Working

Today's post is going to be long and a lot of memories...  Maybe Takumi or Leiya will be interested.

Last night Tetsu came home with a bouquet of flowers.  It was his last day at his office where he has been for the past 10 years.  This is not retirement but rather a change of workplace... From today, he will be working for the same organization in a different facility in a different city.  This morning Tetsu left earlier than usual to start new responsibilities.

When I met Tetsu he was 23 years old and had just moved back to the city where I had arrived to start a two year missionary commitment.  His father had died the month before and through a brother-in-law connection he landed a job with a loan company.  Though he'd studied something else in college and had planned to go into a different line of work, he returned to live with his mother and work in an office spending his days moving currency and numbers.  It was a good job in a nationwide company but Japan's social climate frowned on such companies labeling them as loan sharks.  People's eyebrows rose when Tetsu mentioned where he worked.

A couple of years after meeting Tetsu and I married and according to company policy Tetsu was transferred to another office in another prefecture.  We lived there a year and then Tetsu was transferred again.  And that was how we could see our life going...  A year here, a year there...  Tetsu moving up in the company, financially secure.  It was all fine and dandy.

At the second transfer Tetsu was actually the office manager and a humorous (nowadays) incident that occurred was that one night the loan office was robbed!  The office girl arrived first in the morning and found the office safe drilled open and she called Tetsu and the police.  What a hullabaloo followed!  Tetsu was panicked.  Quite a lot of money had been taken from the safe.  The robber had broken in through an alley window and drilled a hole through the safe door.  Tetsu was on the phone to Tokyo headquarters, the police were questioning everybody.  Just when the reports were finishing up and the police were ready to call it a day, the office girl went to the compact kitchen to serve tea and when she opened the tea cupboard a whole load of PANTIES fell out of the cupboard!  The police were jumping around all over again!  A major robbery and a pantie thief on the loose!  The poor single young man who worked in the office was questioned mercilessly...  But he had nothing to do with it...  Months later the robber was arrested... yes, a pantie thief who when he'd broken into the loan company's safe had left his pantie haul for the more profitable contents of the safe.

A few months of living in this prefecture also included the birth of our first daughter... and two months later her death.  Tetsu and I were both devastated and I especially wanted to get away from the memories of her weeks in the hospital and numerous surgeries.  Tetsu requested another transfer and we moved to a larger city with Tetsu as office manager again.

A couple of months after Takumi was born, Tetsu's was scheduled for ANOTHER transfer.  By now all this transfer business was getting tiresome.  It had been fun with just the two of us... seeing new places, meeting new people but I really didn't want to uproot a family every year.  And both Tetsu and I could look at the other people in the company and see where the future led.  The husband would move up in his work... once the children started school the wife would be unwilling to move them and the husband would be transferred to a new city or prefecture leaving his family very well financially cared for but only getting to see them three or four times a year.  There is a name for this custom of having the husband transfer away and leaving his family... tanshinnfunin and I had always said there was no way that was going to happen to my family.  What was the point of marrying Tetsu and living in Japan if he was going to be working in some other prefecture?

YET...  When Takumi was born I pleasantly said,

"Good-bye Tetsu.  I'm not planning to go live in Tokyo with a baby (no offence Julie) you can go by yourself."

And Tetsu made the wise decision to quit his job after three months of life in Tokyo alone.  The three of us took a month's vacation to California and then Tetsu was without a job.

Back in Japan Tetsu didn't try very hard to FIND a job.  He had unemployment insurance coming in for 6 months and he claimed it would be a shame to waste it and so he did a bit of studying and volunteering... he had an interest in social work.  A lot of days were just wasted playing arcade games and I taught some English and took care of Takumi.  And went bald!  Not my whole head but spots here and there.

"Stress."  was the doctor's pronouncement and Tetsu took it to heart that he and his unemployment were the cause.  He found a job with a hotel and worked there for 6 months.  He was hired by a convenience store company to do lunch box development (I never understood WHY he took THAT job as he has always stayed as far from the kitchen as he can).

