Spring?

There has been a running argument between my kids as to when Spring actually begins. It’s very confusing, due to the different calendars: Chinese, Japanese, Western, whatever your teachers tell you. It’s very important to D, because he is eagerly awaiting the return of caterpillar season. I voted that we just ignore all calendars and go by Nature. And today, Nature was telling us that Spring is definitely in the air.

They had some kind of teacher’s development day today, so to get the kids away from the video games and out into the fresh air, we went for a little neighborhood exploratory walk.

Not only were some trees blossoming to tell us that spring is coming, but other flowers were poking out, and many people had planted the brightest harbingers of the coming season in their planters (and some cool bonsai collections):

Those damned little dog statuettes are all over the place, turning perfectly nice entryways into something some old spinster in Parma would like. I can't figure it out.

These flowers smelled really great

These water bottles are everywhere, in front of people's houses. I'm not sure what they are all about:

Most indicative of the warming weather was the major vegetable gardening that was going on. I was amazed by the bits of land, which would just be vacant lots in another part of the world’s suburbias (that’s probably bad Latin, sorry Val), were turned into little productive patches of organic goodness.

They apparently have their own versions of scarecrows here, too, or at least that’s what we surmised from this:

It amuses me that there are no sort of mean-looking pumpkin-headed effigies out there, but rather serious warnings, as in: “Look what happened to the last crow that tried to eat my vegetables.”

Also in effect in the neighborhood were prime examples of the antithesis of what the world thinks of as the elusive Japanese Aesthetic. Blech.

We also stumbled upon a neat hillside cemetery

and discovered our first 2-liter bottle-selling vending machines. The kids were impressed.

Not much else to say about this week, other than I started at the kids’ school library, attempting to organize. I pilfered a couple books from the shelf of adult books that don’t belong there and are soon to be removed anyway (Angela’s Ashes and Neal Stephenson’s Zodiac). They also have this large collection of Penguin Readers that are basically Reader’s Digest versions of Hollywood films. Weird, and also being removed for their sheer anti-literate inanity. Next week, after the whole computer network is reformatted due to a virus and the proper software arrives, I hopefully begin the exciting process of data-entry and labeling all the books so they can actually be kept track of (I know my kids at least have a couple books that are probably unaccounted for). Doesn’t that sound fun?