Listen to the Rain

Back in Japan I used to go view the cherryblossoms every year, multiple times a year. I remember sitting by the banks of the Motoyasugawa with friends, tons of people all around us on blankets at 10 a.m. on a Saturday, and drinking sake and eating kushiyaki while we chatted for hours at a time. One time we all went up to Shōbara and had a picnic in Ueno Sakura Park, where a bunch of us rented rowboats and went out on the pond. Halcyon days.

Well, we can't get that experience in Chicago but we do have cherryblossoms here, planted down in Jackson Park. The last couple of years the weather has been cold enough that they didn't bloom, and this year the weather was also pretty changeable but the blossoms were out, so on Saturday morning after sashagee and I woke up late and ate breakfast, her parents brought Laila back from her grandparents stay, and then we all drove down to the Garden of the Phoenix to look at the blossoms. What blossoms there were--Chicago weather being what it was, a couple days prior it had been 26°, it was now 10° with chill winds. What's more, the day before there had been a strong rainstorm that had washed a bunch of blossoms off the trees, and they were on the ground and in the lake when we got there. Some trees were almost devoid of blossoms entirely! Despite that, there were still some trees to be seen:


The most interesting trees were right near the parking lot as we entered. We walked around the lake, where there were some trees but only a couple with enough blossoms to bother looking at, and then when sashagee asked me about the festival that was supposed to take place that day I said it wasn't until 1:30 p.m. (it was 10:15 a.m.), so sashagee's parents drove us all back home and after hanging out with Laila for a bit, they left.

We put Laila down for a nap but she did not take one, and she had enough energy later in the day that she kept demanding we go for a walk, so we went. The temperature had gotten a bit warmer, helped mostly by the sun finally coming out, but that meant when we went to the park there were a bunch of people there and Laila asked to leave after only ten minutes. She still wanted to go for a walk, though, so I kept walking down to Broadway and we went down to the other park further south, and Laila ran around for a while. She told me she wanted to leave once and then changed her mind, and it turned out to be fortuitous because after we had been there for twenty minutes, some of Laila's classmates from gymnastics showed up! I actually got to see Laila play together with some other kids. The cutest part was when two of them were on either end of the seesaw, and the second-cutest part was when Laila was beneath the playground equipment and two of her classmates were up top, and they were all looking for each other. When a bubble-shooting gun came out, they all got distracted and Laila eventually got tired and we went home.

The next day was a lazy day most of the day, but in the evening I had an invite to worldbshiny. I was also invited to go to see The Sinners in the afternoon, but I already wrote about why I didn't go. Since I handled most of that, I took the evening off and walked down to the bar where the party was being held, arriving a bit later, but it turned out that it wasn't too late because poor worldbshiny had her car towed while she was in the movie and had to move the time back. But once I did get there, it was lovely--I spent a while talking to lisekatevans's housemate about sightseeing in London, we all (except me) discussed The Sinners, I had a couple drinks and listened in, and after two hours I called it a night and went home. It's how I used to spend multiple nights a week that way.

I listened to Gorgeous on the way home, just like I used to on summer nights, all those years ago.

It's been raining basically all day, so there's a constant soft murmur from the rain falling through the leaves of the trees right outside our window. It's somewhat muted by the music playing on the tv, but it's just lo-fi with a cat sitting on a railing of a rural house. Laila is going to grow up getting used to seeing tons of cats with lo-fi music playing and hopefully she'll think that's what tv is.

This is the best tree on the street. Photo taken from my house, hence the other tree in the front, but I think it's a nice framing.

There's a chill in the air and we've had to bring out the heavier coats. Right now it's 23°C and sunny outside but a couple nights ago it got down to 1°! This next week will be warmer but it's probably the last gasp of summer.