Finally he found a job in the city near us now with a new convalescent home was being built.  Convalescence care was a new business in Japan and Tetsu was proud to be involved with the residents' daily lives and also be responsible for the office and accounting.  Leiya was born and we bought a house not too far from Tetsu's office...  AND THEN HE QUIT!

Tetsu has always had his ideals about how convalescent care should be given... how money should and should not be spent... and they didn't mesh well with what the owner was doing.  Tetsu would tell you that he refused to be part of any shadiness.  Well, there he was without a job again and we had a new home and two children.

But friends were very good to Tetsu and through them he soon found another job with a different convalescent facility and though the drive was over an hour away, he headed that office for many years.  After many fulfilling years there he also asked to be transferred to a smaller facility and spent one year doing on-hand convalescent care.  Then 10 years ago he was hired by the organization he has been with until now and again, that has been complete office and computer work.

This year Tetsu turned 62.  He has three more years in the field before retirement.  He really wanted to take a smaller role...  work closer with the elderly... have less responsibility.  Thus, the change in workplace.

The day before yesterday I sent Tetsu to work with a box-ful of homemade cookies for the staff at his old place.  And they sent Tetsu off with the lovely bouquet of flowers... and three cartons of eggs of all things...  and a sack of rice!  I thought those interesting "retirement" presents.  Well Tetsu isn't retiring and anyway I have a feeling he'll be going back and forth between the two offices for awhile getting glitches worked out and explaining how he's used software etc.  I didn't do anything special to "celebrate" (except for my cookies) but Tetsu IS starting a final new leaf to his working years...

I don't know how many times I've heard Tetsu say (and the kids can attest to this because they have heard it too) that every job he's had in his life has been of value and use to what he does now.  The years working with money... the months working with hotel guests...  even the nutrition and food preparation at the convenience store company has stood him in good stead with convalescence care...  He is really saying that God uses every experience for the building up to today... and for tomorrow too.

ごくろうさまでした 

Gokurousama deshita.　"Thank you for all your hard work."

A Leah Day table runner

A project that I have finished but my two patchwork students have yet to do is the Building Block Table Runner offered by Leah Day.

Leah Day didn't actually offer a table runner project but that's what our project turned out to be.  The Building Block quilt was supposed to be a full size quilt with 42 blocks in it but at the pace my friends and I were going we'd be taking it with us to the grave.  Once every couple of months I would prepare the fabric and the batting and then have my friends make the three blocks in Leah Day's instructions.  And then a couple of months would go by and we would all trace the quilting patterns onto the three blocks and the quilting would be homework.

The Building Blocks were to be for machine quilting practice and for that, the project was successful.  I think my friends got a good background on different ways to machine quilt the same blocks.  But a neverending project can get dull and I finally decided to have us all graduate.

From the beginning instead of using only two fabrics for the whole quilt I had raided my batik drawer and provided my friends with a new batik fabric for each three new blocks.  We ended up using four fabrics and I think the ladies had a lot of fun using my batiks (which are very difficult to get in Japan.)  This week I went according to Leah Day's instructions and added lattice and binding.  Both techniques were new to me.

Because the blocks were already quilted, the lattice had to be added in parts.  A 1 1/2 inch strip folded in half on the top and a 1 inch strip on the bottom.  Three layers of lattice were sewn together, the bottom lattice sewn to the right side of the next block, and then the top lattice folded over and top-stitched.  Leah Day has a video about how to connect blocks.  Leah Day's Block Connecting Method

With the binding too, I followed the instructions of sewing the binding to the back first, folding it over and then top-stitching it to the front.  Hey!  It works!

Interestingly, though I didn't have fantastic expectations for this quilt, it came out very nicely and Tetsu was especially pleased with it.

"It is sturdier than most of your quilts...  It really lies nicely on the table.  Maybe you should make another one for the living room coffee table."

The heavy quilting does give the quilt a firm texture.  Maybe not so great for cozy quilts but very nice for table runners.

My friends will start their lattice work next lesson.  And a some point we'll have three identical table runners to show for our labors.

Mrs. N's kitty quilt

I haven't seen my two patchwork "students" since July.  They both had some machine quilting homework to do and Mrs. N had gone home with a flimsy that she was going to quilt.  Our last lesson had been sort of rushed and except for helping Mrs. N design an cat applique (Mrs. N is my cat mentor), I hadn't advised on quilting.

