Microblog

It has been an inflation-beating week. Tuesday: 20% senior discount at Coastal Seafoods. Later I learned about Wedge Co-op’s 5% off for seniors on Wednesdays. Today: a surprise BOGO (Buy One, Get One) on ice cream at Lunds & Byerlys. (Grand Ole [Creamery] is a local ice cream maker.) Life’s good.

Noticed this announcement at Wedge Co-op where I stopped to cool off with a dish of vegan vanilla coconut milk soft-serve. We spend a lot of our grocery dollars at the Wedge, so I think we’ll be making a point of shopping there on Wednesdays from now on. Maybe we’ll get carded!

With most university students gone for the summer, it was finally possible to quickly snag one of the 14 stools at 1950s-era Al’s Breakfast in Dinkytown. The corned beef hash with a fried egg on top in the narrowest restaurant in Minneapolis was sublime.

Cycled down to this Minnehaha Falls overlook to meet my friend for a walk, cuppa, and catch-up.

Hotel rooms in Japan typically provide prefilled coffee filters like these in sealed packets. Today, received empty filters from Amazon we’ll use on future travels to hotels that don’t provide coffee in the room. We’ll simply spoon in ground coffee before pouring the hot water.

Converted our digital recipe box from Evernote to a folder of .docx recipe files in Google Drive. Evernote is changing ownership, with substantial layoffs, which makes me want to secure our recipes in a standard, open, Web-accessible format that is not dependent on a single company.

Today is Sausage Saturday, a tradition that always includes ice cream. The big question is: which flavor goes better with rhubarb sauce, vanilla or caramel? I suspect the answer is: both. Yesterday, Dwight made the sauce from rhubarb he’d harvested from his sister’s garden.

Cycled past art that will soon disappear from a trail beside the Mississippi.

Problem: Working through a 14-hour time difference, and too lazy/tired to cook dinner. Solution: Walk across Washington Avenue to Maxwell’s.

The last time I saw my oncologist, he had a Japanese medical student in tow. Naturally, the conversation turned to Japanese Kit Kats. Today, I presented my oncologist and the study coordinator with this box of Japanese matcha Kit Kats, proving that I wasn’t kidding.

Sat in Lunds & Byerly’s, consuming a donut and coffee, and watched as a downpour drowned my bike. A few minutes earlier, the heavens had opened as I was locking up the bike, soaking me to the skin. Back home, a hot shower made everything OK.

Stowed our backpacks in lockers while we walked around Tokyo’s Ueno Park before we headed to Tokyo HND for our journey home. Lockers are ubiquitous.

Mount Fuji from a fast train to Tokyo. Tomorrow we head home.

Rain set in for much of the day, but we never had to put on rain jackets. We took a 15-minute bullet train to Osaka, where we walked a few miles through the city’s vast indoor spaces, both above and below ground. A side trip to the Cup Noodles Museum added variety.

Took a local train to Kurama, a village on a mountain above Kyoto. Hiked a quiet trail up and over Mount Kurama, passing through a temple complex and past shrines and ancient trees. Rejoined the train line for the trip back to Kyoto.

We introduced our nephew and his dad to Kyoto’s over-loved bucket list favorite, Kiyomizu-dera Temple, in order to build the case for exploring B-list Kyoto. After that initiation, we walked towards quieter places.