Last weekend we went out to visit my parents for dinner, since wanderluster_kp was going to be in town and then gone for months, probably until April or June. It was basically like Thanksgiving, with a turkey and mashed potatoes and pie for dessert. We learned that Laila is truly my daughter, because just like me she hates mashed potatoes. When some of her other food fell into the mashed potatoes, she whined and tried to pick it out instead of just grabbing handfuls like she does with other foods. I hated (and still hate) mashed potatoes too and my parents told me they had never heard of a baby who didn't like them. Well, now there's two. Maybe it's genetic.

The other thing we did was take a trip to the Morton Arboretum, since the year is waning and there's not going to be many good weekends left that aren't too cold and have good leaves. It looks like we went just before the peak fall colors but the weather was lovely and I got a lot of nice photos, especially of the Human + Nature exhibit that sashagee really wanted to see after missing the trolls. My favorite picture was taken by someone else for us, at the piece entitled "Basilica":



But I took quite a few more photos:

( Arboretum trip photos )

Definitely know I'm getting older when I look forward to family trips to go leaf-viewing!

Monday evening was the beginning of שמחת תורה (Simchat Torah, "Celebration of the Torah"), the day when we finish the very last part of דברים (Devarim, "Words", Eng: Deuteronomy), and roll right through into the first part of בראשית (Bereshit, "In the beginning," Eng: Genesis), in an endless circle as we've done for thousands of years. Before that, though, is the singing and dancing. Some people hold Torah scrolls and rest of us dance in rings around them, and we did that this year too with the addition of a baby! I was a little worried that Laila would be scared or irritable, what with several hundred people packed into a room and a klezmer band playing while we danced, but she loved it. She was smiling and looking around and very happy for the first five הקפות(hakafot, "encirclements") and then she got very tired, so we left and took the bus and the L back home and put a sleepy baby to bed.

Laila did get to meet another Laila there, who was a month younger than her! Our Laila really wanted to give her a hug but other Laila was much more bothered by all the noise and people and didn't want to be touched. We definitely don't have a shy baby.

This was also the last weekend of the farmer's market. I got some more apples, pickles, eggs, and vegetables, ran into aaronhparker and one of his friends, got more Sfera arancini for dinner and dealt with a mixup, and then went home.

Tonight, my parents are coming over to babysit and sashagee and I are going to see Wardruna! I went with her to see KPop, so she's coming with me to see folk metal. Hopefully she likes it. Tomorrow, meowtima is back in town for the first time after moving to Pittsburgh for work, so a few people are going to Indian food together. Then Sunday we'll be resting, because we'll probably need it.

On Saturday sashagee and I went apple-picking at Kuiper's Family Farm!

( pictures )

We rarely have the same day off, so both of us having a Saturday off was a special treat. Even though half the farm was closed and we couldn't go to the pumpkin patch or corn maze, we had a great time. We'll be back before the end of the season.

I mean, not literally.

Yesterday I took advantage of two Valentine's-Day-themed events with friends--the first food-related, the second flower-related. A couple days ago I saw that Hanabusa Cafe posted an instagram message about their fluffy creamy special Valentine's Day soufflé pancakes and I immediately sent it to my pancake partner, my fuwafuwa friend, my soufflé sidekick, my hotcake henchwoman, worldbshiny and asked if she wanted to go sometime this weekend. We spent a while hammering through our schedules and when the pancakes were on offer--only the 13th through the 16th, which ruled out going on Wednesday--and eventually settled on Thursday. worldbshiny had a company lunch that day, and a task she had to complete at 3 p.m., but she squeezed me in as her dessert date. I arrived earlier, ordered two sets of pancakes so they'd be ready closer to when she got there and to build up a bit more food credit, and sat by the window. She arrived a few minutes later, and the pancakes arrived after that:


( Read more... )

Had a hard time deciding whether to use that icon or my Chicago icon.

This year I learned that there is a grove of cherry blossoms in Jackson Park, down by the Museum of Science and Industry, and this year also the Park District started posting a cherry blossom watch the way that D.C. or Japan have. Both D.C. and Japan had their blooms months ago, at the end of March, but Chicago is Chicago. Much like how last night I kicked off one of the four blankets I still have on my bed in my sleep, and then woke up half an hour before my alarm because I was too cold, the cherry blossoms are still closed.