Friday Mrs. N came with her quilt.  And it is all quilted!  I was SOOOOOO impressed!

Mrs. N just takes the bull by the horns and does things.  She doesn't dilly-dally around wondering WHETHER she can or not, she just finds a way to do it and she doesn't get stuck on perfectionism either!  The result is an absolutely fantastic quilt that she can be (and is) very proud of!

Isn't her cat peeking out of the corner just the cutest?  Mrs. N incorporates SOME cat in every single one of her quilts.  Sometimes you have to look for it but for this quilt the kitty shouts its presence. 

The quilt blocks are made from fabric out of Mrs. N's scrap box... pieces that she's had for years and years and years when brown and plaids were in style.  She did all the hand piecing while she road the trains back and forth to another prefecture where her husband is a doctor and in a month's time she ends up doing quite a lot of traveling.  When she is at home, she can set up her sewing machine in the living room and machine quilt with very few interruptions.  She said she quilted in her wonky hearts with no pattern.

Mrs. N spent the afternoon at my house making the binding for her quilt and the next time she comes I'll be able to photograph it complete.  So today's post is a bit early but I was so proud of her fantastic one of a kind quilt that I just had to show it!

September's fabric postcard

Hopefully the typhoon season has ended (not sure if that's true though...  Typhoon 21 seems to be approaching Okinawa this week.) and that we won't have any more rain for awhile.  September's rainfall in Nikko was off the record book!

Yesterday I spent the day making my mother her September fabric postcard.  My mind was still on all the rain we'd had and so I ended up hand appliqueing an umbrella.  That alone wasn't too exciting so I got out my bead box and added bead "raindrops" and as the beads still didn't look like raindrops I went back and added some sparkle lines with some glitter thread that I had.  I'm not too impressed but at least my mother will hear from me again this month.

How many feet do you have?

The other day I gave one of my non-quilting friends a lesson on machine quilting.  This is my friend battling the big C and she has been working on a couple of patchwork quilts.  Well, she finds that the medications that she takes makes her fingers numb and she was really struggling with hand quilting.  She thought that maybe machine quilting would be easier and she asked me to demonstrate.

In SOME ways machine quilting is easier...  It's faster, that's for sure, but easier is up for grabs.  I can only let the person doing it make that conclusion...  Machine quilting takes a bit of getting used to for one.  The more practiced, the easier it gets.  And while there might not be as much stress on wrist joints and fingers as with hand quilting I find that it can be hard on the shoulders and requires a bit of strength when quilting something large...

I took my machine quilting foot and a scrap sandwich over for my friend to practice with and if nothing else she got a lot of laughs from her attempts.

"The quilt goes in a completely different direction than I want it to!  Whoa!  The speed is getting away from me!"

She tried quilting her name and a couple flowers and at least acquired an understanding of how machine quilting works.  Whether she was really going to machine quilt the quilt she was making was another question...  I left her with my quilting foot and planned to get it back from her the next week.  But I caught a cold and decided she probably didn't need a coughing visitor with her own health in focus.

"I'm sure I have another quilting foot.  I know I have two...  But I think I took that foot to the States with me.  Did I bring it back or did I leave it in California?"

I looked high and low for three days and finally determined that I'd left the foot in the States.  So I ordered a new one.  And it arrived in the mail a couple of days ago.  Before I even took it out of its package, what should turn up by my living room chair?  (No where near the sewing machine!)  The original quilting foot.  Murphy's Law.  So now I have two quilting feet.  Or make that three when I my friend returns the other one.  Or make that four since I remember when I got to the States that I found a previously purchased quilting foot already in the sewing box there.

Pretty soon I'm going to be a centipede.

A bus tour

A couple of weeks ago Tetsu let me know that though September 23rd was a holiday, he was scheduled to go on a recreational office trip with colleagues from his convalescent home.  I planned to stay home and quilt all day.

