Hugh Cook's diary - writer's diary - life in Japan etc - blog - Japan - life in Japan - daily life - Japanese culture - Japan journal - baby - lifewith baby - Japanese baby - baby in Japan - baby developments - living withbaby diary blog writer's diary

2004 December 06 Monday.
Baby Cornucopia, now seven months old, is developing at a fantastic pace.

2004 November 27 Saturday.
Looking through the stats for the website for November ... distressingly few people searching for "Hugh Cook"

2004 November 27 Saturday.
A young woman stood up for me in the train the other day, yielding me my seat. I was most surprised. And embarrassed. Even though she had a reason to give up her seat

2004 November 27 Saturday.
So baby Cornucopia got taken by her mother to a special lecture on baby food which was for babies aged seven and eight months and their mothers. And every single baby who attended the lecture was quiet, and sat neatly on mother's lap, and listened attentively. Every baby but one.

2004 November 26 Friday.
Feedback on the petroleum jelly entry and on the snot-sucking machine. One the petroleum jelly from a flesh-and-blood human being who asked me if I really put petroleum jelly up my nose, and, if so, how much?

2004 November 24 Wednesday.
A public holiday yesterday, so we all three of us went to the zoo, me and my wife and the baby. The zoo we went to was Nogeyama Zoo, in Yokohama

2004 November 23 Tuesday.
And it's finished. And it's posted online. A story in the spirit of Christmas, 2\004.

2004 November 22 Monday.
An empty schedule this Monday morning, so a good chance to plan my lessons, catch up on paperwork and clean up my room.

2004 November 21 Sunday.
And just when you thought you'd seen it all, that the boring old universe had no more surprises in store, here it is: the amazing snot-sucking machine! Machine? Well, actually, since it has no working parts, it would be better to call it a "device." And perhaps "snot" is too pungent for the liquid to be sucked out of baby's runny nose.

That's what it's for: it's for mother to suck out the contents of baby's runny nose.

2004 November 20 Saturday.
One of the tenets of our Unified Domestic Theory is that the stereo stack is not for climbing on

2004 November 18 Thursday.
Over the last few days, it has become convincingly cold. Winter has really come, and I've once again started putting petroleum jelly up my nose.

2004 November 17 Wednesday.
Had a spare five minutes to check Google news today and was jolted by electrifying news: prolonged computer use may be a cause of blindness.

2004 November 16 Tuesday.
So a guy e-mails me from out of the blue and asks, well, how's it working out for you, the website and the print-on-demand thing?

2004 November 10 Wednesday.
At six months of age, baby Cornucopia still cannot crawl forwards, though she is continually trying to do just that. But she can crawl in circles

2004 November 8 Monday.
Today I was working at a computer in a building in the heart of Tokyo when an earthquake rocked through

2004 November 6 Saturday.
Q and A about Japanese paper windows - got an e-mail asking about the paper windows in Japan, so decided not just to answer it but to put the answers here as well.

2004 November 5 Friday.
Whoops! I got home from work last night and found that the Deconstructivist of the household, Miss Six Months Old, had been practicing her artistic talents on our Japanese paper windows

2004 November 2 Tuesday.
At six months of age, my baby daughter Cornucopia is on the verge of talking. She is certainly vocalizing loudly

2004 November 1 Monday.
At six months of age, my baby daughter, Cornucopia, has begun to demonstrate her artistic ability. She has begun to work (and to work with great energy, let me say) with paper tissues, producing a series of works in the Deconstructivist mode.

2004 October 31 Sunday.
Before going to the barber's today, I double-checked the Japanese for "parting." And just as well. The word I had in mind was wakame, but that, apparently, means "seaweed." The word I needed was

2004 October 30 Saturday.
It's Saturday, and in my part of Japan it's a little cold and a little rainy. In keeping with my customary Saturday routine, I go on a shopping trip. My route takes me past a cafe which advertizes, in English-language signage, the availability of, amongst other things, club sand, hot sand, and cafe ratte.

2004 October 27 Wednesday.
Pretty busy these days, what with my job and my baby daughter. I don't have much time left for my website, and I have even less time left for answering the trickle of e-mail that comes my way.

2004 October 26 Tuesday.
Damn! No lettuce!

2004 October 25 Monday.
Random notes from a sleepless hour. A sharp jerk from the earth at about 05:30 this morning, not enough to have woken me up, had I been asleep. Presumably our share of one of the continuing series of earthquakes in Niigata.

2004 October 24 Sunday.
Yesterday evening, just before six o'clock, the house here in the city of Yokohama on the east coast of the island of Honshu (the largest of Japan's four main islands) began to shake with a prolonged earth tremor.

2004 October 23 Saturday.
Usually I do the grocery shopping on Saturdays and usually I'm trusted to do it without supervisory inputs, but today I got special instructions not to buy any leafy green vegetables. Why? Because of Typhoon Number Twenty-three.

2004 October 22 Friday.
Last weekend, another typhoon hit Japan, in Japanese parlance Typhoon Number 23, the tenth typhoon this year to make a landfall on the Japanese mainland, which apparently is a record. The typhoons seem to have been influenced by disaster movies

2004 October 16 Saturday.
I got a question about the literary influences on my ten-volume fantasy series

2004 October 13 Wednesday.
Got a question by e-mail: "Do you think of yourself as a New Zealand author still, or a Japanese author? Does such a distinction make sense in your case?"