I was originally hoping to have gone to down to the park for hanami last weekend, but with no update on the Park District website I thought it would be too risky to make my way all the way down to Hyde Park with no guarantee that the blossoms would bloom, and it looks like that was the right decision. Though now, with ACEN coming up, are they going to be in bloom next weekend and I'll have to run back from the con, drop off everything, and then run down to Jackson Park? I did take Monday off too, though that's because there's a Cowboy Bebop popup event Sunday night...

Might have another extremely busy weekend coming up. 🌸

I never used to care about the leaves changing or the flowers blooming. When we'd take trips to Oregon, my parents would go to a garden and I'd sit by the pond and watch the water striders because whatever, who cares about flowers. But I got into the mood of leaf-watching when we lived in Japan, both the cherry blossoms in the spring and the colors in the fall, and while there are no masses of cherry trees here, there are still colors.

I didn't get much of a chance to go leaf-viewing this year because the cold came so late--when we went out for the Scarecrow Festival, it was 25°C and sunny--but I've enjoyed looking at the trees in our neighborhood. And a couple weeks ago, we found a momiji tree only a few blocks away! Momiji are famous in Hiroshima, to the point where the local manjū are momiji-shaped, and we'd go every year to Miyajima to see the momiji change to that deep, uniform crimson color. It was a lovely touch of nostalgia to see.

Then last weekend, it snowed, and I took this picture:


Last month snow fell in Tokyo, and there were a ton of articles about it because everyone knows that Japan is Tokyo and Tokyo is Japan (and also it had been 54 years since the last time but whatever). The photos of snow on fall colors were amazing, though, and I'm glad I got to see a taste of it in Chicago.

Walking Path
This is shown from pretty near our house. If you turn the view around and go down the road a ways, you'll be able to see it on the left. And you should probably turn the view around at least a bit, because this section of road's pictures were taken in fall and the trees are great. The momiji especially are spectacular.

This is the road that schoolpsychnerd and I would always walk on when we went for walks. We'd go forward a ways, then turn right along the river for a short distance, then turn right again and walk down what was called the "old road." Considering that Chiyoda has a festival that dates back 500 years (which I'll write about in a later tour post), it makes me wonder if the old road has been there for centuries and the paved version we'd walk on is only its most recent incarnation.

Forest Shrine
I'm partially including this for the fall colors, but also as an example of the little shrines we'd stumble on when walking around town. There were at least three of them within a mile of our house--one of them is just down the road from the brewery, if you want to go back to Part I and look around--and there are probably half-a-dozen others around there that we missed. Japanese people are pretty famously irreligious, but I think a lot of that is just a different understanding of religion than the usual Western attitude. Nearly everyone I knew went to a local shrine on New Year's Eve, but they'd never characterize it as a religious thing. it was just part of being Japanese. Which is the traditional understanding of religion, really--the idea that religion is somehow separable from culture is mostly a modern conceit.

If you turn right and click down the road to the bridge, you can see the water-filled depression in the road that collapsed during a heavy rainstorm. We also caught two students necking under the bridge at one point, but we didn't say anything and just walked on by. Teachers in Japan and somewhat expected to police their students behavior when they're out and about, but neither of us bothered with that.

The Koyamas' House
The Koyamas were one of the families who came to the neighborhood English class we taught. I've written about their younger son Kazuo before here, but their elder son Naoyuki is the one who brought us the katana that's currently resting above our mantle and who once came by our house and asked if we wanted to go firefly-gazing. Relatively early on, schoolpsychnerd and I walked by the house when the Koyamas were having a barbeque outside, and they beckoned us over and invited us to sit and eat with them. It was moments like that that really make me remember Chiyoda fondly.

