El Sereno

New apartment: fiber optic intertubes... Will be hooked up Monday. For now: almost no cell reception in the building! Needless to say, sketchy imtertubes at best for next couple days. Which is good, because hundreds of boxes need to be unpacked.

Big girl and big boy

House is full of boxes, and tonchan didn't have any pencils with which to do her homework, so she got on her kick scooter and went to her old preschool.
I came back from buying a microwave oven in akihabara and then went to preschool to pick up tonchan and mokun. She hadn't finished her homework yet, and mokun was getting hungry. He saw the yakiimo truck parked outside, and wanted to go buy some.
So, I gave him 1000 yen.
He went out the door, down the elevator, out the building, down the sidewalk, across the street, and bought two giant baked sweet potatoes. We watched from the window.
When he came back up to school he was so proud.
Not bad for a three year old!

gyoza


gyoza
Originally uploaded by renfield

mood = (CanBuyItHere > 0) ? happy++ : DO_NOT_NEED;


mood = (CanBuyItHere > 0) ? happy++ : DO_NOT_NEED;
Originally uploaded by renfield

mazinger z


mazinger z
Originally uploaded by renfield

kamen rider wizard


kamen rider wizard
Originally uploaded by renfield

shopping


shopping
Originally uploaded by renfield

comfy?


comfy?
Originally uploaded by renfield

weekend

Whilst the rest of the world (er, baseball fans in Tokyo) are watching the World Baseball...Challenge? (not sure what the C in WBC stands for, and don't care enough to look it up), Kuroda-gumi spent the weekend prepping for The Move.
We signed the rental contract for the new place on Saturday morning, went off to Midtown to play with a friend from pre-school, and then in the evening jiji and baba arrived driving the Alphard.
We spent all Sunday morning packing ridiculous volumes of stuff into the Alphard, including a number of chairs, amp and speakers, countless cloth items, a bunch of summer toys for the kids (kiddie pool, etc.) and who-knows-what-else-just-get-it-outta-my-house.
I have also now sold just about everything else on Yahoo! auctions (eBay got destroyed years ago when they tried to come to Japan and bidders.com just recently gave up, so it's all Yahoo! these days) so there isn't much left.
We are doing an impressive job of massively downsizing the amount of stuff we need to live comfortably, moving into an apartment 1/3 the size of our current place, but in a brand new building and sporting all the modern amenities including: double-paned glass! computer-controlled bath tub! heated floors!
Still need to go buy a microwave oven and a washer-dryer, so will do that tomorrow or Tuesday, depending on how Mokun feels. He got a bit of a fever this weekend; a bit too much excitement and playing out in the cold wind perhaps.
Packing on Wednesday, moving on Thursday!
Gotta love building names in Japan: bye-bye Noah's Ark, hello Ele Sereno!

sick boy


sick boy
Originally uploaded by renfield