Ordered Pixel 8 Pro for me and Pixel 8 for my wife.
We have used iPhone 11 and XR over 4 years, and I think now can be the timing for renewing as Google Stores is offering discount and some refund via store credit.

My wife is positive for the purchase yesterday, but today she turned to negative mode. It’s opposite mood.
She is nervous about the change of operation system as she is not good at catching up IT stuff.
But the problem is I already ordered mine yesterday, and today was the timing to order her Pixel8 by using 50k yen worth credit.

Anyway I ordered for her as well.
Hope she won’t get hysteric.

Finished filing tax return.
Thanks to RSU and ESPP, I had quite big income except for usual salary and bonus, and I need to pay taxes a lot. Around 1M yen.

My total salary crossed 20M in 2023 first time.
This can be one mile stone.
But this doesn’t mean much for my life.
I can expect there’s not much meaning or impact on my life if my income exceed 25M or 30M.
Still I need to work in case with those “small” amount of money.

Quality of life is not so depending on money.
This is common sense for matured people, but I learned finally at age of 40.

Went to Aquarium located in Ibaraki/Oarai.
Then, I ate anglerfish hot pot as lunch, then we enjoyed hot spring.

It’s been a while/sometime for driving to a bit far place (took 2hours or more) as single-day trip.
I believe this type of experience is helpful from various perspective for human being.

Last week was not good actually.
Maybe my health condition was not good, too, as mental and body health is linked.

This type of experience remind me that forgetting non-good stuff is very important capability of us.
Once we forget, the thing or people, experience itself will disappear in my life.

I’m not a big fun of Kou Machida.
But I’m reading his book “私の文学史 なぜ俺はこんな人間になったのか？” and find this quite interesting.

What I come to know is he is deep thinker about literature.
This itself might be super obvious as he is professional.
But without considering those background, and I just thinks what he is thinking and saying is gripping.

He is saying true thing is intriguing.
And this is applicable to what he wrote, I think.

My company announced 5%(4000 headcount) layoff this week.
This itself is not so special. Same volume of restructuring was done also last year.

But what special is my closest colleague in Australia got impacted this time.
He has 2 month time to decide next step.

Might be selfish but this impact on me as well, and a lot.
Since he is the only co-worker having weekly call and we can have casual talk and joking as well.
And I don’t have those kind of friendly relations with other “foreign” colleagues.

I still have co-worker in other department or ex-team in Japan org.
But that’s a bit different.

I feel sort of depression by this news.

It was relatively busy in this beginning of the year.
While I’m spending my time for the work, private life is getting more monotone.

This Saturday, we will have a bunk bed for my daughters, and sometimes we go out together as family.
Those small update or news is enjoyable, but for some reason, my life becomes monotonous.

Maybe I’m getting more used to everything because of the experiences.
Speed of spending time is also getting faster and faster.

And I’m trying to adjust myself to this 40s life which is already full of routines.

Busy and can’t afford to do something is different concept.
I should be less busier than last year end, as I needed to spend all the free night time for the session in Melbourne.

But I couldn’t spend any time to put some post here.
It’s because there was no room for that in my life.

Today I finished Raising Loop, it’s a adventure novel game.
It’s great game to forget time and play, the plot and story line is engaging.

Maybe now it’s better to use time to replay and think back my life today and recently.

The New Year’s holiday went by so fast.
I don’t have any new year resolution this year.

Even today, I couldn’t find anything I wanted to do after putting my daughters to sleep.
Doing job is also not an option for me to spend time in night time.

I will turn 41 this year.

It’ll be time to go back to my and my wife’s hometown.
It’ll be over very soon as usual.

My elder daughter go to private school, so 29th Dec is the day to go back.
And my wife’s home town will be first destination as usual.

This is mainly why my wife can leverage laundry machine located in her home.
She is not so comfortable to use the cloth washer in my home.

There’s very limited stress, but it doesn’t mean I’m living in dream world.
Still I’m living with my reality, and I started to notice this reality part will not be changed drastically even with more money.
Even if I’m billionaire, still most part of my reality will be same and I need to spend my time in my life.

I turned 40 this year.
My job carrier is moving toward the finale as half of my career was done.

There’s no meaning in the each person’s life and reality, but still we can discover the meaning (even though it’s not existing).
This might be the next target in next round of my life.

Really looking forward to having year end and new year holiday.
Everyone will take days off, so it’s very comfortable to take off too.

This weekend we went to Izu for family trip.
The hotel was a bit high class, so it took about 100k yen for 1 stay, though the room doesn’t have dedicated hot spring bath.
Grilled abalone(Awabi) is 5500 yen, but I additionally ordered for my daughter.
My wife and I didn’t experience this kind of gorgeous trip, though I understand this is not so/really high rank.

I’m not motivated for the work at all this week, we are just counting time for year-end vacation.