It has been a couple of months since my last blog post. Generally things have been moving along smoothly, but as usual the number of events tends to pick up at the end of the year.
On Monday night we had a chance to meet up with Jason Brenner and his wife Sandra in Osaka. It has been years (20? 30?) since I’ve seen Jason, and thanks to Facebook we were able to reconnect and meet up on the other side of the world in Japan. Jason and his wife were traveling a bit through Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka and we caught them on their last night in town before flying back to California.
It was a little surreal to sit across from them and catch up on all the old stories and memories from growing up together in Glen Ellen and Sonoma. Then we caught each other up on what we’ve been doing since high school graduation, and there were some interesting similarities. Like me, Jason had studied winemaking (me at Fresno, him at UC Davis), like him I had worked for a stint in Silicon Valley in the tech business, and it turned out that we both shared an intense love for the Japanese 7-11 convenience store egg salad sandwiches. Unreal!
We talked over a dinner of okonomiyaki, beef skewers and grilled edamame, and then we headed to Grand Front to have some drinks at a bar. We had a great time with them, and I certainly hope they’ll be back in the future, maybe next time with their entire family.
Talking to old friends seemed to initiate for me a sort of mental time machine, and the past few days I’ve been remembering various stages of my life and realizing how I’ve been so lucky with each one. It also makes me wonder what I’ll think of my current life stage once I get older. Will I think about it as a sort of settling down? The calm before the storm? I’ll just have to wait and see.
We are nearing the end of November, and that means that the weather is cooling down, the electric blankets come out, the year end parties get started, the Christmas tree should go up, packing for our trip to America in a few weeks, last minute Christmas shopping, and of course, we need to celebrate our 13th wedding anniversary.
This year we’re celebrating on Thursday the 22nd of November because the next day is a national holiday and we can go out after work and enjoy some good food and wine and not worry too much about the repercussions. We’ll try a new place this year, and we continue our quest for.the “best restaurant in Kobe”.
With all the excitement next month it may be tough to write updates, but I’ll try to be better about that so someday I’ll be able to look back at these posts and not have to wonder what the hell I did in big two month gaps…
