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.