it will take years and years finding the most efficient and sustainable way of creating books in digital media. Chances are that then books themselves are getting really old-fashioned and all the information are going to be spread through the Web. It's not a matter of me though. What concerns me now is arranging the stuff in one's mind in a tree form and representing it as a book form.

I'm looking around for the simplest way to transform a XML tree into EPUB. There are lots of tools claiming to accept quite a few input-formats. But most of them have less flexibility in defining user specified ways of transformations of the document tree. What I actually need is a programming language rather than a style sheet. So I've kept on trying to formulate the most straightforward way of transforming a given document tree into EPUB. I used to take advantage of Scheme with its representation of XML, which is called SXML. Now I prefer Haskell and its library HXT. Honestly, both are relatively less popular tools to tackle with XML data, but I think they are more powerful and sophisticated approach at least for programming-minded guys.

The number of entries I wrote during June was only fifteen! Shame on me, because nobody would call it diary if I was writing it every two days. But allow me to explain. Our kids have gotten a fever in turn, and we could hardly live a regular life for these days. They are gradually recovering though, we have been utterly fatigued.

The day before yesterday, when I was on the verge of getting off the train, a man fell down flat in front of me. I had been realising that he kept on whirling in the running train, and thought that he must be drunk. But I was probably wrong. After his falling down, I let him away from the leaving train, and took him to more secure place. He said he's ok so I left behind him, because that's what I would hope if I was in his situation. Now I doubt he possibly suffered a hemorrhagic stroke. I could do practically nothing though, I can't help being pensive thinking about my father who passed away from a hemorrhagic stroke.

The last Sunday I joined a workshop on CSS and type-settings. I gave the first presentation for the workshop, despite I'm not familiar with neither CSS nor type-settings. The only reason I decided to talk was that I would not prepare for the workshop if I wasn't driven to such a responsible situation. Fortunately, I managed to state my attitude toward the relatively new technological challenges, and could get a lot of stimuli from the audience in return. More to the point, drinking bear after the talk is really bliss.

The next day, that is yesterday, my son got a fever for the first time in the past year. He has stayed in his bed quietly, but he's still unwell and seems to lose his appetite. I hope he becomes well again the next morning.

I would make my living by programming but for the other users! I know it's my bad nature not to make an effort to create tools for others. I really look up to people who are writing computer programs that some other person will use.

There's no skill that one can achieve effortlessly. In other words, all skills need quite a few training and endurance to achieve. Without intense efforts, nothing would come out. As a professional editor for books on science and technology, I think I've been a kind of trained to be able to explain vague things logically. It's not a gifted talent or something like that, although I'm always consciously trying to cultivate that skill. Sadly enough, sometimes such a fiddle skill even seems to make others feel embarrassed, and they often show me a hostile attitude. I could pretend to be an inconsequential person. Having that said, no self-respecting man wouldn't achieve any professional skills.

Sometimes I cannot bear to write a diary. A lot of things actually happened these days, but I have no word to write down them. I could do with a change of scenery...

As far as I have been concerned, people would never acquire any kind of skill by just being instructed a procedure to do a job. Sometimes, procedures are even harmful against the people who have no motivation to get the stuff done. On the other hand, once people realise how significant their task is, and have enough motivation, it will be the chance to show them how to do that in the form of a concrete procedure. Mind you, they often try to find out the way to handle that themselves, and if it's the case like that, you should not make them just follow your procedure because that is your procedure to get your stuff done. On top of that, a procedure tend to become a mere facade and ritual. All in all, if the task can be achieved by just following some procedures, it would be far nice to write a program to do that. We need human resource in order not to follow any procedure but to make a sort of judgement according to the ever-changing context.

When I took a bath, I realised that we had run out of the soap. So I cried out, from the bathtub, for help to someone at the living room to bring me a new one. I expected that my wife would come to the bath, but it was my son. Although I was skeptical at first about whether he could find and hand me the new soup, I gave him a go. To my surprise, he was able to take a box of soap from the drawer without my instruction, and handed the new soup to me! His growth really makes me happy even when I'm dreadfully fatigued.

It turned out so nice in the morning that I went to the office by foot. Nevertheless, it started raining before noon again.

We visited the Yokohama harbor with my wife's mother. A year ago tomorrow my father-in-law died and we buried his ash in the sea. The harbor was the place where we sailed out the last year. The weather was not good though, we enjoyed one day trip to the port town.

Today, one of my friends came around, and we went to Jinbotyo to buy mountain gears. We are going to hike some mountains the next weekend, though the rainy season seemed to have started. He wanted to buy a new camera bag to carry around his new camera in the middle of climbing. Then we joined my family for dinner. It was a good day, but it would be better if it weren't raining all the day again.

It has continued to rain since yesterday. My feet got soaked to the skin on the way home.

The rainy season has come. Because of that, my daughter kept on crying until falling asleep.

I took a wrong path to home tonight. The way I was automatically walking was the one I used to commute by bicycle for over ten years. No doubt I subliminally wanted to avoid taking the crowded train.

It was certainly one of the most exhausted days for this ten years. Out of the blue, the company announced that the boss of our department was changed. I can do nothing but keep on creating books however the company politics gets complicated.

Finally, May has gone and June has come! The past month was too dreadfully bad to make my temper lose. I hope the coming days will be great and unwinding.

Today I bought a half dozen of doughnuts and brought them to my family, except our nine months daughter who cannot eat them yet. Doughnuts are nice whenever our family gets tired.

I changed the place of standing aboard the train this morning. It's like a hell all the same, but seems to be a better hell than before.

The room was so messy when I got home. The Lego bricks were scattered around here and there. My son had just started playing with them, and naturally I joined him. It was, I think, the first time in this year that we played together with Lego. Since this April he has had less time to play in home, we often enjoyed building our favorite jet fighters together though. Today I built a Swedish delta-wing fighter called Gripen. To my surprise, he figured out what I was making and put the name of it.

In the bathroom, I talked with my son about the congruency of triangles. He's only six years old and, of course, was not seemed to fully understand the most important part of Mathematics. That is, Math is all about explaining something as objective as possible. Some says that you'll never understand any part of Math until you can explain that, but if you ask me, it's the explanation itself that Mathematics is. I wish I had realised that at least twenty years ago...

