Change of plans

Sigh...  Things do not always go as planned.

Last week, because we were supposedly headed off to the States, we spent days and evenings making arrangements for our animals to be cared for, I talked with the school principal and the City Hall about formally taking time off from work, we let friends and neighbors know we would be gone for awhile, I canceled English classes and packed up clothes, and reduced our refrigerator contents to the bear minimum and rationed out all the left over fruits and vegetables for the weekend!  We are ready!

To make a long story short, we've had to postpone our trip til next week.  No, no one is sick, it just had to be done.  So now I'm grocery shopping again, going to the school to let them know I'll be on duty another week, messaging friends saying, "Hello!  I'll still be here!"  Tetsu and I both feel like we'd gotten ourselves all psyched up to stay healthy and competant until TODAY and now we need to maintain that motivation through the coming week...  Ah well, at the end of all this we will have a meaningful visit with our kids and hopefully will be of some use to them.  

The days have been cold and in the mornings the mountains have a covering of snow.  We only get a few flurries but we wake up to frost on the inside of the bedroom windows which are frozen shut.  

I wear fleece pajamas and a neck warmer and a knitted hat when I sleep and Tetsu claims I look like a terrorist with only my eyes peeking out from the burrow of blankets.  The cats claim places next to the humans under the covers...  John has his own stack of blankets...

I helped out at an International Day event in Nikko on Saturday and there were four of us foreigners who participated with the 14 children who attended.  A woman from Korea led the first half of the day and we all gathered in the center's kitchen to make Korean Tokku soup and Kippa rolls.  I had remembered to bring my apron for the morning event but I forgot the bandana...  Children in Japan are used to helping serve school lunches and they always wear a white coat and a head covering when on serving duty.  Throughout my years living in Japan, I have noticed too that any time something involving making food is engaged in, the PTA mothers, the teachers, all children and adults will whip out their head scarves or bandanas and, properly uniformed, will begin with food preparation.  I have never adopted the headwear custom and, like this weekend, forget entirely...  I don't think I could even get a bandana to stay on my head! 

If you remember, last year there was an accident near the school just as the children were arriving at this crosswalk and though the school and neighbors petitioned for traffic signals to be put in, the city doesn't have the budget, this intersection is too close to the nearest intersection (which would cause a bottle up of traffic) and so, instead the city put up the white guardrails and also the brown poles (with reflectors) which are strong enough to protect pedestrians at the crosswalk should a car plow into it.  I think it was a good solution though it may not have an effect on future traffic accidents that often occur at this intersection...

The pool has been closed for two weeks and though we don't miss the pool, we do miss the hot bath afterwards.  Every other day Tetsu and I have been going to different hot spas in the area and one day I was alone with this elderly lady in an outdoor spa and we got to chatting.  She said that she lived nearby and she comes to this spa everyday. She reminised about how her mother used to love hot spas and how she wished she could have given her mother the luxury of enjoying an outdoor bath whenever she wanted.  Another day I was at this same spa and sat with a group of ladies one of whom was mentally handicapped.  She asked each of us in turn what we were cooking for dinner that night and passed her approval or disapproval on our menus.  Even after she left, the rest of us continued our menu conversation, exchanging ideas for making such-and-such....  Community bathing is relaxing and also somewhat of a social event!

Tetsu would agree that the hot spa is the highlight of his day too but I'd have to say that attending church and praising my Lord is the highlight of my WEEK!  I'm not much of a singer but when I join in with everyone else I feel like I really am making a beautiful noise!!

Maybe the NEXT post will be from the States!

  

Wrapping up January

I have had a busy sewing week and can actually show a wonderful finish!!!  Photo flood ahead!

M-san and I have been working on our Block of the Month On Williams Street quilts for nearly a year.  We actually decided that we were happy with the skills that we'd learned and that there really wasn't anywhere in our houses where we could display a 12 block quilt so we stopped at 9 blocks.

This was a Quilt-As-You-Go project and one week M-san and I would make a block from scraps that I had in one color scheme or another and then we would wait until the quilting class on YouTube appeared that month and machine quilt our blocks on our own.  M-san quilted in white thread and I quilted in rainbow colored thread.

My quilt.

M-san's quilt.

