It’s been awhile since I took my last flower arrangement class (it has also been awhile since I last blogged), but here is my latest work. It’s a dried flower arrangement and will supposedly last for about two years. The trick is to keep it out of moisture while preventing it from drying up. If anyone figures out how to do that, let me know.

If you’re ever in Nakano, one stop on the Chuo Line from Shinjuku, I recommend a little music store called Nakano Meikyoku Do. It’s located on the second floor of the Nakano Broadway shopping mall hidden in a corner. Look for the little store with shelves of cassette tapes on the right, and rows of coffee cups behind the cash register. Don’t let the man at the store scare you. He’s an eccentric but nice man and will serve you the best cup of coffee you’ve ever had if you’re lucky.

My mom and I were shopping there last weekend. Despite it’s shady ambience, we spent a very pleasant and interesting hour there. We didn’t spend time going through the shop’s selection, which is solid but small, but we just hung out.

It turns out that my mom is sort of an old regular there, or at least as regular a customer as you can be when you live in New York. The owner didn’t remember her, but when she mentioned that he treated her to coffee once, he invited us to sit down and have coffee with him. He let us choose our favorite cup and served us better coffee than I’ve had in many cafes — he apparently goes through 10 kilograms of coffee a month although summers are slow because it’s so hot. While we sipped our coffees, he played a cassette for us with some old Japanese comedy routine/riddles and challenged us to guess the answer (we got one right and one wrong).

It’s nice to know this kind of old local store still exists in thoroughly modern Tokyo. If you would like a cup of coffee at this place, my suggestion would be to ask about his coffee cups. That should get him going in the right direction.

I’m so glad Noguchi-san got home safely. Well, not really home, but at least back on earth.

You see, Noguchi-san was one of the astronauts on the Space Shuttle Discovery. Japan has been very pre-occupied with his welfare over the past several weeks, myself included. First, we were all concerned that he wouldn’t be able to go to space because of the bad weather. Then we were afraid he wouldn’t be able to get back. In between, his hometown worried that he wouldn’t be able to realize his dream of seeing it from outerspace, so they flashed a couple big searchlights around the time the space shuttle was passing over Japan. I thought that was pretty cool.

Noguchi-san is probably one of the few people that actually realized a first grade dream. For those skeptics, we know this is so because he wrote about how he wanted to become an astronaut in one of his first essays, which has been shown in dozens of television shows. The other half of the story is that even after he was accepted into the astronaut program, his shuttle trips kept getting canceled for one reason or another. He apparently holds the record for the number of underwater simulation exercises a person has participated in by a factor of 10 or 20 or something insane like that. He’s been waiting to go to space for about 10 years, and this may have been his last chance given his age (40).

I think a lot of people were glad for him when he finally got to space.