But last week Tetsu called me to ask if I was interested in joining him on the office trip as out of five participants, two wouldn't be able to attend after all.  How strange is it to bring your wife along on a company trip?  In Japan it is pretty strange and it wasn't like a business trip where I could just hang out in a city alone during the day until meetings or something were over.  This was a bus trip to areas south of Tokyo and I would be joining Tetsu and the two other men who had signed up.  Tetsu assured me that I was welcome (and there was the issue of already bought bus tickets) so I hesitatingly agreed to tag along.

Wednesday morning before 6:00am we met up with Tetsu's colleagues and joined a whole bus load of other tourists for a day in the Miura peninsula.  Whereas the day before Tetsu and I had driven around the countryside of Japan, Wednesday was a day near the Tokyo metropolitan.  I rarely get into Tokyo and country bumpkin that I am was quite fascinated by all the cement and steel structures.

The bus was extremely nice...

This was a shot of the countryside leaving Tochigi Prefecture.  Yep.  That's what we see most days.  Rice fields and rice fields and rice fields.

Our very nice bus had a driver and a bus guide.  I remember bus guides from my childhood travels with my family to various countries in Europe.  In those days I thought being a bus guide would be such a glamorous job.  Well, those European bus guides had to be able to speak English and seemed equipped with a huge store of knowledge.  Wednesday's bus guide occasionally threw out facts about Tokyo to her riders... and that was interesting.  She also took orders for instant coffee or green tea and then donned an apron to make and serve us our drinks...  That must take some skill in a moving vehicle.  And getting everyone's orders straight.

"Coffee with milk and sugar?"

"No sugar, milk only?"

And pretty soon the Japanese scenery changed to buildings.  When Tetsu visits California and LA he is always surprised at how SMALL Los Angeles is.  What he means is that the density of population is very low compared to Tokyo and though the city sprawls out into a never ending suburb, the tall building center is very compact...  In Tokyo, the houses and condominiums and trains and highways and high rise buildings all intermix and wherever one looks there are buildings.

Somewhere under all that metropolis there is a whole web of underground shopping and subway system and transportation byways.  As Silver Week was winding up, the traffic was expected to be dense and the bus took a route through a new tunnel that runs UNDER all that commerce.  The last end of the tunnel just opened up this year and makes it the longest road tunnel in Japan, over 11 miles long.  So a lot of our bus trip was in this very dark tunnel...  But the guide did her best to throw out interesting tidbits about the construction etc.

Our destination was near a naval base and then we took a quick trip to an "unpopulated island" which was heralded as a natural oasis off the Tokyo bay.  It had been used as a naval outlook point and artillery base.

Well, with all the boatloads of people visiting the natural island it could hardly be call unpopulated!

 We had to line up to take the path down to the souvenir shop!

I guess there was still a lot of greenery on the island, but it wasn't exactly wild.

For lunch were directed to a shoreline fish market and the meal was a delicious variety of sashimi served in a boat.

Another ride on the bus to a look out point which was at one time a thriving fishing port but was pretty ghost townish these days.  The guide pointed out that tuna fishing no longer was done in these waters and thus the busloads of school children on their school trips, no longer visited.  Tetsu recalled seeing this scenery before and he assumes that as a child he had visited on one of the school trips.

 I guess the biggest thrill for me on this bus trip was the Tokyo scenery at the end of the day.

Tokyo Sky Tree, the second tallest tower in the world, stands tall over Tokyo.  I have yet to visit Sky Tree and its surrounding Sky Town.  Maybe on another day's bus tour?

Tetsu and I arrived home around 8:00pm.

Tourist spots

This autumn Japan had Silver Week which is actually the first time I've heard this phrase.  In May we have Golden Week, a set of holidays strung out over nearly a week, and this year because of the way the calendar falls, there was also an autumn five day holiday.  Let's see... there was the Autumn Equinox and also Respect for the Elders Day.  Tetsu and I took advantage of the holidays to head north and south on separate days.

The day (both days) was beautiful and we loaded Choco in the car with us and went north.

I must not be a very good tourist because I don't really like just wandering around the countryside with no purpose in mind.  One of these days Tetsu is going to get fed up with trying to take me to places of interest that I don't show much interest in...

