08/27/2018, Monday - I want to quickly note down what happened during my bike ride yesterday. I went to see what happened to the tanzaku that I hung on a bush for Tanabata, for the most part. I managed to find it, which is rather surprising since there have been a number of windy and stormy days since I hung it up. It was on the ground below the branch, so it did fall off, but somehow wasn't swept away. The interesting thing is that… it had no text on it. There was no visible ink whatsoever. At first I thought that may have been due to it having rained a few times since then, but if that was the case, there would have probably been some smeared ink left on the card, at least. That made me think that a shinigami (or whatever god it is that grants your wishes on Tanabata) who erased it as a sign that they accepted my wish. Of course, I wasn't really serious in thinking this, but it's kind of what I hoped for. After a bit of thinking, I came up with a plausible explanation, which is that the sun burned the ink out. I'll probably attempt to recreate a similar card now and hang it somewhere to see if the same thing happens to it, and if it does, that likely means it wasn't any sort of mystic phenomenon.

The other thing I did on this ride is that I went to [redacted name of my middle school], as it was on the way to the mountain. Since a while ago, I got the idea to go dumpster diving, and I've done it a few times by now. However, I was able to find plenty of good stuff this time. Well, not really… but I did find an old CRT TV in one of the dumpsters, which was interesting, even if it was too deep for me to reach and turn around to see its screen. I reached in as far as I could, but couldn't get a good grip on it and it was too heavy to move. The other dumpsters also had some good stuff in them, however. I found some metal prongs that could be fun to mess around with and hid them under a tree near the elementary school that's by [redacted]. It's under the second big tree from when you enter that concrete path right after the bus loop, and just past the football field, if you're going in the direction of the mountain where I had my tanzaku. I also looked into some other dumpsters and it seemed like they had some school supplies and the like in them, but a car came so I wasn't able to stick around for long. The interesting thing to note here is probably that they throw away all this stuff around the same time each year - it's likely there because they're preparing for the start of the school year. I should check them out often again on this month of the next year. Maybe I'll set a reminder on Wunderlist to do so.