Summer days

We have managed to get to the end of July without suffering heat stroke though there is still the month of August to contend with.  

Last evening there was a huge earthquake in the southern part of Japan which left us unaffected but that is all the news carries today.  Those poor people.  The earthquake itself is bad enough but even at the best of times in the summer, the southern part of Japan is extremely hot and air conditioning is essential.  What will the population do with the electricity blackouts even if their homes are intact?  What about the homes where water access has been cut off?  It is not always the earthquake itself which is the greatest danger (which we learned many years ago when a tsunami knocked out the nuclear plant.)  We are keeping Japan in our prayers.

This month was full of birthdays for family and friends.  I celebrated mine on July 1st.  Kohei Yamada celebrated on July 12.  Tetsu had his on July 22.  Leiya celebrated hers on July 24th and Julieta will celebrate hers on July 30.  

Marlene invited us over for a joint birthday party and the Sugas brought Costco pizza and sushi! (A combination that works!)

Tetsu and I also celebrated our 46th wedding anniversery which made me feel old especially when the waitress whom I asked to take our picture because it was our anniversary, said "Aw...  You guys are so cute.  I hope I'll have a relationship like that someday."

School let out on the July 17th and now we all have a little over a month of summer vacation.  I'm so happy I don't have to stand for an hour in the sun at the crosswalk for a whole month!  An hour doesn't seem like a long time and the mornings are relatively cooler than the rest of the day but it is nice to sleep in (when the animals allow us) and to go directly into a cool room.

Mostly we complain about the heat and watch sumo or soccer or high school baseball.

My first project of the summer was doing sashiko.

Here's the finished piece about the size of a large handkerchief.  It is sitting under a house plant right now.

Tetsu's birthday rolled around but he'd scheduled his first ever colonoscopy for the next day so he ended up eating pre-packaged meals and getting ready for sitting at the hospital all day the next day drinking something vile and running to the bathroom.  He was concerned about what the procedure was going to entail but in the end (ha-ha!) everything went well.  He gets his results back later this week.  Now he is urging me to be initiated too.

A church friend asked if I could make a quilt sign for a church group and she showed me what the group had been using until recently.  The name of the group written in beautiful calligraphy by one of the older church member's but the laminated papers were seeing some wear and tear.  I got to thinking that maybe I could bond fabric after tracing the original calligraphy and I made a trial run to show my friend and the pastor's wife to find out if that was even what they were imagining.  This sample panel is made from kimono scraps I had in a box (I thought the Japanese fabric was fitting for the Japanese calligraphy.)  I used a small piece of ?silk? rayon? as the background but it wasn't very interesting so I added a colorful scrap that I had behind the whitish fabic.  After placing all the pieces exactly as had been on the original panel,I machine quilted all the pieces down.  The result passed everyone's approval and I will do this all again in four panels with different kimono material.  I don't have anymore silk? rayon? so I'll have to figure out some other way to spice this up a bit...  The black and white is appropriate to the Japanese sumi calligraphy though...  By the way, the character is yorokobi which means "joy". 

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Leiya and family went visiting friends in Ohio.  I think they went blackberry picking.

What a laugh!  I don't think of Taiga as being really small but when he's with Tony he looks that way!

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To all of us in the northern hemisphere, enjoy the summer and keep cool any way you can!

Winding up June and the early part of July

Someone asked me how the animals have been doing and I guess I'll have to say that they are existing.  

John is 15 this year and we had to make numerous visits to the vet in June because he was having a balance issue.  I was taking him back and forth to the vet every other day for IV's and shots and finally the vet put him on a regimen of steroids that seem to have done the trick.  He had similar symptoms last December and spent 10 days at the vet so this time I sort of knew what was going on and I was willing to drive him back and forth instead of hospitaliziing him.  

He has mellowed out considerably in his old age and doesn't try to bite us anymore.  He is very fond of M-san (because we got her into the habit of giving him treats every time she came over) and so he has free run of the sewing room when we are upstairs sewing.  John definitely wants to be near me and so he is always under my feet when I am cooking or drawing etc.  He even lets Tetsu pet him nowadays which is a big improvement!  Unfortunately we've stopped insisting that he come out on walks (which he never liked anyway) because he will still topple over after a few minutes.  It's good that he doesn't have far to fall!  So poor John gets less and less exercise which probably isn't good for him but he's getting lots of love.

Cleo also gets lots of love just because we don't think he'll be with us much longer...  But he could still fool us!  We said the same thing last summer and I was staying close to home in May because I didn't think he'd last the week.  

Cleo definitely is suffering from dementia because when he's awake, he will pace in circles for hours.  I don't think he can see anymore either and he heads for the litter box but 80 percent of the time just pees on the floor.  When put in a largish cage he just howls which is hard for all of us so he still occupies one room upstairs that we've blocked off with a grill so that he doesn't fall down the stairs.  Sounds bad I know.  We have a routine though and every evening around 8:00 I'll carry John upstairs and then pick up Cleo and bring him into bed with me.  For a couple of hours he is very happy cuddling and sleeping on my stomach but eventually he'll want to pace again and I'll take him back to his room and blanket and let him do his thing...  In the morning around 4:00 we'll do the same thing again and he'll usually sleep with me until nearly 6:00.  

I will forever be grateful that Tetsu doesn't mind doing clean-up and this morning he spent nearly an hour in Cleo's room wiping up pee and washing the floor on his hands and knees, changing Cleo's bedding and airing out the room.  Tetsu says he doesn't mind and as long as Cleo is with us it is the least he can do to keep us all going.  We are going to have to rethink our housing arrangement for Ckeo pretty soon though because Japan's heat and humidity is upon us and I think we'll have to move Cleo downstairs where there we have air-conditioning, or give him his own room fan...

M-san finished another table runner, actually the same one that she made in May but with different colors.  She just keeps turning out beautiful quilts! 

Tetsu and I had to get new cellphones in June as my touch screen wouldn't react on one side making it very difficult to get into certain apps or use the keyboard at all.  Tetsu has had the same problem but he lived with the inconvenience for a year (he doesn't much use an English keyboard).  We have finally gotten used to the new phones (they're exactly the same as before!) but it was a headache trying to access apps on new devices with all the passwords.  I don't want to do that again for a few years!!!

I celebrated my 71st birthday at the beginning of July and Tetsu will celebrate his 73 later this month.  Our birthday presents to each other were the new iPhones...

Too many photos of me today?  I've been sewing and I used some kimono fabric someone had given me to make a blouse...

..and these long pants.

And of course together though they may look like pajamas then...

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Leiya and family have successfully moved to Indianapolis and they even managed to sychronize the selling of their house.  They are renting a one story house (Leiya loves having everything on the same floor) and they are exploring their new surroundings.  I think they took the boys to go fishing with a guide and everything who taught the kids about how to hold a fish etc.

I don't know about Taiga-kun, but Luka did catch his own fish which made him very happy.

Tony had a great time too!

And that's about it from the Watanabe family.  We talked to Takumi and Julieta and they are good.  Tetsu is out in his yard today listening to baseball and napping.  I'm ready to do some button hole applique this afternoon.

One block finished!