We enthusiastically followed road signs to this grotto only to discover that we'd been there before and as Choco was with us this time we didn't want to try and cross the low swaying bridge.

Back in the car we tried to find a riverside hiking event but once at the spot Tetsu realized that we were off season and the event had been last month... 

We went looking for a famous ramen place but realized we'd been there before too when we drove into the parking lot.  So we tried someplace else.

As we headed home after a long day's drive we found signs directing us to an village that has been kept in its original state and though we have been here before too we thought in the early evening the tourists would have thinnned out and the light would be different for photographing.  Well, maybe the light was different...

The tourists were still thick though.

Along both sides of the dirt road were these "streams" of fresh water and the shops had a natural cooling system for their soft drinks.

 The little gardens had these lantern plants that make the entrances festive.

And someone had been busy making lantern plants from fabric to sell as autumn decorations.

The village homes are still lived in and the front of the houses open onto the dirt road where they sell rice crackers and buckwheat noodles and basket-ware.

This seemed to be a popular cafe with tourists sitting on the tatami mats and enjoying green tea and bean paste sweets.

After a climb to the top of a hill there was a lovely view of the village.

As a tourist spot the place is picturesque.  In the winter, enclosed on all sides by towering mountains I'm sure the place is lonely.  And 200 years ago think of how the villagers huddled down under a blanket of snow to await pleasanter farming days.

Yesterday Tetsu and I headed out in a different direction (not taking Choco) so more tourist pictures tomorrow.
 

Projects in the works

The other day when I was at the kindergarten I noticed a tattered cardboard box with fabric peaking over the flaps.  My radar picks up unused fabric from across a bustling room.
"What's this?"

Someone had left a box of velvet with the kindergarten principal and she didn't have any plans for it yet.  Bright red and green and yellow and blue velvet.  I've never tried using velvet for anything but the colors were sure bright and pretty.   Not long after, Mrs. Furui showed me a pattern for a Christmas quilt and hesitatingly suggested we make the quilt for the hospital.  Hmm...  there IS that box of velvet fabrics.  Is it even possible to make a whole quilt out of velvet?   I made a special trip back to the kindergarten and asked if I could have the box of fabric (which I need like a hole in my head!)

"I'm thinking this might make a nice Christmas quilt and I'd be willing to make one for the kindergarten if you would pass along the fabric to me."

Now why did I go and promise that?!  Mrs. Furui and I looked over the fabric and decided to make two quilts, one for the hospital and one for the kindergarten.  This week I am washing the red and yellow and blue fabrics and Mrs. Furui is washing the greens...  Yes, the fabric bleeds. (See that pink towel next to the red.  It started out white.)  Hopefully the washing will stop the bleeding.  This is going to be a wall quilt anyway and probably won't need a lot of washing.  So Mrs. Furui and I have committed ourselves to two quilts that need to be made before December.  Yours truly gets the job of machine quilting both quilts.

And then Friday our patchwork group started on another new project.  An applique quilt.  A blog friend sent me a BOM Bunny Hill applique quilt that I would NEVER be able to do myself and so Mrs. Furui and I decided to ask patchwork group members to each do a block every couple of months until the blocks are finished.  At some point the blocks will turn into a gorgeous bed cover which we hope to raffle off... but we haven't given ourselves a deadline.

I haven't done hand applique for a couple of years now and I am VERY rusty.  I offered to make the block with the most leaves on it...  which I still haven't cut out yet.  The photo is not very exciting is it?  This still has to have bunnies and 59 leaves appliqued to it!  GYAHHH!!!

Up in the sewing room I have the Nine Patch Split ready for machine quilting.  Friday our patchwork group spent the morning making bias tape (for the applique) and tracing applique designs and the afternoon was devoted to basting my quilt.  This will go to the Ronald McDonald House when it is done.

How do you like my hodge-podge quilt backing?  Instead of going out and buying four yards of backing material and all the while complaining that I'm not using up much fabric, I decided to cut up some miscellaneous fabrics that I've had for years and just didn't work well into other quilts.  The cuts weren't really scraps but they weren't really large cuts either.  Patchwork front and back!

I really need to get a move on!