It is 7:03 AM on Tuesday, June 20th, 2017. It is very late for me to be writing a journal entry but today is an unusual day. My family left for Japan yesterday which means I’m a bachelor for a very long time. This is normal when you’re married to a Japanese, they go home with the kids for the summer to see the grandparents and also to ensure that the kids are exposed as much as possible to the language and culture. My oldest son will be attending summer school in Japan and so his Japanese will get much better. He has grown up speaking it and was at his best at the language in preschool since it was a Japanese one. But kindergarten was American and so his English improved remarkably while his Japanese got worse. Living in Japan for a while should reverse that.
Unlike me, he needs to speak Japanese perfectly as he will straddle two countries and two cultures for his life. In order to function well in Japan, get a job etc his Japanese needs to be on the native level. We have around 10 family friends where the wife is now in Japan and they will even all get together in Tokyo one day for a play date. How exciting it is to have that type of opportunity. It is a rare thing as I don’t know of any other families who can go to another country and meet up with their same friends they have here in the USA. I’m very excited for them.
The first few days of being on my own are kind of nice but saying goodbye at the airport made me realize how much I love them (not that I don’t already but it hits you all at once) and I began to miss them already. We all need a break once in a while but when you know you won’t see your family for a long while one day apart seems like enough.
So today, I start the first day of my bachelorhood and I followed my favorite routine. I woke up at 3:30 AM, drank my wheatgrass, put away the dishes, worked out, took a shower, meditated and am getting my journal entry in. I’ll get my work done this morning and then perhaps start on my ‘to-do’ list which include contacting a painting company, re-calking the shower, clean the fish tanks, gardening and other many other things I have no time to do when the family is here. Today is the summer solstice and I’ll have a beer with my friend Bill Tatz who I haven’t seen in 17 years. We lost touch for a while and I even put up a post about it trying to find him back in 2007. He found the post by searching his name on Google and we got back in touch. This was right before Facebook became possible and he reached out by e-mail. We’ve kept in touch since then and his job has him working in San Francisco now so we’ll meet up.
It is a great day to drink a beer with an old friend since today is the summer solstice. It thought I’d take him down the coast a bit to the Moss Beach Distillery where we can sit on the patio by the fire-pits, reminisce and talk about how much our lives have changed since we met in Geneva in 2000 for a meeting at the World Trade Organization.
Since I have so much free time I plan on writing more in my blog but for now I have to get to work.
*Update* Picture of Will and me in 2017
