A quarter of a century ago, I wrote my first blog post back when Mediatinker was an experiment hosted on Blogger.

Today’s Weather in Tokyo: hot and humid. (It is summer after all!)

It was quickly followed by a second post where I described the state of my urban garden. And here I am a twenty five years later, still writing about my life in Japan. I still have a garden, and summers are hotter than ever.

In fact this morning at 5:20 am, hoping to beat the heat, I attended to some gardening. Outside in my pajamas, I cut back groundcover that had crept across the flagstones.

Around 5:45, after I finished with my secateurs, Naomi texted and we met for a walk. We saw Hitomi and Kengo just as they were starting Radio Taiso, so we joined in and moved our bodies in the traditional figures. I remembered gathering for Radio Taiso sessions in the early mornings in the neighborhood parks in Tokyo.

It feels like true summer now. Through all the years and in every season, I’ve been writing. Mediatinker currently has 3,552 posts published, though 2,999 of them were written in the first ten years.

The blog suffered years with minimal posts because I was using social media more heavily to document my life. At some point maybe I will reclaim the writing from Facebook and put it here for posterity. The blog’s a little crufty when you dig deep. And with all the system changes over the years, old photos don’t load and external links are long gone.

Will I manage to keep up another 25 years of personal reflections, tutorials, and gardening reports? Today we paid the 4th year of our 30 year lease at 555, so it’s possible that I’ll be here in this exact same spot sitting at my desk in the loft on July 22, 2050. I hope so.