This week I have been dedicating myself to do indexing a book; nothing to write in a diary. Today, however, I began to set up my new PC in the office. It has been actually provisioned several days ago, and today I finally ended up the surplus time to leave the carton unopened. Although I used to love to set up new PCs, it's nothing but a burden now.

I'd been going to piano lessons every week almost 20 years, but I failed to cultivate the skill of that. Nevertheless, I'm practicing to play piano every morning these days. It's been over ten years since I stopped playing it though, I feel now I can play it better than ever.

I had to scold my son again, and couldn't drink wine neither.

My wife and son went out shopping with her mother in the morning, so I spent in the house with my daughter. I meant to go for a walk with her, but could nothing but to read comics because she fell completely a sleep. Being able to buy digital comics online really saved my boredom.

In the afternoon, I bought an artichoke at the greengrocer. I'd never eaten that. However, I decided to try it as the clerk gave us a big discount. According to the clerk, it has grown in Yokosuka. He said domestically grown artichokes are very rare and we can seldom get them. I was looking forward to eating it with a glass, or glasses of wine, but I missed the chance. I had to tell off my son because he didn't stop a play when my wife told him that it was time to dinner. I don't like to drink with a bad feeling.

It was the first day my son got his violin lesson alone. I had been with him during the past lessons, listening to his play and the instruction from the teacher. It had been great fun for me though, I should start not to be patronising him. He should also learn to do his work himself.

Honestly, I'm not good at doing several things concurrently. At least I'd been thinking so. However, I found today that, if only I can see the goals of every tasks, I sometimes feel less stress in doing two or more things at the same time. Which reminds me, I also love to read several books in parallel.

It has been too hard days for me to write any wards here. In short, I've been almost sick for the weekend. Honestly, I love spending with my kids though, I seem not to be able to live with other children all the way just cavorting. On top of that, I cannot tolerate parents letting them such a rude. That's why I've got a nervous breakdown for these days.

There was sudden rain with thunder in the late afternoon. A short afternoon shower is a typical weather of Summer in Tokyo. My boss cynically talked that Spring has disappeared from Japan, but I'll never agree with him until the cedar pollen completely disappear.

The first day after the sequential holidays. I managed to work hard, although I've still had my head in the clouds.

Has my son gotten some jealous of his 8 months sister? I think not. Apparently, due to his new environment, he may be a little bit eager for affection these days.

We went to a concert which allowed even babies ages zero to come and enjoy. The artist played Hungarian ethnic danceable sounds. Although I and my son listened to the same artists playing for free two years ago, their performance still was so enthusiastic that we got a irritating complaint from a nervous guy sitting in front of us. I'm afraid he was a sort of wretch who cannot enjoy any music more than as a snobbish culture.

I started to try a programming language, Erlang. In fact, I've long known Erlang because I planned and edited the first book on it in Japan. I don't think I could then afford to use it enough to write an application, though. I've never used it much more than just trying sample programs in the book. Today I found myself somehow being able to mimic a sample program in another book on the language, and was really enjoying implementing my simple idea with it.

We visited a family friend and spent the day chatting together and watching DVDs. Then at night, I went to a concert today again. What I was looking forward to was John Adams' "China gates". It's originally a piano solo piece, but today it was performed with a disc jockey. In addition to that, they fluctuated the ambient illumination of the stage. I got intoxicated with the repetitive familiar sounds together with such a dozing effects, and dropped off to sleep for the rest of the show. Fortunately, the last half was made up with Philip Glass' which I'm not so interested in at all.

Alina Ibragimova is undoubtedly one of the most endearing violinists in the world. A while ago, I'd been fascinated by her recordings of Schubert's sonatas. Even now, I often put on the CD at home. Tonight, she has been in Tokyo and played Ysaye in Toppan Hall at Iidabashi. In fact, I don't like the hall because it's far away from the station and its seats are stiff. On top of that, there I smell smoke every time. But this time I had no choice but to have bought a ticket to enjoy her playing sonatas for solo violin by Ysaye.

The performance was really nice. I've never experienced such a bright tone in Ysaye. Especially, the second and fifth were so attractive. For instance, at the very beginning of the second sonata, her abrupt but not rude pause after the short passage of Bach's third sonata took my breath away. It almost looked like she was pretending to play the passage by error. Of course it wasn't. Having expected some anger or grief at the pause, I felt a funny surprise. I hope these feathery impression won't change to be more serious and heavier one in her future recordings of this masterpieces.

I went drinking with one of my best drinking pals yesterday. For me, he is the only friend from college days. These days we are always talking about our children, despite many common interests in a broad range of areas. That's good because I can respect his attitude toward life as well as on parental interests, and hopefully he also seems to be gratified by my way of thoughts. But it means that we drink and eat so much every getting together, and naturally, we regretted having eaten a bowl of ramen after bottles of wine yesterday.

It has turned out nice these two days. We went to the zoo on Saturday, and today we attended a local community event. Both two days, my daughter was made so many fuss by passing strangers that I was a little bit embarrassed. I think it was because of the baby coach. It's really cute. The elder brother, who was also brought up with the coach and now pushes it in a proud manner, is cute too.

When I waited with our baby sleeping in the coach, a girl who said that she was studying photography in a university asked me if she could take picture of the coach and baby. I let her do that, of course. However, it was her film camera that attracted my attention. I used to take B&W photos like her. I could even develop films myself. In fact, I still have gears and chemicals to develop films, though they are unlikely to be used again.

I played cards with my son after the diner. He was inevitably defeated and burst into tears. I know what he felt but he needs to get used to that.

The morning air was neither hot nor cold, so I went to the office by walk. The townscape has changed a lot since the days I used to run through by bicycle. Especially, there are more food related shops than before. I was intrigued by a venerable traditional sweets shop and their new dorayaki-tasting soft cream. I'll try it the other day.

I often say to my son that he should be careful in doing something. That's not because I'm careful but actually the very opposite. In fact, I carelessly sent an email to a wrong address. I hope my son not to become like me.

When I listen to somebody talking in English, I think I somehow manage to recognize each words. But I still can't grasp the meaning of what they say before constructing the sentence from these words in my head.

