• Daily Life

    Prayers Gonna Pray

    I’ve been praying a lot lately, which is bloody hypocritical because I don’t really believe in having to rely on an imaginary friend. It’s been a rocky start to 2024 for Japan, beginning with the deadly New Year’s Day Noto Earthquake, a fatal crash at Haneda Airport the following day and general doom and gloom thereafter, despite the Nikkei index headed toward a record high, surpassing the lofty level it held when I first came here in the bubble era. Not much is going right personally or professionally, and that’s driving me to seek any sort of assistance that’s out…

  • Daily Life

    Take a Good Look at Yourself

    Navel-gazing is a dubious “talent” of which I have been adorned with for life, bar those couple of decades when I was too grossly obese to be able to even see my navel. That never stopped me from over-thinking: worse, actually, as taking any action has always been pretty close to a last resort even now when I am more nimbler physically than the mental agility I was blessed (or cursed) with in youth. My over-thinking now is about work. I caused a scandal a couple of decades ago, but Google makes sure it remains fresh in the mind of…

  • Daily Life

    Kangaeroo Corner’s Critters!

    Courtesy of a great act of kindness, this post is the result of receiving a gifted camera. An old mate read my previous post and generously passed on a camera he had not been using. I took the camera out in the garden this morning and got to snap away. I was very pleased with the results. I’ll need to study more on how to use the Sony NEX-7, having been an almost exclusively Nikon user for the past 35 years. It’s glorious weather today, which helped with taking photos. I turned the camera on some of the critters in…

  • Daily Life

    Winter is Here

    Although it was a glorious morning with clear, starry skies and then a wonderful sunrise, it was bloody freezing, confirming that the long-dreaded winter has arrived. Until now we have been blessed with unseasonal warmth: I wore shorts all weekend and the temperature topped 20 degrees on Saturday. I still wore shorts this morning, but my head and extremities were cold, and more core chilled by the time I arrived home. Time to rug up for the next few months.

  • Daily Life

    Accidentally Delighted

    It was Mrs. Kangaeroo’s birthday yesterday, and taking the day off to celebrate opened the door to an unexpected arvo of pleasantness. With the morning occupied by what may prove to be fateful events (of which more may come at a later date), Mrs. Kangaeroo grabbed me by the scruff of my ear and dragged me to Shibuya Hikarie to see the Accidentally Wes Anderson exhibition. Asked repeatedly about our intended destination, Mrs. Kangaeroo kept referring to a uesuandaason exhibition that didn’t really sink in for me. I had no idea what a uesuandaason is….until we got to the actual…

  • Daily Life

    Glowing

    Mother Nature greeted me with a glorious sunrise yet again today as I biked the Tama River Cycling Road. Most of the ride was in the dark, as is the case at this time of the year just before the winter solstice. But just as I was leaving the path and preparing for the ride up Tama New Town-dori (avenue) and the way home, the skies turned on a huge smile for me. Clouds and color made for a great shot. And my ego got a boost, too, when I was able to casually run down another cyclist on a…

  • Daily Life

    Garden Shower Puts the Win Into Winter

    It’s raining today, and while that would normally be grounds for disappointment, considering the dryness of the year, the precipitation is actually welcome. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Kangaeroo Corner. The sprinkle made the garden sparkle. The yard always looks nicer after good rainfall, which makes the greenery glisten. I’m still in pretty much full-time panic mode, so I woke before 3 a.m., had brekkie and readied myself to head out on my customary morning ride. After I kitted up and readied, I looked outside in the dark and noticed raindrops falling into the bird bath. I opened…

  • Daily Life - Strine Sports

    Oz Everywhere!

    Incredibly, just about everywhere I went, a little piece of Australia popped up in front of me. I left home on my bike not long after 6 a.m. to head out on an errand before having a regular, quarterly hospital check-up. I left the route up to my Wahoo Elemnt BOLT device, and next thing I knew, I was riding up a hill in Hachiojji where I could see eucalyptus trees. I had been looking up news about them only recently, so stopped off, took some photos and headed to the hospital. The doctor visit went well. He is very…

  • Daily Life

    Procrastination Propagation

    Winter is probably the worst time of the year to try to grow plants from cuttings, except, like for me, you’re desperately trying to avoid doing something unpleasant and you’ve been handed unseasonably fine weather. So, instead of taking a trial test for a potential new job as I could have done sitting in front of a computer for a couple of hours, I looked up how to propagate a grevillea. It seems the process is pretty easy (at least from the standpoint of the pros giving the advice online), but a lot of the available information was for the…