Friday July 26

2:30 p.m., Mellow Café

I actually was planning on going nowhere today. Last night something a bit frightening happened -- I was awoken at 2 or so with a terrific pain right beneath my breastbone -- like a bluntishly pointed object was pressing against it from within . . . and no matter which way I tried to turn, the pain remained or got worse. It was the kind of pain you can't just ignore and turn over and try to get back to sleep . . . very disturbing.

It had only happened a couple of times before and what I remember from those times was that I had been drinking Kahlua in somewhat large quantities on those evenings. Well, last night there was no Kahlua, but I did eat two insanely chocolatey cakes from that cake place we go to, Sourire d'Anges. Together they must have amounted to about 100 grams of fat or more, so I'm wondering if my pancreas just went into horror mode. That's all I can think of.

For some reason I've been eating far more since I've been here than ever in Montreal. In Montreal, I will go whole days in which I have no appetite at all; indeed, while Brigitte was gone, on at least two occasions I was so un-hungry that I resorted to drinking those meal-replacement things they give to people who either can't eat solid food or have no appetite.

I'm still feeling a bit weird, but I will definitely be going easy on the incredible cake I'll be picking up for Tai-chan's little birthday party this evening. If he shows up, that is. His mother's kid is out of the hospital so she's out too, and who knows, she might just arbitrarily decided that he not come over today. I never know with her.

One week from today it will be my last afternoon in Japan. A week from tomorrow I will be on an early-morning bus to Kansai airport, where I will be checking in for my China Airlines 1 p.m. flight to JFK. This time the flight ail *only* be 12 or 13 hours. Wowee.

I'll have about 6 hours to kill in JFK. I'm hoping I can scope out what it would be like to get Tai-chan to take the flight by himself next summer -- it would be the first time he's flown alone, although it's so pathetically easy he should have no troubles at all. I just have to meet him at his gate in New York and then take him to Montreal. What could be easier?

Well, it all depends on his singularly uncooperative mother, who is famous for reversing herself for little more than a whim, heedless of whether thousands of dollars are at stake or not.

We shall see!

Since Tai-chan took to my iPad Mini like a fish to a bicycle, I have taken the liberty of ordering one from the Japanese Apple Store. It will blow his mind.

Today is easily the hottest day of the trip so far -- it's like standing in front of a blast furnace on the sidewalk, which itself radiates the heat back up in spades. So, we're looking at 35° (95F) just in air temp but actually more like 40°C (104F) with the radiated heat from the ground.

Now it's off to the cake shop to see if they've received my masterpiece of a cake . . . it's a sculpture fit for the gods.