I seem to have caught a cold from my son who had been coughing and snorting for the whole last week. He might been have over-excited about his new environment. No fever, fortunately, so he had gone to the school everyday. And then, on Sunday, he said that, he felt so tired that he didn't want to go out with us and stayed at home alone for the first time. So the rest of us three went out for an hour.

I ate ramen for dinner with my son on the way home from the dentist. My son seemed to be tired. Obviously, it's because his new days at the elementary school. I'm slightly jealous with him though. Being tired is the same for me, but he is absolutely, through these hectic days, cultivating a sense of humanity, learning ability, and everything!

It was a bit hot today. Someone left the emergency door and the windows of the office open in order to let in the fresh Spring air. It means the pollen which causes my allergy broke in to around my desk all the afternoon. Being too polite to shut the door and the windows, I've been enduring with the mask but was exhausted unnecessarily.

I talked in English within my dream the last night. Oddly enough, I managed to tell Jackie Chan, Hong-Kong movie actor, that I had a terrible ache in my eyes. He said OK and magically eased the pain by just pressing a acupuncture point near my eyebrow. Wow. The press also alleviated the stiffness of my shoulders at the same time. But then he started to press the back of my knees, and it was so acute that I woke up to the reality.

On the way home, my old HTC Desire had no reaction without any warning. So I made it force reboot, but then, out of the blue, some of its core applications, including gmail and even 3G, seemed to disappear. I guessed the phenomenon has got to do with the sd card because I've S-OFFed the device and moved some applications into the sd card using a2sd. So I tried to do "a2sd checkext" from the terminal emulator, which also had to be reinstalled, and narrowly avoided to replace it with a new one. All in all, however, I have to replace it as it's becoming too out-of-date to keep using these days.

A Monday on April is the hardest day for going to the office. Even though I was a full of vigor when leaving home, riding a packed train was so daunting task that I actually got off the train two stops early and headed from there to the office by foot. It was far more comfortable than being almost choked by the cramped posture.

If a baby has been fed with breast milk, it's harder for the father to cradle them. All we can do is to wait them crying themselves to sleep. I dare say every baby should realise this inevitable fact.

Now I studied a bit about the formal way of processing XML trees. I have a vague intuition that the approach I've been practically using in my projects, which I developed without any theoretical background, has partly equivalent with the well-defined formal method. If it's the case, it might be a kind of help for someone who has the same problem as the one I had.

Before I started to open this editing page tonight, I had thought I spent all the day doing nothing special. It's one of the beneficial effects of this diary to remind me of how every single day is irreplaceable.

Today I went to see the doctors for my allergy symptoms as a routine visit once a month. There's always a lot of patients waiting to see them. At the waiting room, we can do nothing except reading comics which are there for the sake of killing our times. I have also been reading a comic for these months. They were a serialized story. Although it's a relatively long series, today I inevitably reached the very last episode currently available. What can I do in the waiting room at the next visit?

In the afternoon, I finally post-processed the photos I took the last Monday at my son's enrollment ceremony to the elementary school. Some of them were well taken, but honestly, I could do better.

These days I'm leaving home in the morning half an hour earlier than used to be. That's because I have to accompany with my son who has started to go to the school since this Tuesday. I merely lead him to the broadest street between our house and the school to see his crossing the street. Although I can then go back home and even sip a cup of coffee before actually go to the office, I'm taking advantage of the responsibility as a father and directly heading to the office in order to go down with the bunch of work. It's rather fun so far.

I reserved a hotel for the TeX conference of this year. It's going to be held at Portland. I hope I can give some presentation there, but I haven't come up with any idea for now.

My son enrolled in the elementary school yesterday. I attended the ceremony and was completely worn out by a lot of excited children all yelping and running around the room after the ceremony. Too tired to write a word here. Although I love my son, I can't help almost screaming when he making a fuss with other children. I know it's a nature of them, though.

Having that said, I was very proud of him having been focused on the ceremony. Becoming a school boy might be a kind of new social title for him that let him take a grown-up attitude yesterday during the ceremony.

Speaking of today, it was his first day of the school and I accompanied him in the morning to the cross near the school. I prefer such an ordinary happiness to a ceremony like the one we had yesterday.

I made noodles this afternoon. I often make them for these years and have been getting better and defter at it.

I attended a party the other party of the company held for welcoming the rookies. I seldom talk with people working for the other department, but really enjoyed talking with them tonight.

Today was so wet that the cherry blossom started to fall. It's still been raining. I didn't imagine it would get worse when I left home. In fact, I almost forgot to bring the umbrella, and worse than that, I left home with my favorite shoes that aren't water proof. It got soaked out by the time I got back home and I had to wash it immediately. By the way, I hadn't known that shoes can be -- even should be -- rinsed with running water.

I went to the English class, but then it turned out that it was not today but yesterday. Feeling a little bit foolish, I redirected my destination to the book shop near the school in order to buy a new text book for the class which will start the week after the next. Again, to my disappointment, it was also wasting my time because the text book I'm going to use was out of stock. There, however, was a funny clerk who asked me about my shirt. He said that he used to have the same shirt as the one I was wearing and that the shirt is hard to get now as the maker discontinued the line. Talking with him, I was aware of the embarrassing fact that I had been wearing the shirt back to front! Everything could be better today.

We had a first overnight trip since our baby was born a half year ago. The more family we are, the more money we need, as well as the more fun we have. This time I was so impressed by the growth of the elder kid. Taking a spa together with him, we talked about a lot of silly little things in the unusual environment.

Cherry blossoms have been coming back to Tokyo. It's still been at half bloom, but will have been almost ended at the next weekend. They have very short lives, although different types of cherry blossoms delight out eyes over several weeks in every Spring.

We enjoyed working across the cemetery near the house. It's famous for the cherry blossoms. The good news for us is that the cemetery officially bans any drinking party around there. Beside some minute banquets held by a handful of neighbors, there used to be less cherry-viewing party than in the Ueno park, which is located near the cemetery and is also one of the most familiar place for such a cherry-viewing. But for the past few years, unruly guys from a long distance seemed to come and held a lot of filthy parties in the cemetery. I welcome the ban because that brings the cemetery a peaceful atmosphere.

On the way home today, I popped in a musical instruments store near my office and bought two scores. One of which was a violin score for my kid, which I originally intended to buy it. Another was the etudes of Hanon for my own.

