The month of August vanished...

I am so sorry to be AWOL for so long.  Life is a strange balance of not doing anything worth writing about and then actually having so many details that it is hard to get started!  It has been nearly a month since my last post so now I fear today's post will be too long!

The weather hasn't actually changed that much from my last post in the middle of August.  The days are still hot and sweltering,

I still worry about Tetsu spending so much time time outdoors cutting weeds in the middle of the day.  

I can't convince him to limit his outdoor work to early morning and when he finally does come back into the air conditioning he collapses onto the sofa and can barely talk with me.  A nap, something iced-cold and a big meal usually revives him! 

This summer I have drawn him numerous times weed whacking and he is somewhat annoyed that I depict him as only ever doing yard work...  But honestly, that has been his main activity!

Not long after my last post, Tetsu came down sick and I followed soon afterwards.  Tetsu never went to the doctor's though I did and I took a Covid test and it was negative.  I was told, though, that it might be too early to tell and so to take Covid precautions.  Actually, I'm pretty sure that both Tetsu and I had Covid because we both lost our sense of smell!  Tetsu bounced back fairly quickly but I was knocked out completely for a week and then just sat around in a brain fog for the next week and even now nearly a month later I am still coughing.  The brain fog and lack of motivation and the fatigue was the worse and I ended up sitting in front of the TV watching Olympics and high school baseball all day and every day!  And I HATE the TV!  It was pretty bad!

While I was still laid out, Tetsu discovered that there were hornets trying to build a hive in our balcony wall (they were buzzing in and out of a very small crack) and then he discovered a small hive up under the eaves of our house. 

I slept through all the excitement of Tetsu dealing with the hornets with extra strength wasp repellant and then getting up on a ladder and knocking down their hive.  He managed to wrench his knee while he did that but he did win out over the hornets!  He counted 63...

Not a great photo but you can see that we survived the hornets and Covid.  Here we are with the end of the season crop of blueberries from our garden.

Once I was back up and about I finished off the Mola wall hanging I had been making.  

This goes with the Mola from last year.  I think the top piece is supposed to be sprouts in a field and the bottom piece are the tomatoes after the crop comes in. 

I'm done with Mola for the year!

Japan had a couple of typhoon visit us in August and the southern part of Japan had quite a bit of flooding and landslide damage.  In our part of Japan, though school was canceled for the day, we actually didn't get much wind and in the evening the sky was just beautiful!

The scenery from our bedroom window.

You can see how the rain has hit the windows on this side of the house but once that passes we get some fantastic sunsets!

I made cookies one day...

M-san and I went out fabric shopping for our next project and we stopped for gelato on the way home.

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Taiga-kun has two bottom teeth now!  He is getting past baby stage.

He is also beginning to stand and try to pull himself around.

Luka and Leiya and Taiga made a trip to Texas a couple of weeks ago and they spent a week with Leiya's good friend and her three boys.  Luka loves having some older "brothers".

And that's pretty much our month...

A couple of lessons from  Skillshare classes.

The hot days of August!

Another couple of weeks gone by.  In some ways the days pass so quickly, in other ways it seems like the summer is just dragging.  Mostly we do nothing which in itself is rather a downer...  I'm not much motivated to do anything but the bare minimum though I have set myself the task of drawing everyday and having a hand sewing project available for air conditioned afternoons.  

Cooking is at a minimum, though I did get inspired to make some carrot cake when M-san's mother gave me a large bunch of home grown carrots.  The cake, by the way, was DELICIOUS!

Most days Tetsu tries to spend outdoors whacking weeds and it is a never ending project.  If it is not the weeds around our house then he goes off with the neighborhood volunteer team to tidy up some elderly neighbor's yard for them, or he visits his friend who recently had a stroke and cuts the weeds around his house.  

I finished a smallish quilt to hang by my front door.  The pattern of a welcome quilt with lettering and applique was my own idea but the applique pieces and layout were taken from one of Lynette Anderson's books... though I made the doggie's legs a bit shorter to represent John.  Two of my friends are planning to make similar quilts and this was my sample to see if I could teach them the right dimensions.  (I'm still not sure.)

My other sewing project is from a Mola book that I own and once it has been planned out and set with various layers of fabric, it is ready for just a lot of hand sewing.  The sewing doesn't give me many problems but the set up is rather a brain exercise.  This should keep me occupied for the rest of the summer.

