Every time I sit back to write one of these, I try to look back at the day prior and reflect on a small lesson I may have learned, or one I already knew and have been reminded of. So as I sit at this laundromat or コインランドル (coin laundry) as it’s known in Japanese. The thoughts coming to my mind are, Family, Friends, and Football.

I’ve written blogs before about how I consider myself not the greatest of friends especially when it comes to the “keeping in touch” part of friendship. Only because I kind of feel like, for me at least, if I don’t hear from you, I don’t assume the worst of you or think you’re a bad friend for not checking in on me or saying happy birthday. Those kind of things don’t matter to me much in the grand scheme of things. However I can see it from the other side and completely understand how other people may appreciate and or want/need those kinds of acts of friendship.

When I come to Japan, I see friends of mine I haven’t seen in a year or more depending on the last time I came by, and it’s like we just saw each other yesterday. It makes me think about how back home there are friends of mine that I consider like family to me who I haven’t seen in even longer periods of time than that. All because like, idk, life gets in the way I guess.

I’m not going to promise to do better or make some kind of general sweeping notion that I’ll “reach out more” or anything like that. I’m old, truth is I’m probably more stubborn in my ways at this point than I realize myself. I will just say that I hope you understand, I do love and care for you.

Above is a picture of me and my nephew. To say that I love that young man with all my heart is an understatement. I try and spend at least one Saturday or Sunday with him every single weekend that I can. Which is usually most weekends. For those that don’t know he has SMA type 1. It’s a pretty debilitating illness and I wish I could take it from him so he could just like, walk. Enjoy life more, not get super sick when he just gets a cold. And a myriad of other things.

I bring up my nephew because yesterday I was hanging out with my Big Brother Dak and his 2 youngest kids for a majority of the day. It made me think about my nephew while I’m out here and miss him and then just had me thinking about family and how important it is.

I have pictures from yesterday, but out of privacy for Dak and his family I’m not going to post anything here on the blog with people’s faces and stuff that I haven’t asked permission for.

Anyway I’m not sure if anyone from my family is reading these but if you are, I thought about you yesterday and I love and appreciate you. I mean that.

And now you’re wondering, what the fuck does football have to do with this. Well I’m glad you asked (or didn’t)

One of my homies plays pro football out here in Japan. He had a game yesterday so we went to watch it and support him. It was interesting. The crowd was hype. A particular thing that had me laughing was that there were cheerleaders for the team, and the head cheer leader had a microphone with a loud speaker and she would lead the crowd in chants for the team. It was funny. Very different from football back home.

I’m sorry to say that my homies team last right at the end of the game. It was basically a 3-4 point difference between the teams the whole game it was crazy. The weather was super cold and rainy and no one left they just opened their umbrellas and chilled.

After that we went to book off bazaar, a huge thrift store. Dak bought the kids Pokémon cards. I just browsed. Then we went out to dinner and we all drank and chilled. Except Dak’s kids, they fell asleep at the restaurant lol. I’m sure they were dead tired we were running around all day.

Well, this is getting kind of losing and probably mostly uninteresting. So thanks again for reading, more blogs on the way and hopefully some vlogs with my footage after I get back home.