It's almost ten years ago when I stopped playing a piano. Before then I had attended a piano class every week for almost 20 years. I had definitely loved to play it, but at the same time, to be honest, I hated the class. The teacher had never taught me how to practice but just ordered me to prepare to play a boring etude till the next lesson. I have no idea why I could have continued to attend her infuriating lesson. Then, when I told her that I was going to quit the class within the next four months, I finally confessed that I couldn't tolerate the etudes she had made me play. I also insisted that I had wanted to learn how to exercise, instead of a mere vague sensuous instruction for beginners' etudes. Around that time I happened to know about the Hanon independently of her, and started practicing it by myself. I found it very helpful for the finger. But first and foremost, I knew, for the first time in those wasted twenty years, that what "an exercise of piano" actually was.

Since then I have had less opportunity to play a piano, but in my mind, a hunger for playing some instruments is getting stirred while my kid learns to play his violin. It's because of that I couldn't help myself and bought the etudes of Hanon together with my son's score.

Kids graduating from a nursery kindergarten is a little bit emotional for their parents. It happened to me today. And I was so proud of my son sitting up during his first sober ceremony.

His nice grown-up behavior during the ceremony was enough to make me decide to send him on his first errand. After the dinner, I asked him to go to a 7-eleven next to our condominium and buy me an ice cream. Both me and my wife felt a sort of uptight when he phoned me from the shop (I let him bring a cell phone, just in case). Fortunately, it's not an serious trouble. He just chose more expensive one than we gave him. In short, he got short on cash. I reckon he will keep hearing we say about this accident ever after.

I found a new Kindle PaperWhite has an awesome feature. It seems to be very useful for cultivating my vocabulary. I used to write down unknown words to a notebook with sentences where the word appeared. Kindle's Vocabulary Builder, which Amazon calls it, gives me the same sort of word book for free. It's created automatically within the device and whenever I look into a word during reading, it collects the word together with the sentences around which the word locates. There are already over 500 words in my device. Turning over such words vacantly will be nice way of passing time when I'm so tired that I cannot read any book.

I went to Ueno to listen to a concert. It's one of the many programs called Tokyo Harusai, meaning Spring Festival in Tokyo. I didn't know about the festival until recently. They say it has been held every year since 2005, though. Anyway, I found it for the first time, and was interested in some of the scheduled programs.

The one I was most interested in was the four consequent concerts celebrating Richard Strauss's 150 years birth. Because it would take me almost eight hours if I joined the whole program, I chose only the first part, which contained Richard Strauss's first horn concerto and the oboe concerto. I reckon it must have been a rare occasion to enjoy there two master pieces at the same time.

Both of them were accompanied by a piano instead of an orchestra. Watching the soloists had always been adjusting their instruments during the performances, I got an impression of how robust pianos are. I know it's quite usual thing for most of players to tune their instruments during a live session. But pianos never require such on-the-fly tuning. That might explain their relatively large size than other tempered instruments.

On the way home, I bought a shirt at Ameyoko where a lot of apparel shops stand side by side. I'm always annoyed with the lack of right sized shirts for my long arms.

We went to Yodobashi Camera to take a bicycle my wife had ordered the other day. She had decided to buy it before the sales tax increases on April. For exactly the same reason, I also bought a DSLR on the last month. The clerk said their items for sale are getting scarce as a lot of people hustle to buy whatever they had intended to get with the current tax rate.

The symptoms of my allergy suddenly got worse yesterday. I'll see a doctor tomorrow.

We seldom use a ticket to take a train in Tokyo these days, because there's a well-developed payment system using non-contact IC cards. But today I asked my wife to go the railway service to set my IC card up as a fixed fee pass, and I didn't bring it with me. It made me buy a ticket at the station. At first I couldn't find the fare chart letting commuters to know the fee. Tokyo has a very complex railway system so there used to be a billboard to show the freight for every stations. Also there's a limited number of ticket-vending machines, far less than I remember.

My son brought back his drawings from the kindergarten. Some works are really admirable in their creativity, I think. One of the best drawings is of a wrecked ship under the sea. It has some holes pricked with a pen. He says it represents the damages the ship had gotten in the battle. Pretty cool, isn't it?

I visited a concert hall in Ueno to buy a ticket for a concert to be held tomorrow, but was said by the officer that I couldn't buy it because they have already closed the reservation. And that I have to come tomorrow without a ticket and wait on the line just before the concert starts. It made me lose my enthusiasm toward the concert. Apparently, I won't go there tomorrow.

Yesterday we received a pack of Buntan -- a kind of orange but has more stiff peel and juicy pulp. You will find it rather expensive at a fruit shop, but we got them as moderate as apples as we ordered them directly from the farmer. I happened to be able to spend the afternoon alone without children. There generally are a lot of things a man can't do with children, like making a kit model, going out to a movie, or enjoying a spicy hot restaurant. That is, it was a rare opportunity to do such grown-up businesses. But I chose to use the free hours to focus on the works which have been a burden to me for weeks. I reckon that the decision turns out well because I managed to finish them! I then offered the family who were at home dinner. There must be no more fascinating moment than unwinding after a load of work with the family and glasses of wine.

I spent most of the day with my daughter as my wife and son went out here and there. She slept well during the daytime, and now she's reluctant to sleep in her bed.

I went to dentist with my son and ate dinner on the way home at a ramen shop. There I had to scold him because he could't stop watching TV during the dinner. Watching TV in itself is not a bat habit. But losing the precious time unawarely is not good. That's what I want him to see.

I argued with my colleague about how tactful the thought of children are. She said she's always impressed by somehow conscious answers made by children, and they must be more deliberate than we adults imagine. However, I was against her view. No matter how deep they think, it can't be measured along with our way of "thinking". There are a sort of framework in our thinking which differs by age. In fact, it's also differ by each people, although the most affecting parameter should be age. In other words, children never think in a way adults think. We can't think in children's shoes, even though we all used to think using the same frameworks with which now children see the world around them. In my opinion, she confused children's precocious answers coming from the framework they are using to think and which are different from ours, with some thoughtfulness.

