As obligatorily noted on my version’s cover, it’s now also a major animated motion picture out of France. Haven’t seen the movie yet, but I’m certainly into the book.

Asa wa yuki ga furu katta. It snowed again this morning… and through most of the day.

My nose dripped plenty of snot through most of today, too. It was the very liquid kind that just dribbles out of your nostril no matter how insistently and annoyingly you snort to keep it back. And even after you’ve blown some out. I seem to have caught my first cold for this year, my second since I moved to Japan. Thankfully, no one at work has forced a sick mask on me yet, so I do politely try to keep my germs to myself while I muddle through the day, drip dripping alongside the coffee maker.

Later, during lunchtime…. cause that’s when all the action seems to happen…

Well, it’d been about four days since I’ve been working at my regular junior high school because my job is divided between my main school and two elementary schools, so I was sizing up some of the older junior high boys during lunchtime as they came to pick up their food bins (don’t know what to call these containers) to bring and serve lunch to the other kids in their homeroom class. For some reason I had the breakthrough of, Whoa, these kids are tall! Because really they are, and not by some malnutritional Asian standard. These mountain people pack some serious centimeters. The girls aren’t far behind either. I was nearly squashed behind a group of guys monkeying around with each other, and afterwards fumbled a question out at the science teacher about whether the students had suddenly hit growth spurts since last week, cause damn if they didn’t seem huge all of a sudden. Most likely my skewed perspective came from looking down at kids who only go up to my navel (yes, that is possible) for so long. You get to measure their height precisely by the fact that those little ones insist on standing ever-so-close to you, even when you have an activated nose.

What’s the lesson learned? I don’t know. Japanese children grow like fish.. super tiny to monstrously huge. Retaining the exact same proportions throughout the process. No, not really. But, yeah, just feed ‘em balls of fishy stuff like what we get in school lunch. It seems to do the trick.