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.
While cloudy, it has warmed up. And the Sakura appear to be in full bloom along the river close to my house. We took a leisurely Sunday walk to check it out. I don’t think Pao glanced at a cherry blossom even one time.
During a cold, afternoon walk I saw a few sakura in bloom. I think it’s still around one percent. Maybe in another week it will get closer to full bloom. Here are a few today. The first two were shot in macro mode up really close. I love how that feature works. The warmer weather should rebound tomorrow.
Because of last week’s earthquake, and the sudden extreme cold (it snowed yesterday!) Tokyo has been on a possible power shortage alert. While peak usage reached 103% I think there were no power failures though.
In other news, my Facebook account has been disabled for the fourth time! Again, there was no explanation, and no mention of violations. I received a code on my iPhone, then uploaded a photo and ID to verify identity yesterday. Now I’m just waiting. It’s annoying because it cuts me off from various friends and also disables my Messenger account. Anyway, by now people know how to reach me otherwise (email, iMessage, LINE, WhatsApp, and text to my U.S. number too).
I’d really like to just get away from Facebook, but the problem is everybody has accounts there, and people are resistant to creating new general social network accounts elsewhere. And if I post miscellaneous tidbits of this and that to my blog it would swamp subscribers. On the plus side, it’s felt nice and quiet (except for Pao’s hyper-reactivity to sounds outside) and I could relax and get more work done.
The police were out en masse in front of my neighborhood supermarket this morning passing out these flyers.
The Olympic relay will be running right past my house on July 19!
There are all sorts of cautions about traffic and other things.