Writing is a habit. The more you write, the easier you can write. I know that's true in my native tongue, Japanese, so I'm trying it in English too. That's why I have started to do it here. However, there's few thing to be written every day, especially on weekday, because I don't want to write anything to complain about my ordinary life. Anyway, trying to be able to write about nothing using any foreign language should be another interesting, big challenge for me.

Anti allergic medicine makes me feel so sleep during this season. It's far better than without it, but I can't wake up in the morning everyday. So I'm going to the bed now.

I finally wrote the income tax report of the last year. We can get a good amount of money back, because we still have mortgage loan and the amount of medical bills exceeds one hundred thousand yen.

There are a few still working steam locomotives in Japan, but we don't have any in urban Tokyo. No wonder they have already disappeared from this super overcrowded and hectic city. It means, there would be no rarer opportunity than today to be able to enjoy their dynamic sound and smoke along with the Yamanote Line, which links cities in central Tokyo circularly. Fortunately, we could look down at it from a building on the railroad. If we were to wait it within other viewers in the cold weather, I would go home before it showed up at last.

I visited the new Kabukiza in Ginza for the first time. It was reconstructed the last year in order to strengthen against the earthquake. It was also aimed to utilize its estate more effectively. So they said it would be a skyscraper having an exterior much like the one of the original Kabukiza theater. I was afraid that any skyscrapers with clean lines shouldn't be match with such a traditional Japanese architecture having rather ornate exterior. However, it seemed to turn up well. From the pathway, in fact, the higher part was almost out of sight and it still looked like the original one.

My wife is now struggling with writing the farewell cards to the baby minders of our son. They have also been his teachers for several years, so we really want to say thanks to them, but it's always difficult to write these cards.

My daughter becomes six months the next week. I feel the time has gone faster than six years ago when we were bringing up our first kid. Back then, we used to wash diapers everyday after coming back home at midnight, while now we are using disposal diapers for our daughter. We must have had more nursing works than now. Nevertheless, time seems to pass through so fast that I hardly be aware of the process of bringing up the newborn, sadly.

I love trailing mountains covered with snow. To my dismay, however, I will not be able to go hiking in snow mountains this winter. Our family have a lot to do this month, especially because it's the last month for our son before his schooldays. In addition to the preparations for which the elementary school asks, there's a series of events relevant to the pre-school. If my wife hadn't been taking maternity leave to care our newborn daughter, we would fail to do something we have to do for him.

We are going to rush to stash the hina-doll into the box as soon as morning comes around, because it's an old saying that daughters whose hina-dolls remain in displays after March 3 must have a hard time to get married. I usually hate superstitions but this one is interesting.

My mom came over and cerebrate the first March 3 for our daughter. The actual March 3 is tomorrow, of course, but there's a kind of festival to cerebrate a growth of a newborn daughter around the day. For guys, like our son and me, it's a day for eating sakura-mochi.

It's the end of February. I somehow finished my work where I had decided to do in this month, and now I'm drinking a glass of sake in a laid-back mood.

This morning, my daughter succeeded to turn over for the first time. I witnessed the moment but couldn't do nothing when she fell out of the mat and then cried.

I talked with my colleague all the afternoon. We are facing with a lot of strategic problems to survive the ever declining publishing business. We have already figured out many hints but haven't found the way to make it live. What we need is a person who can work with us toward the future of publishing. Although we have got to hang out meanwhile, there will be good, discreet publisher's business in the near future.

Today we got a package from my mother. It contains a pair of hina doll, which is a traditional doll to be displayed in order to celebrate a growth of daughters on March 3; the Girl's Festival day. We wouldn't buy them ourselves because they usually take a huge room to display and a additional storage to be put in. But my mother, who had been somehow yearning for the girl's traditional festival but didn't have her own daughter, finally had a chance to buy them, so we got one. They are relatively small for a true hina doll set, because my wife went to the shop with my mother and succeeded to persuade her not to choose anyone bigger than that.

Now I'm reading Howard Schultz's "ONWARD" to and from work. It makes me think drinking a cup of coffee in Starbucks must be a temporal heaven among those hectic days.

I decided to get a little rest from a mind-boggling amount of editing tasks, and went to a rare exhibition of the British Council Collection with my son. I had wanted to go to there because everyone who already saw it said that it was so nice and filled with variety of creative works.

It really was amazing. I was knocked out by the uniqueness of each work as well as the way they were displayed. The one I was most seduced was an Anna Barriball's drawing of spotlights with "real spotlights" painted in blue and green. However, I also felt uneasy because I had to keep my son from touching them.

Of course, there were more fascinating works there. Some just made us laugh, the other disrupted our daily thoughts in a good way. What was surprised me the most was that my son didn't seem to be bored. We spent more than two hours in there, going up and down stairs in the museum. We then ate lunch near the museum and came back home at almost two o'clock.

I don't have nothing to write because I've been working all the day even on Saturday... Didn't I write about my new DSLR I bought the past Sunday? I've been hoping to visit somewhere with it for a week.

This morning, our son lost his baby tooth for the first time. It was a lower one so he have to throw it over the roof of the house. It is a sort of ritual in Japan to do that. Sooner or later the upper tooth will drop, then he have to bury it under the basement of the house. The problem is that we are living in a room of a condominium, and there are no roof or basement we can reach. We will do that at his grandma's house before long.

I haven't know that kindergartens have exactly the same role as nurseries in the UK. I've been thinking that kindergartens are something like pre-schools, and nurseries have to do with baby minders. In Japan, there's a special kind of institute called "hoiku-en", where children spend a whole daytime with several baby minders. It means that one can't use hoiku-en unless both parents are working. Children with his mother or father usually staying home, and being taken care by she or her, have to go to kindergartens. The point is, kindergartens generally close before 3 o'clock, so parents having daytime jobs can't use them, and if they weren't allowed to let children enroll any hoiku-en --- it's often the case when there's more children than the enrollment limit of hoiku-en in the region --- they have to quit their jobs.

It was the day of a play of our children in the nursery. We showed up to see our son acting one of baby owls in the play. Honestly, it was nothing more than a mess. But, of course, we were seduced by their smiles. That's the purpose of this kind of play, isn't it?

I spent the day in the office expecting a phone call from Yodobashi Camera only to find it never came. So I came home disappointed. Then, during the dinner, I finally got the call from them at almost 9 o'clock. It's not usual for them to make a call such late at night because they would close the shop by 10. They must have given me a kind of solicitous service as I had said that I would need it on Tuesday, if possible. And now it turns out to be possible!

