Hopefully heading out of winter

March is living up to its name and the days are rather unpredictable.  It is nice and sunny today but the wind is so strong and cold that I am bundled up tight like it is the middle of winter.  Earlier this week we had one of the heaviest snowfalls in years but by noon everything was melted.

This is what the road looked like when Tetsu and I arrived at the crosswalk.  Tetsu takes it upon himself to shovel snow at the crosswalk if need be, so that I don't have to do it and because the teachers usually arrive too late too get much cleared before the students arrive.  

Many of the larger cars were backing up and heading down another street rather than go through this tunnel though some of the cars were weaving back and forth...  These are bamboo fronds that bend easily but also spring back fairly easily.  Tetsu was poking at them with a broom while I just grabbed the fronds I could reach and started shaking them.  With a shower of snow the bamboo let go of their burden and snapped back into the forest.  If I had been daring I felt like I could hang on and been jettied into the air!

By the time the children arrived, neighbors were out, as well as teachers, and at the end even a city crew drove up and added a lot of man-power to the snow shoveling (probably some driver had called the city to let them know the street was impassable.)  

Let's see...  At the end of February an young American friend and I baked a couple hundred cookies to hand out at a Nikko City festival.  

She and I and a Korean friend and a Chinese friend, manned a Global Cafe at the festival, and along with the cookies, people got to try snacks from China, a very spicy dish from Korea and even a banana and coconut dessert from Indonesia (a Japanese friend had once lived in Indonesia).  

One day when I was home alone, I answered the door to an older lady on my doorstep who seemed very confused and upset.  I did recognize her as someone from down the street but she couldn't make herself very clear and handed me her cellphone and kept saying "police".  I thought to try and call her husband but she didn't want to/couldn't and insisted I needed to call the police.  I finally called a neighbor and asked her to come over and help me.  Together we figured out that the husband was away, that someone was at her house, that no, she was not in danger, but she wanted the police.  We walked her home and someone in her family was there while the husband was away, but the person was rather frustrated because the elderly neighbor kept going outside.  A few days later the husband came to thank us for our help...

Okay!  I promised eye candy!  M-san finished her large quilt called Smokey River Quilt and it is M-san's first bedsize quilt.  I sort of wrangled her into making it.  

"You could just make one block...  Or make the four center blocks and see how it goes..." 

Later I'd say,

"The fabric is all here, why don't you go ahead and make the corner triangles."

And then...

"There's still fabric and those borders won't be that hard.  Go for it!"  

In the end, M-san had a bed cover sized quilt even though she had been leery that she could ever complete such a big project...

I am a proud teacher.

On my own quilting front...  I completed the Edelweiss quilt that Leiya asked me to make for her.

This is a Thimble Blossoms quilt pattern and it was easy to follow and the results were great.  I did minimal machine quilting so that I didn't lose much of the quilt's softness.

Extremely simple machine quilting...

This will stay on our wall for us to enjoy for a few months until it gets sent to Leiya.  I keep saying that but I now have THREE large quilts to send to her that I keep putting off.  I just don't trust the post office yet, and the expense, and the whole digital bother of making an official label and printing it out before a package can be sent plus other rigamarole that the Japanese Postal service puts customers through...  But these quilts keep piling up and I have to get them to the States somehow...

And that's about it for the last two weeks!  Cleo seems to miss Toi...  John hasn't noticed...