We also did our part for tolerance, since Mrs. Koyama told us that before she had interacted with us during the class, she had been kind of scared of foreigners, but after meeting us she wasn't scared anymore.

Forest Path
Sadly the Google van didn't go down that path, because we'd walk down there a lot. Just around the corner there is a grove of bamboo, and then a few family grave sites, and then a set of weathered stone steps leading up to a shrine of Hachiman that we'd frequently stop at. One of the first times we went there, we ran into the shrine keeper and had a brief conversation, but every other time we went it was deserted. Sadly, I don't have a clean picture of the entrance or the shrine itself. You're always a terrible tourist where you live.

Stonecarver's House
At least, I have to assume it's a stonecarver's house with a display like that outside. A lot of what's there were graves, but there's also plenty of stone lanterns and just lawn statues like the owls right at the bottom of the image.

The reason I included this image can be seen if you zoom in a bit and look behind the stone table, just to the left of the two Hotei statues. schoolpsychnerd and I always used to think of this as the gravecarver's house, and every time we would see that, we were happy that it wasn't somewhere out there decorating a child's grave. I realize now that it was intended as a lawn ornament, which makes me a lot happier.

Creepy Shrine
Most of our tiny mountain town fit the good stereotypes of a small town. We had neighbors invite us over for barbeque and to the local festivals, bring us vegetables and rice during harvest season, buy us drinks when they saw us in local bars, all of that. They also talked about our house being creepy and looked into our basket when we went shopping, but on the whole, I think the good outweighed the bad by a lot.

Sometimes, though, there were scenes straight out of Fatal Frame. The stairway in our house was one, with narrow, steep wooden steps with no railing and a single bulb at the top. The entrance to this shrine was another. During full daylight it wasn't so bad, though even then the layout was a bit creepy. Those steps led up through the trees to an empty clearing of grass and dirt, and then there were more stairs at the far end that led up to the actual shrine. But if the sun was even a bit obscured...well, you get the picture there. At actual night? We usually crossed the road to avoid the darkness that seemed to spill almost palpably down the stairs. If there were J-Horror ghosts anywhere in Chiyoda, they lived at that shrine.

The shrine was maintained by the neighborhood who had twice-yearly cleanings, and our friends the Kaminakas mentioned that they had taken a turn at cleaning it in one of the pre-class English "what have you done since last class?" discussions we instituted. I remember being surprised at that at the time, because he hadn't been killed by murderous ghosts. If you've lived in the country for a long time--and in Japan, "the country" has basically no streetlights"--you're probably used to that kind of darkness around, though.

Confession: I don't actually like pumpkin at all, much less the spiced variety. I don't like kabocha, or most squashes. Zucchini scrapes by as acceptable due to exposure.

I do love fall, though.


Temperatures in °C. Get with the program, Americans!
That was Thursday's weather. The day before, it was closer to 25°C, and then we woke up to cold winds and rainy skies. It was like those old cartoons where things are great and the sun is shining and then all the leaves suddenly fall at the same time.

I'm not exactly sure why fall is my favorite season. I suspect a lot of is the weather--I've always said when people ask that Ireland is the place I've lived with the best weather, because in Cork temperatures ranged from 5° to 30° with none of the awful extremes we get in Chicago--but the leaves play a part in it as well. Last year when I went to the Scarecrow Festival in Geneva I wrote a blog post about going down by the river to view the leaves and how disappointing it was. With the weather changing so early this year, maybe in a month when we go to the Scarecrow Festival again the leaves will actually be worth looking at.

I never would have thought I'd be the kind of person who'd like leaf-viewing. When I was younger and my parents would take us to gardens, my sister and I would usually find some place to hang out so we wouldn't have to look at the stupid flowers. When we'd go to Shore Acres State Park for a picnic and so they could look at the flowers, we'd always go to the "a Japanese-style garden with a lily pond" and watch the water striders and fish in the pond. And now, I willingly go on walks to to look at leaves.

See, this is why children think adults are boring and adults think children are dumb.