I went to Yodobashi Camera to buy a new DSLR, but they said it had gone out of stock!

I've been working all the day in home. That's it.

In fact, I went out to see a doctor for an allergy in morning, and to take the son to a private academy in late afternoon, although I actually have been working the rest of today. As for the private academy, it was from the last Saturday that he was supposed to attend, but they put off it because of the heavy snow. So today was the first day for him to go and study there.

I'd never attended such kind of private schools outside of local ones, so personally I'd been rather sceptical about letting him study there. At a short glance of last 10 minutes of his first class, I think it was nicer than I had imagined. He seemed to be taken in, in a good way, by their methods of attracting children's concentration, such as collective cards, sort of awards based on other than just test scores, funny teaching materials, and so on. I hope he will keep enjoying going there.

Snow is accumulating little by little outside. The pace seems to be slower than the last week. I guess the snow has more moisture this time. The more water snow contains, the more serious perils in urban lifelines become, especially in the commuter rails. So I got a half-day leave today, and did the rest of today's work in home. Actually, I had to go back home by two o'clock because my wife were going to attend the first meeting among the parents of the elementary school where our son has got to go from April. We had asked for her mother to take care of our newborn during the meeting, but the snow prevented the grandma from coming to our home. So I had no choice but to leave the office immediately after lunch time.

I had decided to buy a DSLR once I finished the last project, and it's the last Sunday that I had intended to go to Yodobashi Camera. Unfortunately, there was a pile of snow on the road, which kept us from going out together, so I had to put off the plan for a week. Then the next Monday, out of the blue, the camera company announced a brand-new model having a completely different CMOS censor! It made me have second thought to buy just a new lens, instead of the DSLR. Anyway, I might well have to stay home this weekend because it will be snow again. Worse than that, it seems to be more dreadful than the last one.

Nothing special today, except that I got a book after two days waiting. I had asked a bookstore for bringing the book from their remote shed. To my surprise, they hadn't yet put a price tag on it, although they always do that! I hate their price tag because it sticks to the end leaf of a book with strong glue, and almost impossible to peel off without any vestige.

We walked home from Ueno, where I bought pajamas pants. Our son was making a complain about not taking trains, but he ended up having fun playing with snow on the way home.

In the afternoon, I made a kit of X-1A a little. The cockpit was installed, as well as the rest of the interior devices.

I confronted a problem of not having a font license, again. The last time I managed it by buying them by myself! This time, I was really mad at the fact that there was a machine having been installed some expensive fonts with proper licenses, despite nobody were using them for any creating job. I forced to get rid of them from the machine and reinstalled them into mine. Worse, to install and enable them, I had to restart my machine again and again and again... It was already past noon when I was finally able to use them in the application.

Sunday morning with pile of snow! I can't tell you how many snow-mans fathers in Tokyo have built for their children today. I definitely was the one of them. I don't know when I last made a snow-man, but today I learned through the hard way that the weight of a snow ball increases as you rolled it bigger and bigger. Having been unable to lift the head of the snow-man, I split it into four discrete balls and stacked them onto the big body, and got a snow-man tower higher than me.

Of course I broke it after that, because it would bring a peril for the other children given its heaviness.

In the afternoon, there was a little progress in creating a kit model of Bell X-1A. I'm still on assembling its cockpit, and today I attached the safety belts to the seat. The next big hurdle will be the control rod.

I joined a conference on XML publishing this afternoon. I highly admire the speakers for their many attempts to achieve a reliable way to use XML in publishing, though I've taken, and will take, another approach. There's a lot of difference between their problem area and mine. Mind you, the conference was very instructive.

I have to talk at the other conference on publishing tomorrow. But the weather forecast says that it will be dreadful snow. I'm anxious about the number of people coming.

There's a Shinto shrine on the way between home and the nursery. We stop in there every morning. These few days, freezing night air has turned the surface of the Chozu -- a sacred hand washing tub which all Shinto shrines have -- into ice. I handed him a relatively thick piece, and he brought it to the nursery. He said he had made ice too by putting a pail of water outside the nursery yesterday.

I'm already feeling that my last exhausting days had passed more than dozens of years ago, though it's finished just yesterday. I think that forgetting busy days soon, provided that the days hadn't been the one against me, is my good nature. This time, nobody was hurt, nothing completely failed, and the eventual outcome will be funny anyway.

Today I tried to compare the difference between the several XML files. It would be easy if I needed to get the diff of these files. But I've been working with the totally different files within which there are mere similarities. The number of code I wrote today was just five lines. I sometimes wonder how the code becomes the fewer when I thought the more.

However, I guess things I dedicated the most today was the discussion with admirable people through twitter. It was on about what we should take care of when we are educating children. These days I often see kids easily deteriorate to rather myopic easiness, despite their vague desire to learn some complicated things. If you ask me, enduring a basic, systematic, often boring study is a sort of common skill for all the learning activity. I want my son to realise that as soon as possible.

It was the first snow of the season, I guess. Because of that, I left home together with just my son without my wife and daughter, though it hadn't started yet then. We two used to go to the nursery school everyday, like today, but these days he goes to with his mother since his sister was born. Today might be the last day for me to go to the nursery with him, because the elementary school will start from the April.

Today I awoke from a dream in which I was trying to keep our daughter alive by rescue breathing. I know it was the reflection of the accident happened yesterday. But curiously, in the dream, she stopped her breath caused by my faulty attempt to loose her screw out of her mouth!

There was an accident happened to the baby, just before I left home this morning. It wasn't a big one, but I had been worried sick about her state until I came back to. Fortunately, she seems to be OK now.

I can't get enough of coffee and go to Starbucks everyday. It's often said that their espresso is an affordable luxury, but their "coffee of the day" is not so much expensive than the other shops. Above all, I guess I'm sort of addicted to their hospitalities, let alone to caffeine.

The above photo is of the one I built the other day, because I had a bunch of work in the office today too and didn't have time to make it.

I had to go out to the Starbucks today, because I hadn't used a free ticket which would expire on today. I was so in a hurry that I dropped my lunch box down after cleaning it off. It got cracked and went off. I guess it was on its last legs.

