My mom’s out of the hospital! Hooray! And since she sounded fine the first day, and even better on subsequent days, I’m thinking she’s fine. She probably just had poo-related problems. That’s my opinion and the opinion of at least 2 of the 3 Drs. Kawasaki.

I spent the day with my aunt and my pseudo-aunt and pseudo-uncle. I have pictures of most of the day in fuzzy iPhone style. It should have been multimegapixel sharpness since I bought a new digital camera, but it turns out that when they tell you that the battery isn’t pre-charged in Japan, they mean it.

In any case, I wasn’t bleary from the middle-of-the-night 3AM phone call from the burglar alarm company (the contractors disconnected the fire alarm again), nor was I too bad off from my friend’s SMS text message asking for my address soon afterwards. I boldly went forth to stand in front of the shiny camera display and bought another Panasonic Lumix, this time an DMC-FX37. As I mentioned earlier, it didn’t have any electrons in the battery, so it was a paperweight today. It would have done a much better job of the field of cosmos than my iPhone.

I probably would have taken a lot more pictures of the flora if I didn’t think that would turn me into my father. I’m already collecting cameras like he did.

My uncle has weird ideas of how I need to eat more meat or something, so he took me to the “Volks Family Restaurant” where he told me to order a lunch steak like he did. I had a doria instead. It’s sorta like a casserole. Volks was near his prize-winning garden (he won a prize last year and this year as well).

There’s both my pseudo-aunt and pseudo-uncle at the garden.

The garden and Volks are also close to the Minoo waterfall. I haven’t been there since my first date with my ex-fiancee about 20 years ago. Here’s my aunt (on the right) and my pseudo-aunt in front of the waterfall.

We hung around their house for a while and had dinner at the cafeteria near the garden. Today I had several of the things I wanted to eat last year all on the same day again: roasted Japanese sweet potatoes at the waterfall, and croquettes and roast mackerel at the cafeteria. Oh, and a co-worker from Mitsubishi who lives in my relatives’ neighborhood stopped by and we talked about old times for a while. Another uneventful but fun day in Japan.