Hiroshima Peace Dome

This past week Japan commemorated two anniverseries of the atomic bombings of 79 years ago.  Of course there were ceremonies held on the respective days in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but in my city, loudspeakers requested citizens to honor a minute of silence for prayers and remembrance. 

Nagasaki Peace Park statue

When I was a college student I visited both the Hiroshima Peace Dome and also the Nagasaki Peace Park and though the museums are heart-breaking to go through, they are necessary memorials and reminders of why the world should aim for peace. 

My memorial in my bullet journal.

John and the kitties are bearing up with the heat.  John and I are of the same mind and neither of us want to do any walking outside.  Maybe next month?

Leiya reports that Taiga-kun smiles a lot and is trying to crawl!  

It looks like Tony has his hands full!  

And that's about it from Japan on another hot day!  

Wrapping up July!

We are in the heat and humidity of summer and wondering how the days will go through August.  Every year we say "This year the summer is the worst." and it is a regular greeting between friends these days.  We all end our conversations with "Stay well and be careful of heat stroke."  

There is not much energy for anything!

Tetsu and I did escape for a couple days to the highlands of Nasu, a resort-onsen area about an hour away from us.  As we'd both celebrated birthdays this month, there was a discount for each of us and Tetsu snapped it up right away.  It definitely was cooler and we enjoyed the hot baths and mountains of food!

The onsen was called New Maple and the onsen is especially popular in the autumn when the surrounding mountains are a riot of golds and oranges and red.  The green was still very refreshing and I'd love to go back in the fall.

We played ping-pong for an hour after checking in... something I haven't done since my high school days.  As you can imagine the goal was to keep the ball in a rally for more than 10 swipes across the net.

We were given yukata (cotton kimono) or Japanese style pajamas to wear around the hotel while we were there, and though it seems a bit strange for me to go wandering in public in basically pajamas, that's the custom and so I enjoyed the comfortableness of it.

Our room was purely Japanese style.  So glad I can now get on and off the floor again without any hip troubles.

Dinner and breakfast was buffet style with 10s of different dishes to try.  I ate more in these two days than I usually do in a week!

The scenery was wonderful, with clouds being born from the surrounding mountains.  Even the outdoor bath had this beautiful scenerys to look out on framed by bamboo screens for privacy.

As you can see, I used some of my time sketching.

On our way home from the onsen, we stopped at an outlet mall in Nasu and Tetsu bought me a pretty T-shirt, so that got in my sketchbook took.  And here is my T-shirt with tassels!

Back home, we battle the heat by going to the pool though in this season, in the middle of  summer vacation, there are too many families and too many people in general for me to do any swimming.  The facilities where we go have an outdoor pool that is only open for a month and Tetsu and I like to go outside and bob along under the trees.  The outdoor pool has less people in it because Japanese (women especially) don't like to get tan and so most people prefer to use the indoor pool.  The outdoor pool isn't big enough to swim laps though so I have a reprieve from doing any real exercise during the summer.

M-san came over with her finished strip quilt.  She has been working hard practicing her machine quilting skills!  I had a jelly roll of strips that I wasn't really too fond of and M-san asked if she could use it.  The simplest quilt pattern I could find was on the ON WILLIAMS STREET website and M-san got started making that.  I hadn't planned to make this quilt but when I was bemoaning all the 2 1/2 inch squares I have been collecting in a bin that I hadn't found a use for, I decided to make my own version of the quilt without the strips.  I quilted in white as I felt the quilt was already pretty busy, but M-san chose to quilt in black thread and her beautiful quilting really stands out wonderfully!

My quilt is already up on the wall and I thought this was a cute photo of the two of us with our two quilts!

Taiga-kun is getting big.  Still spitting up...

I don't know why Luka was wrapped in a blanket.  I think it is just as hot in Indiana these days as it is in Japan...

Today, is Julieta-san's birthday!  Happy Birthday Julieta!  And I think I missed blogging that it was Tetsu's birthday too this month and Leiya's!  July is really a celebratory month for our family!

Most of our days are spent in front of the TV...  I'm hand quilting something small while Tetsu enjoys the Olympics.  I'm grateful for the Olympics though not a big fan of watching them myself, mainly because it keeps Tetsu out of the heat for most of the day!

Enjoy your summer and be careful not to get heat stroke those of you in the Northern Hemisphere.  Those friends in the Southern Hemisphere, please send us some cool breezes!