Bicycle class

Monday I was at the elementary school again in another form of my crosswalk duties (or rather as a Traffic Safety Officer).  Every year I am asked to join other traffic safety officers and help with an hour long class on bicycle safety. 

From April the 6th grade class will be jr. high schoolers and nearly all of them will be going to the local jr. high school by bicycle.  Before these future jr. high schoolers are let free to the streets of Nikko, they get a lesson in the basic rules of bicycle safety.

Four of us from the city office stood before the class of twenty-one 6th graders and explained about right of way, and told them about laws.  We went through how to check a bicycle before setting off and then had the children go through a course that we'd set up in the gymnasium.  The school provided three bicycles and with helmets brought from the city office each student got on a bicycle and went through the course...

The boys were all pretty confident and pooh-poohed all the rules and careful preparations...  They whipped through the course easily.  No problem there!  (Though I can predict some of the boys are NOT going to get off their bicycles and walk the bike through the crosswalk next school year...)

I was surprised that some of the girls had NO coordination for braking a bicycle and staying balanced at the same time.  They sort of wobbled around with heels on the ground before the bicycle stopped!

"Umm.. No.  Brake... Put your LEFT foot to the ground (it's opposite in Japan...  traffic is on the right side of the bicyclist) and keep your RIGHT foot on the pedal, which is supposed to be at the top of the cycle... then you can push off safely without wobbling into traffic."

Now that I write it out I admit it does sound confusing... and that is why I got questioning looks from the girls as I adjusted feet and pedals.  One girl probably has never been on a bicycle in her life.  She couldn't ride at all!

"And you're going to be bicycling to school from April?  Please go home and practice in front of your house!"

**********

The gymnasium was cold... And Tetsu has been battling a cold since the weekend.  I think I feel it coming on myself today...  I'm hoping my symptoms, like Snoopy's, are from sympathetic LOVE and not the FLU which is going around.  I think I'll go take a nap...
 

At my crosswalk

The school year is winding up in Japan.  We have only a couple of weeks more of class time.

I am earning my salary this last term of school when I go out every morning to do crosswalk duty.  Though we haven't had as much snow as some years and I haven't had to shovel snow yet, the mornings are cold!

(My crosswalk and my car there in the background...  Someday when I'm on less of a schedule, I'm going to give up driving to the crosswalk and just walk the 20 minutes to get there...  The children from my neighborhood do it everyday, I should be able to...)

 

I really enjoy being a crosswalk guard though I wonder if the students even see me every morning.  I'm just an entity that greets them and makes sure they obey the rules and sometimes jabbers at them in English (occasionally insisting on a repetition... )

"Today is Friday!  All together now...  'Today is Friday!'"

(A group of children heading to school from the residential area.)

I mostly think I add some brightness to the drivers in their cars as they pass my crosswalk or have to stop for students.  I try to be smiley and look perky (it is morning and we could all use a perk-up).  I bow Japanese-style to most drivers who have stopped and waited as the children cross the street.  I wave to some of the drivers who have gotten to know me.  One driver waves to me every morning or beeps his horn and the school principal asked me if the man was my husband!  Ummm..  No!  I have no idea who he is!  (Tetsu gives me a subtle wiggling of fingers when he passes by the crosswalk.)

Actually I did run into the man one time in a vegetable shop...  It took me a minute to figure out why I knew him and finally a light bulb went on! 

"Hello!  I know you!  Thank you for always waving to me at the crosswalk!"

The man seemed very embarrassed and tucked his head and practically hid among the carrots...  But the next day he waved and honked his horn at me again at the crosswalk.

(Not all that much traffic is there?...  Just a lot of bamboo.)

 

There is another couple that I ran into in the supermarket one time.  Who are these people?  Neighbors?  Kindergarten parents?  It wasn't until days later when they drove by and the wife gave a wave that I realized.  I ran into them again and was able to talk to the wife a couple of years ago when I was at an open house at Yuma-kun's jr. high school.  It turns out they have a child at the same school.  We were all very surprised to meet each other but since then we always wave and give each other big smiles when they arrive at the crosswalk.

(The crosswalk and sweet store with the school in the background on the left.)

