Michael's day off
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Today we had plans to rent a car and do a bunch of housewares shopping. But first, I walked The Boy to the station for his first full day of school, then we both took The Girl to her new school. The Girl's disappointed that she's entering grade two here, having just finished grade two in Canada, but the Japanese school system has an (as far as I know, globally unique) April 1 school year start, so The Girl (being a May baby) falls into a later year.
We got back from that only to learn that the landlord had arranged for someone to look at the washing machine at eleven. Apparently the outlet hole for the water needs a fitting of some kind. So we revised our plans: we'd go to a dermatologist about the rash on my arm. We tried that, going back to Tachikawa, but it was a bust - they had a 2.5 hour waiting list. Driving back, the nav system in the car routed us through the worst bit of traffic infrastructure I can recall: a traffic circle attached to a bus depot and the drop-off area of a train station. It took us two tries because of the buses stopped in the traffic circle and other insane things. We managed to get in a car's worth of grocery shopping, and then it was time to meet the guy about that fitting. Mari dealt with that, and I moved boxes around. The living room is now mostly free of boxes. Mostly.
I also squeezed in some time to string together my 2009-era monitor with the 2009-era used office PC that I picked up at a recycle shop last week. Happily, it "POSTed" (got through the power-on self test) so I'll be able to re-fit it with inexpensive RAM and solid-state drive. So I ordered those.
Then it was time to get going again. We went to a recycle shop again, and found the dish drying thing that Mari wanted. It was otherwise a bit of a bust when it came to furnishings and housewares.
Back to our place to return the car, Mari picked up The Girl and I headed off for a dermatologist's office in Kokubunji, and:
a) found the place on my first try, by bike, without consulting a map after I'd left
b) navigated the whole thing in Japanese, including picking up the medicines
It turns out that the "bites" are likely hair impact sites from one of any number of toxic bugs that live in the country in great profusion. When the movers and I had been struggling with the refrigerator, we'd had to pull it through the dense foliage in the front yard, and it seems that we'd run afoul of bugs there. Mari's going to speak to the landlord about having the worst of the trees removed.
Encouraged by my dead reckoning having succeeded so well in finding the clinic, I turned around and got a bit turned around. I took one left too soon, and was sent off-tangent by about 15 degrees. I eventually came near the train tracks that led to our neighborhood so turned north and happily ran into a bike shop I'd been meaning to visit. I popped in and asked about replacement axles for Mari's bike (I broke an axle disassembling the bike last year; the axel had fused shut either due to low use or salt or both). They didn't have any axles, but they had a lot of bike styles that I think would suit Mari and The Girl. Hooray!
Still on my way back, I passed the train station and it occurred to me to check in whether The Boy was home yet. It was already 17:00, and he'd left at 07:00, but he wasn't home. So I turned around and checked and there he was. I'd managed to take him to - and bring him home from - the station on his first day.