Rainy season in Japan

Ah-ah.  Time has passed by me again.  It has almost been a month since my last post...  There must be something going on around here to write about...

The biggest news was that Takumi celebrated his 40th birthday at the beginning of June.  I can remember my mother saying things like "How can my daughter be (such and such an age)?  I don't feel old enough to have a daughter that old!"  History repeats itself.

And here is the birthday boy (man).  Happy Birthday, Takumi!

The same week that Takumi celebrated his birthday, his elementary school friend stopped by with his family to bring us some strawberries.  Take-chan is a strawberry farmer and he often stops by with strawberries and then just spends an hour or so chatting with us.  Did you know that there are white strawberries now too?  We were the recipients of some huge red ones and sweet little ones and yummy white ones too!  Take-chan asked me to sketch a picture of his children holding the strawberries and I did my best!  

Then just last week Take-chan stopped in again with the last of this year's crop and we spent another hour or so chatting.  It is so nice that this young(ish) man doesn't mind spending time with us oldies!

M-san still comes faithfully for patchwork and recently drawing too.  She's another one who will spend time with me, a generation older, and doesn't seem to mind my ramblings...  Together the two of us paw through my scraps and come up with some project or another for her to work on.  She is making two of these farm scene quilts...

I got on the warpath for using up as many scraps as I can and I set M-san to work using 2 inch leaders and enders while I tackled the 2 1/2 inch bin.  I've got my quilt at the quilting stage but I'm a bit leery of starting because I have a feeling my backing and batting may shift if I push this around too much in my domestic machine.  But do I really want to hand quilt this?  Even if I quilt minimally?  In Japan's hot and humid summer?!  But because of that heat and humidity I'm not going to be able to spend much time in the sewing room so maybe hand quilting in the airconditioned livingroom is the way to go... This is now sitting in my sewing room marinating until I make up my mind.  M-san is doing something completely different with her 2 inch squares so that should be fun to follow also...

While making short work of square scraps I also grabbed a box of strings I've been collecting and started in on another toothbrush rug and even got two of my friends involved with making some rugs!  I am so pleased that this craft caught their interest and one friend is now teaching some of HER friends!  These are my friends' rugs...

And these are two of mine...  I think I've made four all together...  This is a great project for using up those strings that we quilters seem to accumulate, but I even cut up t-shirts and other knit fabric to use and it doesn't seem to make much of a difference.  My rugs are pretty hodge-podge and I just use what I pull out of the box, but you can see that my friends put more thought into the colors and number of rows etc.  

These two friends started out as English students but we've decided to give English STUDY a rest and just get together and chat, in English as much as possible.  Instead of getting out a book and studying, we come up with different art or craft projects every week.  Last month we did some weaving, and yesterday we did some bubble painting.

Here I am trying to blow bubbles onto a paper fan (but actually I was just getting colorful blobs...)  

We then switched to trying to make flowers and balls and I think we did pretty well!

We got together with the Yamadas at our favorite curry restaurant to celebrate Marlene's birthday.

Did you know that Japan is having a rice shortage?  This is huge news in Japan and while we can buy rice at an exorbitant price, we'd prefer not to...  Tetsu knows someone who knows a rice farmer and he kindly sold us 30 kilograms of rice for about a third of the price so now we are well stocked and hopefully the price of rice will go down before we need to buy any again!

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An update on Leiya's family...  Well, they DIDN'T go to Colorado.  Somehow that plan fell through but they were very philosophical about it as their Indiana house hadn't been put on the market yet, they hadn't signed a contract for the apartment they'd planned to rent, Tony's hospital was happy to take him back again.  It seems very complicated but I'm glad they are happy with where they are and the reasons why.  Luka is already registered for another year of preschool in their small Indiana town.

I don't think I showed this Victorian Puzzle that I made for Luka-kun last month.  It is a clever little puzzle, and I put a riddle and answer in it for Luka, as well as a maze...

The puzzle arrived (it took long enough!) and Luka seemed pleased to get mail from Grandma.

And that's about it from Japan.  We have rain and thunder and humidity and heat!  Not my favorite season!

