Our pets.

Since we live in an apartment, we aren't allowed to keep any pets. I'm not really sure we would get one if we could anyway. Saying goodbye to our dogs and cats was one of the biggest sacrifices we had to make on our move over here. We satisfy our furry, cute animal cravings by looking at pictures of animals that need to be adopted online or by saying hi to dogs on our walks.

Nonetheless, we started taking care of some aquatic organisms. It started out with taking care of same tadpoles which are now tiny little frogs. Then went out to catch a lizard and Elissa ended up catching a gecko. Yesterday I fished out a crayfish from the creek.

It's been a very fun experience for all of us and I'm enjoying watching my family interact with the critters.

Day 5

Finally the rain stopped and the sun decided to give us some love. 

My goal was to ride with the family.

We managed a trip to the park early in the morning. Everyone was out to enjoy the sun and the warm temperatures. Our purpose at the park was to catch some live insects for our froglets. We're keeping them for now but I think their release is forthcoming. None of us really like catching insects and we're too cheap to buy live food from the pet store. 

The Bike Friday Family Tandem was bought off of the Tokyo Craigslist a couple weeks ago. Such a great bike. Miyo is a couple inches shy of fitting it comfortably but she seems to enjoy cruising with me. I didn't expect to buy anything like this, but I can already tell that this is going to change how we spend our time as a family and experience our world around us. It's also great because Elissa can ride it too.

I feel blessed to be able to enjoy cycling with my family. It's truly an activity I enjoy 110%.

We snuck out for another trip in the afternoon. We were all bored and weren't really motivated to do anything but decided to go do some shopping. This meant getting one of Miyo's favorite food items - the pretzel. There's only one place to get them that we know of so it's a very special occasion.

I even went for a third ride in the early evening and found a beautiful full moon. A wonderful end to a great day. Looking forward to more days like today.

Peace.

Day 4

I wanted to go out on a ride with the family today, but once again the weather didn't cooperate.
The weather guys told me we would have some sun today, but that didn't happen until 5pm.
Once again I took off into the drizzling, sunny early evening and went for a short ride.
It was great to see so many people getting out the enjoy the brief sunshine. I also noticed that because it's before dinner time, so there were all kinds of appetizing food aromas in the air from people preparing their meals. I think I smelled some curry.

No destination or purpose today. Just a fun ride.

This road was a new discovery. I always seek out secluded, quiet areas to ride. It dictates where I go most of the time. This is one of those roads. It's a short non-motorized use road running along the expressway pictured below. I've found many nice areas to ride along the expressways. Cars tend to stay away and building aren't built very close to them. This is the Tomei Expressway which will take you to Mt. Fuji.

Japanese style squatty potty. The pink suggests this is the ladies room. Hate using these but sometimes you have no choice. This public toilet is located on the expressway with access to it from the road I was riding in the picture above.

This is our neighborhood grocery store. It's very close to our apartment and a great place to shop. It's called Humming Stage. Strange name, not sure what it means. People put weird names on stuff over here but you get used to it quickly. The name seems normal to me now. I guess it could be Engrish but at least it's spelled correctly.

We're supposed to have a nice sunny day tomorrow. Hoping for a family funtime ride. Yeah.

Day 2 & 3

Day 2 was completely washed out due to a record breaking downpour. I had hoped for a break in the weather in the evening put it kept on raining. It rains quite a bit here. Apparently we're getting more than usual too. After 24 hours or so of miserable wet weather, I took off for a ride in the early evening on Day 3 and decided to do a 10 mile or so loop to check out the swelling Tama River.

By the way I'm writing this on Day 4. I'm a very slow writer and guess what, it's raining again!

Usually the cycling road along the river is packed with all kinds of people. It's called a cycling road so I use it all the time because it gets me out of traffic, but I feel bad for the walkers and runners that use it too. Most of the cyclist go too fast so I make sure to go slow and pay attention to other users. That's also why I stay away from this area on weekends.

This is one of my favorite activities - hitting some balls at the batting center. I stop by here often. It's on my way to work. Recently Under Armour took over it so it looks really American-which is too bad.
They sell a lot of their clothing inside and I've already seen some little kids wearing their signature tight fitting shirts. I was never very good at it, but I sure do miss playing baseball.

Day 2 and 3 made me realize how little I'm prepared to ride in the rain.  My bike doesn't have fenders and I've got zero rain gear. I wore a rain jacket but it was more like a sauna suit. My bike doesn't fit fenders - which I knew when I bought the bike - because I chose to run bigger tires. I don't have to ride in the rain and I usually choose not to anyway so it's not a huge deal, but when rainy days continue like it has, my butt and I wish we were able to stay a little drier.

Tadpoles

We recently adopted some tadpoles. We started out with 6 of them. We lost one early on and lost another last night. We currently have 4 super tiny froglets. They transformed super fast, I think in about three weeks. The tadpoles in the stream we caught them from don't even have legs yet. Apparently we're really good at raising them. Except for when they die.

After we lost the last fella, we learned that these frogs aren't the swim in the water kind. It's been very fun trying to figure out what they need to stay alive. They eat algae off boiled lettuce and enjoy munching on bugs. We've all enjoyed raising them. The plan is to release them before we kill them. They'll be missed but maybe we'll stock up on tadpoles again!

Speaking of tadpoles, we have a couple of our own. I think they kinda look like frogs too .....

Day 1

Coming straight from the suburban neighborhood somewhere southwest of the center of Metropolitan Tokyo, Japan, is Day 1 of what will hopefully be 30 consecutive days of active bike riding and photographying.

I was inspired to do this and wanted to sign up for it, but found out it was an April only event, so I decided to do my own thing for the month of May. My goal is to lose a few kilos while accruing some kilometerage while showing you where I live/ride. I'm actually very excited about doing this. Here's day number one.

One of my favorite destinations is this mega-cemetery. It sits atop a hill about a mile away from home. This is one of very few places I can ride my bike freely away from car traffic. It's also very quiet and clean. It gets busy on the weekends but there's hardly anyone there when I usually visit in the afternoons.

Visiting the cemetery is a very important function for Japanese people. They spend time cleaning and tidying their family plot and give it flowers, light some incense and sometimes leave gifts of food for their deceased ancestors. My Japanese family has a plot at a different cemetery. I shouldn't say that I enjoy visiting our family grave, but I feel a strong, special connection to my Japanese side when I spend time cleaning our tombstone.

Cats abound in the cemetery. 

View from cemetery. Surrounded by houses, houses and more houses.

These are our pet tadpoles caught at a river near our apartment. This picture is from 2 weeks ago.
Come back tomorrow for what they look like now....