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.