Yesterday’s walk with Pao by the Nakagawa. The sakura are still in full bloom. I haven’t been to any other places this year to check out the sakura. They are still advising against hanami at busy locations. But this is nice enough. Fairly peaceful (unless a motorcycle drives by and Pao leaps at it). We met another dog and he nearly ripped my finger off grabbing at a snack, which made me appreciate for the first time how gentle Pao is when taking food from strangers’ hands.
The sakura along the Nakagawa are definitely starting to bloom. It’s a lot more than 1% now. Maybe 5 or 10%. I doubt if it will be in full bloom by the weekend, but soon! Here are a few photos from my walk yesterday.
My account at Facebook remains disabled. I’m ok with the groups at Reddit for things like Whole Food Plant Based healthy eating, and war discussions, and so on. But I wonder what’s the best way to share little things with my extended circle of friends: old friends from college and grad school, friends from work at Fujitsu, and an extended circle of ex-pat friends in Japan going back decades? I can’t flood them with blog post emails multiple times a day. I would be fine not getting back into Facebook if there was an easy way to just share stuff. I guess I turned into a “sharing” type of person. Maybe I’ll just set something up at my private label social network and say, “visit if you are interested” and see who comes. People are resistant to joining “yet another” site though.
For once-ever-few-days sharing people are welcome to subscribe to my blog here.
And here are some sakura along the Nakagawa during my afternoon Pao walk.
We took Pao to the vet yesterday for his yearly rabies shot and ward office registration. Unlike Tao, who would turn away as soon as he realized we were heading in that direction, Pao loves the vet. As soon as we turn the corner heading in that direction he starts pulling harder and harder, like he can’t wait to get there. And once there, he’s all smiles and wagging tails.
The shot went fine. Hirokazu predicted that Pao gained weight and would be 29.5 kg. I guessed 28 kg. He was 28.5 kg, which is up 1 kg since the end of last year. The doctor said he’s a bit on the chubby side and we should be more careful about giving him too much food.
The “Doug/Pao” weight ratio has now dropped to 2.3. When he first came here, the same ratio was 107! (I’m down since then from 82.4 kg to 66.0 kg, and he’s up from 1.3 kg to 28.5 kg).
A few weeks ago I posted about how Chako was nearing the end (https://lerner.net/chako-a-quiet-update/) and how we were basically just trying to keep her comfortable.
Her condition got worse, and so I visited the local vet. He wasn’t familiar with the English “nine lives” expression, but after I explained it to him he said it sounded like Chako was at the end of her 9th life. He recommended I get a net laundry basket, and after making sure she was safely in that, to bring her in.
I picked one up at the 100 yen shop, and left it for my neighbor, Kogita-san. Unfortunately Kogita-san contracted Covid and while her symptoms weren’t severe, we couldn’t get together, and I could not get in back where Chako was.
I got her some soft nutritional snack tubes and left them for Kogita-san, who gave them to Chako. Chako actually started nibbling on them.
Kogita-san (who is all better now) reported that Chako started eating more and more of them. And yesterday reported that she’s been gobbling down regular canned food now, her eye seems to have cleared up, and she’s moving around again.
On to her 10th life.