A neighbor rolls down his window daily and yells out hellos.  A woman I've never talked to always waves even though depending on what car she is driving it takes me a while to figure out who the car belongs to.  A man drives past TWICE every morning and waves each time...  I have no idea why.  The pool life guard will occasionally pull over on his way to the pool and hand me a warm can of coffee from a convenience store.  The sweet store man and his mother always step out to say hello as I begin my duties.

(My favorite scenery at the crosswalk...  Sometimes it is snowy, sometimes it is green...  When I get there it is always filled with morning light.)

See...  I may not be making much of an impression on the school children but I feel I have a community of crosswalk friends and despite the cold mornings, love to see everybody off to work!

I SPY

I spent one afternoon last week preparing fabric circles for the latest hospital quilt Mrs. Furui and I are making.  The success of this quilt is a bit iffy.

Mrs. Furui has all those cuts of beautiful Liberty fabrics that someone donated to the hospital and that she rescued from being made into pot holders.  Hundreds of cuts!  Our patchwork group has already made two large quilts for the hospital (and one for the fabric donor) and even sold smaller cuts of the fabric to patchwork friends for a hospital donation.  But there is still a large box of fabric left.  Time to make another quilt.

When making our previous quilts, Mrs. Furui and I noticed that some of the cuts had animals and cute prints of cars and buildings etc.  Liberty has expanded its designs and though the quality of the fabric is the same, there are many more designs than just the intricate swirls and leaves and flowers.  I think I commented when riffling through the fabric that these cute fabrics could be made into something "fun".  I forgot about that comment but Mrs. Furui held me to it and wanted me to think of a fun quilt for the hospital using the cute Liberty designs.

This is harder to do than I'd anticipated...  Like and I SPY quilt?  No...  Liberty designs are all small and tiny and intricate.  It would be too hard to "find" the animals in the print, especially from a quilt up on a hospital wall.

The purpose though was to use the Liberty fabric, not to make a fantastic I SPY quilt.  We thought circles might be a bit more whimsical than just blocks of fabric and with the addition of colorful circle borders, maybe that would liven up the very sedate fabrics.  Even so...  That's not going to make an I SPY quilt...

Right now the plan is to applique circles onto color and then sew those together into a quilt AND make a sample circle BOOK that could be left near the quilt in the hospital lobby so that people could look at the fabric design detail.  We have never made a BOOK so I don't know how we are going to do that but first things first and this month we are appliquing circles.

I brought home 4 circles to do and I thought I'd show you close up what sort of designs Liberty is making these days.  I think we've chosen 24 designs and I will show more as my friends get theirs made.

This is pretty typical Liberty.  Where in all that is a bird?  It is in there somewhere.

 These dogs are so cute in this block!  And butterflies!  What a happy block!

This is my favorite of course.  CATS!!!

And what do you know!  Liberty also makes Hello Kitty designs now!

This quilt has no deadline so it is going to be slow going...  And I still have to think about how to make a BOOK.

Looking for spring

I went out with my camera yesterday around noon, looking for signs of spring.  And I found some!  

 The early morning... like 6:00 am, started out drizzly and foggy.

Is this going to be a stay at home day?

But by noon, the sun was out and last night's rain had nudged spring a little farther along.

 With a little more ummph this bud might be opening today.

That was white plum above.  There were just a few blossoms on a small stunted pink plum tree by the side of the road.

 Crocus!  Crocus!  I found crocus blooming at the edge of a farmer's yard!

And just because it wasn't planted is no reason to ignore the very small bloom between the gutter grate and a rock.  It is calling to spring also!

 And even tinier were the minuscule dots of blue along the still barren rice fields.

There...  Maybe from this angle you can see the blue.

As I say, spring is coming but I have to look hard for it.

Cat Lady

Yesterday was Cats' Day on my side of the International Date Line. As it is still February 22 in other parts of the world, I have another cat post today.

Hmm...  At the end of the year, am I going to be able to call this a quilt I MADE?  This is a panel that my friend, quilting student and cat mentor, Mrs. N, gave me.  She fell in love with this panel by the designer, Takashi Kuge, and bought four of them.  She then hand quilted one panel and gave it to another of her cat friends.  And she had PLANNED to quilt all four panels and give them to friends (me included) and keep one for herself.  But the hand quilting was such an endless job for Mrs. N that she finally admitted she was only going to get that one panel done and so she gave me and R-san (the other quilting student) a panel each and kept the last one for herself.  But what to do with them?