Stay cool if you can!  (My friends in the Southern hemisphere, stay warm!)

 

May in the Watanabe house

So the month has gone by and though I think that there was nothing to report on, once I get started on a post I seem to find things that have passed through the quiet days.  Let's see how much "didn't" happen this month.

After Julieta-san and family's visit, things did fall into sort of a slump.  We had spent so many months planning and thinking about the visit and then the last week doing drastic housecleaning, that once the event was over, it was sort of a letdown.  Julieta and family left just before Golden Week in Japan and just because of the crowds of people out traveling during that week, Tetsu and I chose to stay close to home.

Actually this year there weren't that many carp flying on Boy's Day which was a bit disappointing.  The custom has faded away in cities as there really isn't space to fly the great streaming carp kites, but in the past, farmers proudly displayed the kites over their fields.  Not so much this year. 

With the start of Golden Week, the farmers start flooding their fields and then planting rice.  

I love to see the green countryside reflected in all the connecting flooded rice fields.  Soon, the rice plants will be so big that the rice stalks will take over... and then we'll start hearing frogs who live in the flooded fields.

One day during Golden Week, Tetsu and I visited a famous wisteria tree in our town and we enjoyed walking around the ancient tree and smelling the sweet aroma.

Hiya!

I got a burst of energy and decided that I had enough scraps of fabric to make a pretty background and then I pulled out some McKenna patterns from which I'd made a larger quilt years ago.  I had planned to stop with this small wallhanging but as I still had fabric scraps I made another.

Well, of course I can't stop there!

The last quilt got made.

And now all three are up in the entryway!

While I was doing that, M-san finished her quilt of applique squares.  It looks so different from the one I made last month!

While I was in the sewing room I tackled the large, OVERFLOWING basket of scraps that multiply and I spent three days just cutting the whole basket down to strips, (3 1/2 inches wide, 2 1/2 inches wide and 2 inches wide), strings, (anything less that 2 inches wide), 5 inch squares (for a someday Hunter's Star quilt) 3 1/2 inch squares (can anyone recommend a quilt using 3 1/2 inch squares?), 2 1/2 inch squares and 2 inch squares (M-san and I have plans for those).  I also just moved a lot of random batik scraps to another box.  My once overflowing basket of scraps is EMPTY!  It pained me to see how much I was still actually throwing away but I really needed to get some control back in the sewing room.  Of course I still have drawers and boxes of fabric, but ONE BASKET OF SCRAPS HAS BEEN CONQUERED!!!

And then I got inspired to use some of the half square triangles I'd kept and I made another baby quilt for no one in particular...  

For the past few years I have been on the crosswalk guard planning committee in Nikko, but I actually add very little to the meetings.  It is enough that I follow along on all the written material that I'm given (I feel happy when I find myself on the right page!) and I mostly agree with what other members are talking about.  Twice a year there is a general meeting with about 50 people and I've usually been given the simple job of walking to the podium, formally announcing the start of the meeting and at the end walking to the podium and formally announcing the end.  I can memorize that short exchange!  This year however, one of the other committee members couldn't attend the general meeting and so it was left to me to take up the slack and report last year's activities and this year's proposed activities!  I've been a crosswalk guard for a long time so most everyone realizes my limitations and are very forgiving!

The animals are all still pretty healthy.  At 21, Cleo still climbs up on people's laps for a cuddle.

Tetsu is enjoying his garden.

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Leiya writes to say that Luka graduated from pre-school but actually he has another year before kindergarten so he'll be starting at a new preschool from fall.  He looks so grown up...

...until you see him with Tony and he doesn't look so big anymore.

Yesterday Luka Facetimed us to say that he had a loose tooth and then an hour later he Facetimed again to say that the tooth had come out!  I think he had banged it on Taiga's head a couple of months ago and it started to wiggle then.

Leiya reports that Taiga is more active than Luka ever was and so she has her hands full!

And that's about all the news from this side of the world!

Visitors!

