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.