R-san (who doesn't have any cats!) decided that as she had three other projects waiting to be quilted, a cat panel wasn't going on her list and she has just tacked the panel up on her wall as is.  Mrs. N is waiting to see what I can do with the panel and thus my Monday project was machine quilting the panel. 

It was easy!  I used invisible thread and just free-motion quilted wherever there seemed to be a distinct line between colors.  The quilting was done in basically one sitting and yesterday I put the binding on.  A finished, very cute quilt...  Though I don't know if it can be considered one of my own as I've given it no individual touches.

Other cat worthy acquisitions this week.  On the weekend Tetsu and I were browsing at a small shop with cat items and my eye fell on this cute scarf...  And Tetsu bought it for me without hesitation.  Soft and numerous kitties around my neck for the rest of the season.

You know...  I never planned to become a cat lady.  They seem sort of crazy and out of control.  It is true I have a lot of cats but I agonize when each one joins my household and run the other direction when I see a cat in the neighborhood and I refuse to go into a pet shop!  People who don't know me must think I really dislike cats.  I also have claimed that I don't really COLLECT cat memorabilia, that people know I have cats and give me things...  but that's not really true.  My eyes go to cat things that make me smile and like this weekend, Tetsu will buy something for me just because I looked at it and said "Awww!" 

On my own though I bought myself a new watch this week.  Sort of a toy watch, it probably won't last long.  But I was needing a watch, I looked at this one and said "Awww!" and as there was no one around to buy it for me, I bought it myself.

"Awww!"
 

Cats' Day

Today is February 22 in Japan already.  Cats' Day!

Let's see...  How am I going to explain this.  February 22nd is called Cats' Day because cats in Japan say "Nyao" instead of "Meow" and kittens will say "Nyan".  And when today's date is written this way...  2/22, with three twos together, the sound is much like "ni-ni-ni" and stretching it a bit it becomes "nya, nya, nya" and that in turn creates the word play "nyan, nyan, nyan"... a kitten's mewing.  Did you get all that?

ANYWAY!  In honor of Cats' Day I'm showing my cats.

Here is Toi.  He is huge and sort of a bully though he has a cute meowing voice.  He is living upstairs during the winter with Patora, DESTROYING the spare bedroom while they are there.  He is very friendly to humans...  Just doesn't like two of my other cats...  He was a stray that came as an adult and could probably carry on very well outside by himself but I still keep him imprisoned and safe. 

And here is Toi's counterpart Patora.  She is loud and noisy and my neighbors don't like her meowing when she lives in the cat house outside.  As with this photo.  She always has something to say!  She puts up with Toi and I suppose they are happy together in the spare bedroom with a heated mat and a nightly hot water pad. 

This is Cleo.  And he is Patora's brother but in recent years they can't stand each other so that is why they live separately.  Tetsu and I picked up Cleo and Patora and another brother on one of our morning walks and these two have stayed with us.  Cleo's torn ear is courtesy of a fight with Toi and Cleo was traumatized.  He still darts for under the chair whenever Toi escapes from the spare bedroom.  Cleo doesn't much like Chip either whom he lives with and that causes a lot of fur flying.

Mi is the darling of my menagerie.  She came as a semi-adult (being picked up by Tetsu who mistook her for Chip!) and is my hermaphrodite kitty.  You can read about that tale here...  http://bytaniwa.blogspot.jp/2009/10/cat-names.html
Mi is loved by EVERYBODY!!!  My ladies English students look for Mi when they come and feel honored when she chooses one of their laps to sit on.  Yuma-kun wants to hold Mi throughout his lesson.  Tetsu calls for Mi (and she answers) the minute he comes home and Mi spends the evening on his chest.  Mi even gets along with Toi and Patora so she is a pretty laid back kitty! 

