Asakiyume mita

A fine vintage of honey
The unspoilingness of honey. I can't get over it. I'm going to buy some honey this summer and put it away, a flavor time capsule, and break it out on some later date--the flower vintage of 2012. And there may be a story in that, maybe. Though, bee stories tend to fly away from me.

Cell phone novel
Little Springtime was hard at work, an air of severe concentration on her face, when the ninja girl and I went to get lunch just now.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm writing a cell phone novel," she said. "Last year I started a novel in Japanese and English, and I thought, 'There's no possible market for this,' but then I found out about cell phone novels, in Japan. People upload them and share them. I've joined this site ... I don't know how to change the genre, though. Right now I'm down as その他 ["sono hoka" = "other"] but really it should be 恋愛：切ない ["ren-ai: setsunai" = "romantic love: sad"]. It's amazing how many different flavors of ren-ai there are ... There's ren-ai: highschool, and ren-ai: office, and ren-ai: sad ..."

"Wait, but what if your highschool ren-ai story is a sad one?" I asked.

"Well, you go by the most salient characteristic, I'm thinking," she said. Sensible answer.

ETA She's already had feedback on her first installment! The person who commented said (I'm translating) "At any rate, your English is excellent! I'm excited for the next installment." And they said it felt very authentic. Oh Japan. How do you be so awesome?

Scrutible
Jiji-the-kitten is very scrutible. You can see the wheels turning in his head. Looking at him and reading his thoughts in the twitches of his ears and the change in his posture, I wonder if this scrutibility of cats gave L. Frank Baum the idea for the Glass Cat, who was so proud of her pink and purple whirling brains, visible in her glass head.

The Glass Cat

A bird flew right into the light of the sun, and when it did, its wings were like flames or lightning. Maybe you can imagine it: look at the blue below, where the house is kindly shielding your eyes from the sun. Now imagine moving a little to the left, so the sun is just visible--and a bird is flying up there, and its wings have all the sun's brightness caught in the feathers.



And speaking of wings--safe travels and best adventures to Little Springtime, off to the land of her birth, the land of the rising sun, for a year in a Japanese high school.