I couldn't go out for lunch, let alone the coffee at the Starbucks.

I walked to the office this morning. It took me an hour. Just an hour, despite the fact that it takes me more than half an hour by train. Anyway, I found it nice to go to the office by foot wandering around the Ueno park, the pond in there, and the narrow streets which I had't walked along. I could do that because my son stayed home and I didn't have to take him to the nursery today. I'd like to do that again whenever possible.

The only thing I had to do was the indexing of the book which has been on the verge of the release. But I was somehow struggling with the printer settings for the adequate outputs, in order to send them to the authors. Normally I was not so clumsy, but the printer driver really sucked. I think we should have more elaborate printer, as we are sort of the professionals.

We had new chairs for our kids today. The shop's clerk had said that they didn't have the stocks and we had to wait till March, but they arrived today all of the sudden.

I suggest that they should ship this products with more accurate and rigid bolts. One of them was partly stripped from my PB driver.

Today, I struggled with LaTeX to make the unusual layouts of the table of contents. Trying to find the most suitable appearances of typesets took the entire morning. It was almost noon before it turned out to be adequate, so I ate lunch a little bit earlier and went out to the Sturbucks with a colleague. She talked about a wedding party of her business friend, which she attended yesterday. Oddly enough, the party was not a bridal itself, but was a sort of after-party, and it seemed to be the groom himself that planned and managed it. I suppose that such parties are usually planned by the friends of the bride and groom, instead of the very life of the party.

I was looking after our four months daughter while my wife and son went to the local library this morning. They say babies tend to become bad moods when a low-pressure system coming. That's why I could do nothing but cradling her, who was totally out of sorts refusing to drink the milk. She finally fell into a nap after an hour crying.

I spent the late afternoon making a interior of the Bell X-1 kit, which I started last week. Honestly, the kit is sort of antique, and the details of the cockpit is almost rubbish. So I ordered a etched parts for it.

Today's Saturday but I had to go to the office. The only amusement was that I could spend lunch time with my family at the Strarbucks near my office.

My son used to eat anything happily. But as is often the case with kids, he is occasionally a faddy eater these days. Tonight he began to hesitate to eat the seaweeds in the soup and show the reluctant mood, then spilled the soup over the table. So I stopped him pretending to eat the dinner, and scolded him for that. I think it's one of the most important thing for a human being to eat your food properly, even when they are not your taste. Scolding a child always makes me feel depressed and, ironically enough, I had to waste the rest of the beer at the dinner.

The current project of creating a new book is gradually reaching its climax. The due date is Feb 3. So we are up to our eyes in work. I'm aware that I've been in a little bit distracted these days. Apparently it might be because it's the first book I will publish after I had a newborn the last September. I couldn't have been taking enough time for work since then. I'm afraid that the amount of time we have spent for this book could be shorter than the other books in the end. Although the quality of the outcome won't be determined just by the time we spent, it does matter to some extent.

Now I terribly know that it's almost impossible to get a proper meaning from a bunch of texts in Japanese while speaking in English.

We had been talking all this morning at the office about the way we recruit. I thought we need two types of colleague in the long run; both a thoughtful non-productive cooperator and more "autonomous" guy who would do whatever when they find it profitable.

I've got to do some email works this morning. My colleague wrote back most of them, but there still remained one significant email I had to reply. It took a whole morning for me to wrote it. Although the mail I received wasn't a bad deal, writing an appropriate reply to it was a hard job. Rather, I reckoned the subject of the mail really was very fascinating, so I needed to be tactful.

I often talk with my son in the bathtub at the end of the day. Today, he told me that taking picture in theaters was not allowed. I asked him why he thought so. He said that he once saw a man whose head is a video cam was arrested by the police. I hardly believed the fact that a preschool boy could see the message of the anti piracy ad, which you could watch before every movie in Japanese theaters. It looked so stupid that even boys might be able to understand. But he has been thinking that that's because the shutter sound would disturb the other audiences. So I had to explain about the criminal charge of the piracy, and of course, how a good purpose would end up with an over-the-top restriction. Fortunately, the complicated situation seemed to get through to him.

I overslept again this morning. Around winter to spring, I could hardly overcome the constant drowsiness. I know the reason. It is caused as both the direct symptoms of the allergy, and the side-effect of the allergy medicine. I also know that, it's preferable not to go out as far as possible, because the symptoms of my allergy are due to Japanese cedar pollen. Of course, it's too early for cedar pollen to fly into the air. However, the doctor told me yesterday that the people with the cedar pollen allergy have a strong tendency to show the same kind of symptoms caused by many other elements in the air, such as PM2.5. Anyway, it's not good idea to go out without any purpose, or at the very least without a mask, during this season.

Even so, I can't help strolling the town with my family on the holiday like this. So I got out with my family to a shop in Akihabara to take a device I had back-ordered the other day. Then we roamed along the railway to Ueno. It was a nice walk, about an hour long.

After coming back to home, I started to make a new kit model. This time I'm up for the challenge of the transparent kit of Bell X-1.

It's the birthday of my son today. My wife and I made his birthday cake in the morning, but then his grandma came over, bringing the other cakes. So it became the day that he could eat raw cream and strawberries the most in his life ever!

Do you know what a father feels when he knows his son's aim for this new year is to complete a Lego kit? I love my son, although I know the fact that my son have already completed the Lego kit.

I got a lot of advice from the man I admire about the carrier and the attitude of raising kids. I really enjoyed having these talk tonight.

I wonder whether the book entitled "for Kids" can be understood by pupils aged 6 or so. The Japanese word corresponding to the English "kids" may suggest that it's for the pupil whose age is at most 10. So teens in Japan would feel the book "for Kids" is too stupid to read.

It's not because Japanese teens more strongly want to be regarded as grown-ups. In Japan, most children in elementary school can read books because it's fairly common to let toddler learn to read at home. The point is, it doesn't mean all of them can actually understand the content they are reading. Indeed, there's a lot of books that might not be understood by most teens, even if the words and the expressions in them are easy enough for mere kids.

Apparently, the skill of reading books scarcely has to do with the ability of understanding abstract concepts from books. On the other hand, as I said above, most children in Japan can read books. That's why the book "for Kids" is miserably avoided by teens. Furthermore, it would be criticised as not being appropriate "for Kids", if it's filled with paragraphs, even the funniest and easiest ones.

