cycling

  • Sticky And Sweaty Before The Swelter

    It’s the rainy season in Tokyo now, but the forecast is for a wet weekend followed by a couple of weeks of sweltering temperatures. Even though it’s relatively cool, I’m sweating like a pig. I feel for our Aussie plants, many of which also struggle with the humidity of the Japanese summer. This week was an excruciatingly busy one and I made lots of blunders. Fortunately, our garden has plenty of beautiful flowers at the moment, and they provided some delightful sights. Amid the fumbles, I got a great look around at the Intermediatheque museum in the Kitte building in Marunouchi, and was thrilled by some of the slightly bizarre…

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    Going Out To Lunch With Godzilla

    I’m fortunate enough to work within a short stroll from Godzilla, the (sometime) scourge of Japan and frequent destroyer of Tokyo. I took advantage of my lunch break to head down to visit Japan’s most famous monster. Of course, it’s not the real Godzilla, otherwise I probably wouldn’t get much work done. It’s a statue of the monster located in front of headquarters of Toho Co., Ltd., the movie studio that gave the world Godzilla. I also got to look at a quaint little garden filled with Aussie plants. Then, this morning, amid an ongoing period with a heavy workload, it was nice to get back on the bike. Even…

  • Springing Into Life With Flower Power

    It was an extraordinarily hectic day of being flat out from go to whoa, but also extremely productive and fulfilling as I was propelled by the thrill of the garden’s explosion of color through flowers. I started the day with a ride, dealt with some of the village’s board responsibilities (albeit lamely), wrote a blog post and attended an online meeting. Then work started. I was incredibly busy all day, punctuating time behind the keyboard by loading up my Brompton in a backpack and taking it for repairs to Y’s Road Fuchu Tamagawa; a roundtrip journey of about 13 km that needed to be made in about 40 minutes and…

  • Mornings Are Pleasant When You Can Meet A Pheasant

    May presented me with yet another delightful way to start the day, getting great encounters with the Japanese green pheasants that are a symbol of the Tama River. Every morning around this time of the year I get to see and hear the pheasants while I go on my customary ride. This morning, I managed to capture some shots of the bolder males along the river. Yesterday’s rain also left the paths filled with puddles, which are opportunities for reflection in more ways than one. I’m lucky enough to get shots in this are every year. I always find the reflections to produce breathtaking results. This year, Big Red makes…

  • Rain Yet Again Can Be A Bit Of A Drain

    May in Tokyo in my mind is a month of warm, dry, blissful weather, but for the second time in the four-day weekend this year for Golden Week we’ve had constant rain, which is frankly a bit of a drag. But being stuck inside with little to work on is giving me a chance to do a little study and fix my bikes to protect against theft, having being stung by a robber taking my bike earlier this year. I can also spend time with the struggling dinosaur, who still isn’t quite 100%. And the rain makes the garden look absolutely spectacular! I had originally planned to spend the morning…

  • Trying To Kid Myself On Children’s Day

    Blessed with glorious weather and little wind, it was almost appropriate I spent the first part of Children’s Day trying to kid myself that I am something of a decent cyclist. I did manage to build up an almost acceptable pace considering the countless number of traffic lights I had to deal with on a quick trip in and out of central Tokyo. Blessed with a day off as part of the Golden Week series of holidays, I headed into town to attend a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous near Tokyo Tower. The group was filled with sanctimonious, pious souls, so I left feeling like I could speak in tongues, but…

  • Juggling Jobsworths And Feisty Photographers

    Even with a 4:30 a.m. start aimed at avoiding meddlesome obstructionists, I still didn’t get up early enough to escape the scrutiny of the local jobsworth. Riding my bike into Yakushiike Park just as the dawn broke, and entering down a ramp well past the park office, I thought I had escaped any possible officiousness. This park is a delightful oasis alongside a heavily trafficked road, and is surrounded by densely packed suburban housing. Yet, regardless of the time I get there, I have customarily found it to be staffed by jobsworths, who prove time and again that sometimes the worst thing you can do to a person is give…

  • Pop Goes The Blister And A Cracker Jaca

    I’m not quite out of action, but not far from it, thanks to popping a tiny blister on my finger over a week ago now. The bloody thing got infected and the infection started to spread up my arm. Pain has been excruciating, which has come as a total surprise considering how small the original blister was, and I have barely slept in a week filled with visits to the dermatologist and being pumped with increasingly large and frequent doses of painkillers and antibiotics. It finally appears as though the drugs are working and the swelling has subsided and the infection beginning to retreat. I’m not the only ailing body…

  • Gifts Galore From The Garden And More

    Spring has really kicked into motion, one of the upshots being that our garden presents us with a new gift nearly every day. Our garden is providing us with a series of new flowers one after another. Hardenbergias have been giving me great delight for a few weeks now, particularly because I grew all of our four thriving plants from seeds I brought back from Australia. But our biggest surprise this year has come from the white paperbark teatree, which we picked up in a bargain basement bin at our local home center and have now been rewarded with a delightful bunch of frilly blossoms. Our ground covering linear-leaf grevillea,…

  • Treading Through The Tulips

    Much as I would love to have been tiptoeing, I’m way too fat to do that, so when Mrs. Kangaeroo and I headed off to the Hamura Tulip Festival, it was stomping heavily through the gorgeous flowers. Mrs. Kangaeroo and I had done some cycling tours together in the past, but not since before the COVID-19 pandemic. I’d been pushing all week to go as the return trip is largely flat and a distance I thought Mrs. Kangaeroo would be able to handle despite not having cycled for many years. But the visit seemed unlikely yesterday as our dinosaur fell ill, and I woke this morning expecting to spend the…