Okay!  Life for us in Japan is usually pretty tame but as we had visitors last weekend, the busyness ramped up a bit!  Ooh...  I wish you could have seen our house.  It looked so good!  Tetsu, as always, was gung-ho to clean up "a bit" and though we attacked the rooms bit by bit day after day, still the last two days were intensive!  The floors got washed (all of them!), the curtains got washed (all of them!), most of the windows got washed... blankets got taken to the laundromat, and Tetsu rearranged out normal storage area/cat room into a passable guest room!  The only room that wasn't really presentable was my sewing room because anything that had been taking up space in the other rooms got moved to my sewing room for the weekend.  John got taken to the vets for boarding and we were ready for guests!

The main purpose of Julieta and her brother and mother's travels was to visit Korea because her mother is a big K-pop fan and so the three of them spent a week in Korea.  I'm afraid I don't know much about K-pop nor Korea but they said they had a great time.

The three of them got to Tokyo early last week and next it was Julieta's time to check out anime and figurines etc.  (I'm not sure about that culture either).  But Julieta was most excited about a trip to a mini-pig cafe!  I think the pigs were the highlight of the trip for Julieta!

Finally they arrived in Utsunomiya and Tetsu and I picked them up from the station and promptly took them to a non-revolving sushi restaurant.  These less expensive sushi restaurants used to be called revolving sushi because you could just pick up plates of sushi that revolved on a conveyer belt around the guest tables but during the pandemic, most of those types of restaurants turned into quick order (by tablet) and quick delivery (by little Shinkansen bullet trains that run on tracks right to your table.)  

We finally got back to Nikko where the cats claimed laps and everybody could relax until evening.  We took a walk around the rice fields and neighborhood and in the late afternoon we headed for a day onsen for an evening bath.  

For dinner we went out to a nice Chinese restaurant.  As usual, I'm not much of a cook...

The next morning we got ourselves ready for a day out and an overnight stay and then headed for the shrines and temples of Nikko.  It was SO crowded though that we chose not to stand in lines to see the main attractions of the shrine (the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" monkey carvings and the "sleeping cat" carving) and instead just wandered around the large spiritual area where Buddhism and Shintoism meet.

They were very happy to see the tail end of the cherry blossom season.

Julieta at the landmark Shinkyo bridge.

We stopped for some street snacks...  These are usually called taiyaki in Japan and are waffle like things shaped like fish with sweet bean paste or custard inside.  In Nikko they are called Soppo and instead of being shaped like fish, they are shaped like monkeys.  Tetsu had a bean paste one and the rest of us had custard filled ones.

Julieta was very happy to get her street snack!

Finally we arrived in the mountain town of Kawaji to stay overnight at a small onsen called Saka Hijiri.  It was so nice!  There seemed to be only about 15 rooms in the onsen, and the girl at the reception desk remembered Tetsu and me from when we visited to ask about staying despite the fact that Julieta's brother has tattoos.  The girl at the reception (I found out her name was An-san) suggested we stay on this night because most of the guests were foreign and foreigners don't have the aversion to tattoos that Japanese do.  Anyway, An-san was very glad to see us and did her best to make our stay special.  

I had a chance to talk with her and learned that she is from Viet Nam and has only been in Japan 7 months even though she spoke excellent Japanese and also English!  Though the hotel was old, the onsen was adequate, the rooms were spacious and the food was fantastic!

A very nice, traditional Japanese dinner.

The scenery from our rooms.

A lovely inner Japanese garden.  I don't know why the tree was in autumn mode but it was lovely.

Breakfast was delicious and I was impressed at how everyone in Julieta's family are willing to try anything and enjoy the experience of different tastes... even though some of the morsels might not be something she'd choose again, Julieta's mother proudly finished off everything in front of her!

We left the onsen on the early side to get back to Nikko within an hour where our three guests gathered up the remainder of their luggage and then we headed off to the station which was another 45 minutes away.  

It was a whirlwind 48 hours with Julieta and her brother and mother but we got to feeling that we'd all become closer.  Tetsu and I sure had a good time, and I think Julieta's family did too!

And that's how our weekend visit ended.  Julieta's mother said next time she wants to show Tetsu and me around Mexico so hopefully someday we'll get in another trip with Julieta and family!