A bit of gentle Japanese music


Because La Serpiente is in Japanese classes at her pre-school, my wife asked the teacher to give us some of the songs that they sing, so we can sing them at home with her. A USB drive went off to school, and came back with some files, and today I got round to loading them onto my computer.

This morning I got up at 6 and ran over to the East Coast for the parkrun, so I was rather knackered. After the run I’d met up with my wife and the kids and an ex-colleague for brunch, so rather than doing what would have been sensible (going home and going back to bed) I’d deprived myself of sleep in favour of eating eggs and chocolate. So my mind wasn’t perhaps as strong as it should have been.

Thus I wasn’t as surprised as I should have been, when instead of Japanese folk songs about acorns, my computer began to blare fairly terrible Japanese hard rock. Well, all terrible hard rock sounds pretty similar, so I could just have easily said terrible hard rock with Japanese "singing".

Either way, La Serpiente was not very impressed by the Japanese equivalent of Whitesnake coming at her, when she had been expecting small children singing "domburi buri buri". How I never fail to disappoint my children…

I’m not sure why, but La Serpiente only napped for 45 minutes today, and as a result melted down from lack of sleep in the afternoon. We took her back to Queenstown Library, borrowed another 13 childrens’ books, and then went home. On the way back we stopped for dinner at YOLO, which I had assumed was a deep fried chicken wings outlet, but turns out to be a curiously healthy restaurant. Or healthy in a curious way, because all the items on the menu were labelled as being less than 300 calories, or less than 600 calories, as if that was a feature, not a bug.

I had a portion of rice and broccoli and then, still starving when I got home, ate fake chicken nuggets and real toast, neither of which are things you’ll eat just because you’ll only live once, right?

That meant we didn’t get La Serpiente to bed until well past eight tonight, but that’s the new secret weapon in making her sleep – she was so tired that after a few protests that she had to have her mother come to her before she’d deign to sleep, she passed out cold, allowing me the singular joy of sneaking into the living room to spend my Saturday night working on client presentations for Monday morning. Meanwhile my wife, who’d been woken up the instant I left the house for my run this morning and had had 15 minutes sleep since then, conked out on the sofa.

Another sociable Saturday, in other words.


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