And here is Chip, my beautiful cat.  She started out small and dainty but she is getting pretty hefty now.  She has her own ideas about who is allowed to pet and talk to her.  SHE makes all the decisions and if she wants your lap and you don't want a cat on your lap, too bad!  She will spit and hiss and hang on with her claws.  I had to take Chip and Toi to the vet last week for shots and Chip is only half of Toi's weight...  (which only proves that Toi is overweight I guess...)  Chip was left in our backyard as a morsel of a cat and I fed her through a straw for the first week or so.  As mentioned, Chip and Cleo don't get along but they both sleep with me...  One on either side of me...  the "Great Wall of Tanya".

Happy Cats' Day!  "Nyan-nyan-nyan-nyan-nyan"!  (My kitties give you 5 meows).
 

School Etiquette

ETIQUETTE -- conventional requirements as to social behavior; proprieties of conduct as established in any class or community or for any occasion.

I was invited last week to spend a couple of hours at the elementary school.  Somehow I became a member of an evaluation and support group and 6 of us meet twice a year to visit the classes and talk with the principal and vice principal.

The visit coincided with Parent Observation Day which unlike many American Schools which hold Open House in the evening, takes place during the regular school day so that parents can see their children (and teachers) in a learning/teaching situation.  I can see the good and bad points in this system.

Supposedly parents can get a new perception of their classroom child but it does mean that participation is almost entirely mothers and there is no chance for parents to talk with the teachers until a recommended PTA meeting (which a lot of people bow out on because they get put on committees!).  Sceptically, I wonder how much of the observation class is a performance for the teachers... I know I always planned something a bit more visual when I had parents visiting my kindergarten English classroom (do the mothers really want to hear me read a storybook in English to their children?)

Anyway...  the 6 members of the support group visited each classroom for a whole 5 minutes each and watched the "new" way of teaching with desks pushed together in groups (until recently the desks all faced the blackboard and were separated by rows) and children offering ideas and comments (rather than rote memorization).  It was interesting I suppose...

One of my comments that didn't set well with the vice principal was that I noticed that except for the 2nd grade English class, all the students and teachers were wearing masks.  I thought it interesting because I had always requested my English students and teachers to remove their masks and wondered if the visiting foreign teacher that day (a woman from the Philippines, excellent English) had the same feelings.  As I've mentioned before, masks are my pet peeve in Japan...

Of course I could have divined before I made my comment (and went on to tell WHY I asked to have the masks removed... because it isn't an American custom, because I can't tell if students are participating, because I think facial expressions are important in communication, because I think the subconscious message of everyone else being contaminated is damaging, especially for a teacher to act like students are germ-ridden... etc. etc.) that this wouldn't be a popular point...  because the vice principal was wearing a mask!  And also because she had pushed a box of disposable masks towards our group of 6 and recommended we wear them during our visit.  Hmmm.

(Doraemon character posted above the school sinks teaching the importance of gargling after returning from outside)

We are now in flu season and in truth, just last week the 6th grade class had to be house quarrantined for 5 days because of an influenza outbreak.  The school does not want any more students to become sick and so mask wearing is required this month.  And all the mothers who came to Observation Day were asked to bring their own masks...  And maybe the 6 of us should have considered the health situation for our own safety and the students...  (of course that wasn't the VERBAL message... but I got it.)  It was a matter of ETIQUETTE (and that was the word used).

 (Hand washing and gargling instructions in front of the bathrooms)

I guess I've got to polish up my manners...  About wearing masks and about vocalizing my opinions... 

I wish I'd learn to keep my mouth shut...

A park

Choco joined us last weekend for a day trip.  If we are gone all day then Choco either has to stay outside in the cold or in her kennel in the house with no potty breaks.  When we take her with us she still travels in her kennel but at least she sees the passing scenery and gets out for walks occasionally.

We all went looking for swans but though hundreds were reported to be at a pond in the neighboring prefecture, when we got there we found two.  The plum trees were beginning to bloom though and Choco did get a nice long walk.

Looks like Choco knows how to heel doesn't it? 

Not for long.

There is a heron in that photo.

And a few plum blossoms.

Tetsu's weekend photo masterpiece.  He likes the leafless trees.

Not much action at this park during the winter.  There were lots of photographers though with their big cannon (really!  Like castle cannons!) cameras.  So we knew we were in the right place to look for the swans but all the real photographers, and us, were fooled this day.

It is easier to photograph plum blossoms anyway.