our long day
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Mari and I went took Kenny to the daycare this morning for a parent-teacher meeting. It was a long morning.
In the afternoon, Mari had to attend a training session related to some volunteer work she's organizing (cleaning up the Arakawa, an endless event that attracts the participation of countless corporate teams). So I took Kenny on a 2 1/2 hour cycle trip. We went to Akihabara, toodling along some of the city's larger streets either on the sidewalks or on the streets proper where appropriate.
Kenny was well-behaved throughout, but on the way up he was particularly quiet. I think that getting out into the traffic and so on is still a new and daunting activity for him. It's one that's necessary if he's going to learn to survive in the city, of course, and in the short term I want him to get used to traffic because we're going to take that motorbike tour of Shanghai next month.
I was on a mission to look at the current round of cameras that Pentax offers, because I want to upgrade our DSLR. The current one takes decent photos, but I've noticed that Mari's still struggling to get clean images with the manual-focus lenses, and I want her to be able to better capture this time in Kenny's life (I think she's put off a bit by the thing's so-so results).
I learned that the top-of-the-line model (it's currently a line of only two models!) has a very much improved autofocus system indeed. I don't know that that will warrant the cost of the thing in of itself, but since we'll be doing more product photography I know that we can write off the expense in part or in whole. We'll see how it goes.
On the way back, Kenny was a good deal more rambunctious, even grabbing me by the hips on occasion in an effort to turn me around to look at something that had caught his attention. Not the smartest thing in the world, distracting a bicycle's pilot....
In the evening, Geoff came for a visit. He's my philosopher friend, and the author of the book from which the cover image appears in the upper-right corner of most pages on this website. We caught up on developments both here and "back in the old country" and discussed our various projects. Geoff's started a new book, one that will tell the many tales from his rather swashbuckling youth. Ganbatte, Geoff!