Postscript

Postscript

Postscript

I T’S DEFINITELY the warm season now, huh? Anywho! Hey, y’all. Kinugasa here.

I think people awaken to hobbies throughout their lives. I started trying to cook a while ago, and I’ve been increasing my repertoire of dishes, trying to make them even tastier through trial and error. I even got carried away and bought my own personal kitchen knife. In the past, my only hobby was watching baseball. While I’m impressed that I can still acquire new hobbies even at my age, I noticed something unusual regarding my hobbies…

As my children have been growing up, I’ve had to buy big blocks and stuffed toys for them, so I’ve inevitably had more opportunities to visit the toy store. During these trips, I unexpectedly felt an interest surge within me, and I reached for the Plarail toys. I know absolutely nothing about trains, but I was just like ‘Oh, hey, what? Just moving them around is surprisingly fun, huh?’ and well, that led to me buying them, and I started collecting tracks and making my own routes, running trains in parallel, buying RC trains…

I also started to get interested in stuff like mini 4WD, Nerf, board games, and more, and—oh no! Too many hobbies! I used to only buy toys for my children, but before I knew it, I ended up starting to buy toys for myself to play with. My recent favorites are Bottleman toys. They’re toys that can shoot plastic bottle caps. I remember that I used to play with toys called B-Daman (the predecessor to Bottleman?), and being, like, super hooked on them. That brought back some memories, which made me go out and collect them.

If I were hard pressed to describe myself, though, I’d say that I’m more of a minimalist, and I never had much interest in collecting things. And yet things have still turned out like this… Anyway, I wonder if the reason I feel like B-Daman is by far the most interesting is because I’ve grown up into an adult. Personally, I’ve wanted to try out Lego, which I yearned for ever since I was little, but I just can’t take that last step. Maybe because I think that if I try them out, it’ll really be over for me then. Someone stop me! (Or give me a push!)

Okay, with my status report out of the way, let’s talk a little bit about the books. Finally, the second semester and winter vacation have come to an end. Starting with the next volume, we’ll be getting to the story of the third semester. Unlike the second semester, which was rather long, I’m expecting that the third semester story will be about the same length as the third semester for the first-year arc. Perhaps even shorter, with slightly fewer books.

Anyway, I hope that you all keep cool during this hot season! Please take care not to get heatstroke and such. Let’s meet again around the time it gets cooler out.