Happy Setsubun, Feb. 3rd

Sigh. Apparently I neglected to upload the below photo yesterday. So I'm going to combine two days of entries here.



Have a nice demon-casting-out day, from your friends at Shiro Hair Salon.



One of the grocery stores had a Setsubun mask promotion. Buy a bag of dried beans to throw at demons, and get a free paper mask (the Shogi Oni, or an Okame woman). The character designs for the kids were taken from Himitsu no Akko-chan (Akko-chan is Secret), but I can't remember the name of it right now.



Wear a mask and play Shogi.



Feb. 3rd was Sunday, and there was supposed to be a big bean throwing event at Terukuni shrine, but I wasn't sure exactly what time. I've been at past throwings, and they're a crazy mob. I usually end up being at the back of the crowd, where nothing ever reaches. People closer to the stage fight over little 1 cent bags of dried beans or 5 cent protective amulets, and I don't see the appeal in that. At 1 PM, I decided to get outside, and I walked by Terukuni on my way to Tenmonkan and then to Amu Plaza. It was raining heavily, and the shrine was abandoned.



I couldn't tell if the event was held at 11 AM and was therefore long over, or if it had been cancelled. There weren't many footprints in the mud near the stage, but a little farther out there was one piece of blue paper folded into a little envelope on the ground. The evidence points both ways. Regardless, it was a miserable day, and nothing else was going on (the past 2-3 weeks have been dead event- and music-wise. I went to Amu Plaza to look at 3D wood puzzles in Kinokuniya (nothing I want to buy right now), and then sat in a coffee shop for a couple hours solving a cipher puzzle from the American Cryptogram Association's The Cryptogram newsletter (the Cm comes out every 2 months, and I joined last year. The cipher was a Monome-Dinome, which I was trying for the first time, and was pretty easy to solve.) Then I went back home and worked on my science and math blog, writing about Swagman and Monome-Dinome ciphers, for the rest of the day. Nothing really spectacular. No big events coming up.