We had so much fun making these quilts.  M-san claims this was very hard for her and it is true that it is largest quilt that she's ever made.  I guess I'm a bit pushy when it comes to what I think she can do...  BUT SHE CAN DO THIS!!!  I've been quilting for 30 years (or more).  M-san started 3 years ago!  

Really, you can't tell the difference in our quilting except for the thread color.

The blocks are identical.

And these were the labels we put on the back of the quilts.

The On Williams Street YouTube videos were so easy to follow and I'd recommend this class for beginners and experienced machine quilters alike!

Some other sewing that I've been doing are wonky words...  This is a project I am frantically trying to finish before the end of the month...  Will I succeed?

Because of all the sewing I didn't get as much drawing in as I'd wanted.  We went to a Chinese restaurant and had noodles...  

The pool is closed for two weeks so we are visiting various hot spas.  This is NOT supposed to be me.  Yesterday I soaked in an outdoor bath with an elderly lady who said that she comes to this spa every day and she considers it the highpoint of her day...  The water is so hot and there was rain boardering on snow coming down so you know the air was SO cold.  Of course I couldn't sketch her while we were in the bath but I tried to catch her essence from memory afterwards.  I see I need to do more people drawing practice...

I scribbled a house with some new ink that I found...  

I was so thrilled with a set of inks and glass pens that I found at a recycle shop,

The inks aren't waterproof so after inking in the outline, a brush of water makes them "bleed" and they give such fascinating texture to the scribble.

By the way...  a week from today I'll be getting ready to board an airplane for the States.  I'm taking quite a long absence from my job (and I feel bad about that because this is the coldest time of year and a puts a burden on the teachers who will have to come and stand at the crosswalk every morning while I'm gone) but after a short stay with Takumi and Julieta I'll be headed to Indiana to be with Leiya until a couple weeks after their baby is born.  I'll be back in Japan in the middle of March....  It is complicated, but Tetsu will go to California for a week but he'll come back and hold down the fort until I get back...  We have one cat who we don't really expect to last that long, and winter is a very hard time of year to leave a house unoccupied (bursting pipes... two other cats who will be left in a cold house though they'll get fed by our neighbor.  We will leave electric mats on for cats... Don't worry).  So... sorry Tetsu.  He'll have to meet our new grandson at another date.  And Luka isn't too happy that Jiijii (Tetsu) isn't coming...  

"Jiijii!  I'll miss you!"

A cold week in January

Another week gone by...  and again I am at a loss as to what I did that was worthwhile the past seven days...

More sitting in waiting rooms and killing time by sketching people.

I've spent some evenings in the warm living room doing some embroidery for Mrs. N.  (She likes doing applique on a kitty block but her eyes don't do embroidery so I prep her blocks for her).

I had a school meeting one evening this week as I am on the school evaluation committee. There isn't much to report on the meeting but afterwards we were invited to check out the baseball mitts that Shohei Otani donated to the school.  

In case you didn't know, Otani-san has donated three baseball mitts (two right-handed, one left-handed) to EVERY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL IN JAPAN!  

A very nice letter was included expressing Otani-san's hope the there will be future baseball players who may be inspired by using the mitts.  Mr. Otani is pretty much everybody's hero now in Japan, both adults and children.  

All of us adults at the meeting were very excited to touch and photograph the mitts so you can imagine how excited the children must be!

Continuing my Interactive journaling class on Skillshare with Samantha Dion Baker, I sketched a tunnel...

...with scenery at both ends (sides of the page) of the tunnel.

I cut through a page and added a garden scene behind the cut out window...

And I SEWED a pocket into my bullet journal and slipped a little book of sewing implements inside.

There are four pages but I guess I'm not going to show all of them...

I liked the pun at the end.

Today it snowed for a few hours though it probably won't stick.

Even in the house we wear neck warmers and hats.  (At night I wear a beanie and have my neck warmer pulled up over my nose and Tetsu says I look like a terrorist...)

Nearly as scary is what I look like before I head out to the crosswalk at 7:00 in the morning.  Under that black coat (which is NOT warm) is a down jacket, a scarf, a neck warmer, socks, ski pants and pajamas!!!  (Unless I get hit by a car I figure no one will know I'm wearing warm pajamas under all this.) 

And that's the news this week!

(I made chocolate chip cookies to keep our winter spirits up !)

