Spring is here. Well, I guess it started a week and a half ago. Many things are going on in life, but I decided to write a bit about the Spring to help clear my mind a bit.
Main Story: The Most Influential Season in my Life: Spring
It’s been a somewhat busy holiday, but something that has been both nice and terrible has been the spring flowers.
Nice because I like to see the flowers and feel the warmer weather before it becomes too hot to bear comfortably. The plum blossoms are my favorite, as they come in a wider variety of colors than cherry blossoms and they give off an amazing sweet scent. Cherry blossoms don’t really carry much scent, but they are quite beautiful and I understand the significance of change that they carry in the culture. It is very beautiful to see a flurry of sakura pedals drifting down on the wind like snow when their time to fall has come.
Plum blossoms covered in snow this year. So lovely!
Terrible because I’m allergic to sakura. I developed this a few years ago while living in Kawagoe, and it’s made the start of spring particularly difficult for me.
Terrible too because everything is starting to blossom sooner and sooner. I believe we have climate change to thank for that. The winters here are getting shorter and less severe, while the flowering starts earlier and earlier.
A lot of Japan is classified as flood plains, so you’ll find tons of rivers lined with cherry blossoms!
Back in 2017 when I first arrived, cherry blossoms wouldn’t really reach peak bloom until early April, which is why so many graduations and entrance ceremonies for schools are scheduled around there. This way, we can use the ephemeral nature of the cherry blossom as a symbolic changing of the different seasons of our lives.
Now, in 2026, they’re blooming nearly three weeks earlier. There are already some of the early blossiming trees completely done with their flowers, now fully green and ready to catch some summer rays. It’s a bit wild to have lived here for what, in the long scheme of things, isn’t a long stint, but nine years is enough time to see the effects of a changing climate in a real, measurable way.
It’s also been a good time to clean up the garden: removing old plants, trimming bits, getting seeds going, and reorganizing the setup. I also took a load of time to clean off our woefully disgusting deck chairs so we would enjoy the balcony weather. We get a good amount of sun during the day, while the balcony of our upstairs neighbor provides shade that covers our heads about 80% of the day. It’s lovely to go out there and enjoy some tea or coffee and watch the trains (and sometimes boats!) go by.
Speaking of garden…
Good Thing: Blooming Cactus
I grow succulents and cacti wherever I go now, it seems, and in the rare year they choose to bloom, it brings me immense joy. This year, my insanely large dollar-store cactus started popping off. I would never had noticed it had I not been on our balcony watering plants and took a minute to look at the plant from the other side. I love these little flowers so much! It’s wild to think that all of these plants I got from dollar stores years ago.
This one that’s branching out was actually a piece of the flowering one, knocked off by Halee as she walked by the plant one day and accidentally ran into it. This was many, many years ago when we were still relatively fresh in Saitama. I was really upset at the time, but I left the nub on my desk, too busy with life to figure out what to do with it. Eventually, I noticed that it started to sprout roots, and decided to plant it in an overly large pot (only one we had at the time). It took root, grew some friends, and now it’s going strong years later here in Tokyo.
Miscellaneous Media
I played all three original Dark Souls games, having purchased them for myself on sale for Christmas. Here are my brief thoughts:
Dark Souls 1: Still holds up quite well! Very tight, balance feels good, few odd hit boxes but not so janky as people described. I can see now why this is held is such high regard. It’s amazing to see how they took the ideas from the preceding game, Demon’s Souls, and expanded on them to make it just infinitely better.
Dark Souls 2: The neglected bastard of the trilogy. Has odd choices with mechanics, especially with movement, and the updated Scholar of the First Sin edition just added too many enemies in areas that makes exploring more of a chore than an exciting adventure. I got a bit bored with it and stopped— I may try to pick it up again in the future. I really want to like games that aren’t super polished because one of my favorite games, No More Heroes, is definitely lacking a lot mechanically, but I still really enjoy it. Maybe now is just not the right time to pick this one up.
Dark Souls 3: Developed after Bloodborne, and you can really see the influences from that game all over the place. Lots of references to DS1 and DS2, considering this is the final chapter of the story. As someone with no nostalgia for the series, it almost feels like, at times, there’s too much homage from the first two games. Definitely the tightest mechanically, lovely story, a blast to play.
I also saw Chris Fleming’s HBO special, which I highly recommend. He has a very niche style of humor, so try watching some of his YouTube clips and skits to see if it clicks with you. He also has amazing interviews with fellow comedian Calbe Hearon on Caleb’s podcast, So True, which are all worth listening to for a good laugh.