It may sound peculiar, but the fact that most adults in Japan have never read any books except cartoons explain the situation too. If you'd like to sell books "for Kids" in Japan, they must be a form of cartoon, or messy chunk of visual elements without long paragraphs. The book with pages of relatively easy and funny texts would never be considered "for Kids", despite all the kids can literally read it.

The weather forecast had said that there would be snow today, so I left the house with my folding umbrella. The sky was covered with heavy clouds, having the wave-like surface. I rather like such awful winter sky. It would be more preferable if there was a little bit of snow, but it ended up nothing. Tomorrow will be the clearest, typical blue sky in Tokyo.

I went to the memorial concert celebrating Toshi Ichiyanagi's 80th birth year tonight. He has been one of the greatest classical music composers in Japan. Today's program was consisted of his relatively small eleven works, which covered a wide range of his past activities. Each was performed by the best player, and that made the whole program very exciting.

It's often said the classical music is dull and boring. I partly agree with that. The works written over hundreds of years ago are inevitably sounded colorless. A lack of inspiration makes us sleepy. But, if you ask me, the contemporary classical music like Ichiyanagi's is the most entertaining kind of music today, especially when you listen to live.

I'm very sad to hear that the colleague sitting next to me was leaving the office. We had worked together just for about half a year. I might have been more thoughtful about the work that I had occasionally asked her? The news led to the dismal atmosphere throughout the office in the afternoon.

The 1/144 Zero Fighter was finished at last today!

The main wings became terrible appearance few days ago because I failed to stick the decals. I had to repaint the wings after scratching the original color. I made another try this morning. Although some decals didn't stick well again, I somehow managed to finish it.

My son also finished his own construction of his first Lego Technic kit. His grandma gave him the 9396 helicopter at the end of the last year, and he has been making that step by step. But the main gear didn't work but just slipped vacantly at first. I checked his accomplished work against the instruction over and over again. My friend, who happened to came over for dinner tonight, also helped to figure out the cause, but couldn't turn out to let the gear work.

After the friend leave, I found there's another gear not being installed well, and I just fixed that. I'm looking forward to seeing my son's delightful face.

We came over to my wife's friends whose first baby was born about two weeks earlier than our daughter. Me and my wife enjoyed chatting about the babies, their new house, and music -- both fathers are fun of contemporary music. But our elder kid seemed to get a bit bored. It's important to learn how to spend politely such dull time, and he did a sort of good job today, I think.

He compensated for the boredom by playing at the park on the way back home.

There was an event at one of the biggest bookstore in Tokyo tonight. They would exhibit their sales ranking of the computer related books published during the last year. Thankfully, in the ranking, there were some books which I edited. However, everybody knows that the ranking itself tends to be a bit biased every year. Such bias can't be avoided because the customers' expectations are different from each bookstore, no matter how big the store is. So it wasn't the ranking the attendee, including me, were interested. Instead, we were looking forward to hearing the talk of the main presenter. He managed to review hundreds of books merely in two hours this year, and I found a few books I should read someday.

I bought a pack of small bread on the way to the office this morning, and consumed all of them before the lunch time. I think it's more convenient for me to eat something before noon and work through the lunch hour with just a cup of coffee.

I went for a dental cleaning today. It was a monthly checkup. I used to go the dentist with my wife and son, but my wife haven't been able to go there since the birth of the daughter. My son has still gone with me, and today he was seen by the dentist alone for the first time.

I ate a lot of yokan today in the office, instead of chocolates. Yokan are a sort of traditional sweets in Japan, and have enough glucose to boost the human brain. We have a variety of sweets in the office around the New Year's day because the business partners bring them as gifts. They are pretty nice in most cases. But sometime there are a bunch of crackers which I sort of dislike. Yokan is good, except that it's difficult to eat in the office. There are some nice products with handy wraps, but they even make my hands sticky quite often.

When I bathed with my son at night, he asked me why did the bathroom become the coolest just when he shut the door after it had been opened for a while. I wasn't sure but I answered that it's apparently because the time elapsed would have been maximized at the very time when he shut the door. He scarcely see that at first, but the explanation seemed to get through to him in the end.

I spent a lot of time in the office finding words which explain clearly about the books I created as an editor in the last year. I dare say I'm rather good at doing such a composition work, but nevertheless it needs very intense effort of the brain. Whenever I use my brain hard, I couldn't help but eat a bunch of chocolates. I know that eating quite a few chocolates every day is hard to say a good practice, but what can I do otherwise? So I bought a box of white chocolates after the lunch and ate it in one go. Well, I won't do that again, hopefully.

This morning, out of the blue, I found my own name at the article in the online magazine about software developments. It was written by the nice bloke I'm acquainted with, and he said in the article that the editors working for the magazines or books on software might as well write some program codes themselves. I cannot agree with him more! So I'm very proud of that he has counted me as one of such "code writing editors".

When I came back to home, our newborn daughter was cracking up for something the rest of us would never recognize. She had been far more aggressive than her elder brother in the mother's womb. These days she becomes to know the activity with her face down. I can't believe the under four-month newborn lifts her upper body from that position.

Today was the first day at the office after the new year's holiday. I was expecting the eventual fatigue, but it was far less than I imagined. I guess it's because I hadn't left the house much during the holiday than usual. I even wrote the email to the designer about the jacket of the new book I've been involved since the last year. I wasn't able to decide what should I do with the motif of the cover and been hesitated to consider it. It's always hard to handle the cover image of new books, especially when their original edition are scarcely sophisticated.

Finally, I got started this new blog just as a typical diary. I know the big effort must be made to keep writing diary. But I really want this to be the true diary, instead of mere journal.

Today I've stayed home all the last day of this holiday making the model fighter. I'd been away from that sort of hobby for several years, and had been thought that I would never restart that. But I actually started to make one of the 1/144 Zero yesterday. Part of the reason was that because my son has begun to be interested in the kit models. He really loves airplanes. But truth was that his grandma told him that he's sort of "coming to the age of kit models". Never! He hasn't! He's just 5 years old!

However, I remembered how fun was that. I'd like to say thanks to him.