Update From Japan

I'm afraid there isn't a whole lot going around here at the Watanabe house.  We haven't gotten out much, we haven't taken pictures.  In general we stick close to home and spend a lot of time watching Japan's dismal news on TV.

We probably have the same information that everyone else in the world can get about Japan's latest earthquake but day by day the news and the coverage reveal that it was so much worse than we thought it had been when I last posted.  I had written here on this blog that we didn't get any shaking where we live but it turns out that was incorrect.  There hadn't been any shaking at the POOL or in the building that we had been in but numerous friends in the neighborhood whom I talked with later, and Marlene whom I saw the next day, reported that they certainly DID feel the earthquake and were concerned that it would get stronger in our prefecture.  I have no idea why the pool building didn't get shaken.  Built on rockier soil?  A stronger foundation?  Anyway, there were tremors in our area even though we live quite far away from the epicenter.

On January 2nd, Tetsu and I went over to Marlene and Kohei's in the evening to have dinner with them and to play cards.  (By the way, I have always used the excuse that because I am a foreigner I don't know how or have the custom of cooking traditional Japanese New Year's food.  Marlene has proven that it is a lousy excuse because though she and I have lived in Japan the same amount of time, SHE DOES cook traditional Japanese New Year's food, so I guess I'm just lazy...)  Anyway, as we played cards we had left the TV on so that we could hear what was going on about the earthquake, when all of a sudden the news changed to live coverage of the Haneda Airport.  Something about a collision...  Marlene had just mentioned to me that her son and daughter-in-law were at Haneda flying off on their honeymoon and so with the news of the accident Marlene set about trying to contact them and find out if they were alright.  It took a few tries as other friends and family members were calling to check on them too but when we did finally connect, they said that they hadn't been aware of an accident and were minutes away from boarding their airplane to Miami.  Well, they did manage to board their plane but as shortly after that Haneda closed down completely, they had to disembark a couple of hours later and they spent the night and most of the next day in the airport with all the other stranded people.  The last I heard, they did get to Miami though they missed connections to travel onwards as they had planned.

Holding cards

On the drawing front, I have signed up for another Skillshare class this time making interactive journal pages...  Because it's a journal, I'd like the pages to be relevant to the day so I got involved with painting playing cards for this lesson.

Laying them down.

We keep eating and eating and with all the opening and closing of the refrigerator I modeled my next page on my fridge.

Closed

And open

If I'm not drawing, I do get in some sewing and I finished another long-term project.

At home in a warm living room I've been working on another labyrinth quilt and the last stitches finally got sewn in.  This has been in the making for quite awhile because not only was there a lot of reverse applique but also because I quilted along the applique edges with 6 ply embroidery floss which was rather hard on the fingers.

I used various colors of floss which made this a fun project.  I consider this a prayer labyrinth and trailing my fingers over the path to and from the center is a walk with God in praise and intercession; a laying down of burdens as my fingers travel to the center and on the return trip, of being thankful.  Actually the whole process of winding around and around as I sewed and quilted and then returned to the outer border was a few months of prayer.

I guess that's about it for our first January days.  I am still on winter break but school starts on the 9th so I'll be back at the freezing cold crosswalk soon.  It has been so nice to be able to sleep in these past two weeks!  No snow yet though the mountains are getting it.

 

Noto earthquake

We are fine.  Thank you for thinking of us.  We live in the center of Japan north of Tokyo and earthquake’s epicenter was in Ishikawa which is on the west coast of Japan.  The area there is famous for its heavy snowfall and freezing winters.  We feel so bad for the people who have evacuated their homes and have escaped to higher but unprotected ground.  We remember the days after the March 11 earthquake 12 years ago.

Yesterday Tetsu and I had gone to the pool and I had just finished taking a bath and was dripping wet and headed for my locker when earthquake alarms started to go off from cell phones in the many lockers in the room.  Another lady in a similar state and I gripped the walls expecting the shaking to start but when it didn’t we realized we needed to put on clothes if the need came to evacuate.  Other ladies coming from the pool and bath weren’t aware that there had been an earthquake alert (only the phone alarms which had been left in the lockers) but someone coming from the lobby gave us the immediate details.  

It is so cold this morning and it was hard to get out of our warm beds making me think again of the poor people in the western prefecture of Ishikawa. There are always earthquakes in Japan but it seems like we are never prepared when they strike…