Hot summer celebrations!

Oh, wow!  It's been awhile since I've been here.  I sure let time get away from me this past month!  We've celebrated two birthdays since Takumi's and a wedding anniversery and tomorrow (today for us in Japan) is Leiya's birthday...  In another couple of days it will be Julieta's too, so July has been the month for celebrations!

Let's see...  the blueberry bushes have been giving us fruit which we pick and store in the freezer.  They are not as sweet as some years but they make a nice addition to our morning granola...

This was how I honored my birthday month in my bullet journal calendar.   Ha-ha!  So true!

I am officially 70 years old.  Should I sigh for the old days or rejoice at how far I've made it?  We celebrated my birthday at our favorite cutlet restaurant.

Leiya made me a beautiful birthday card with photo cutouts pasted onto a pop-up birthday card.  She is so creative!  She also worked long and hard on a patchwork bag for me to carry my sewing or sketching supplies around.  Who knows!  She may turn into a quilter yet!  Her bag is full of pockets and magnets!  And she also sent me a box of Archer and Olive journaling kit materials.  If you don't know, Archer and Olive makes some beautiful journals and pens and stickers and stamps for the journaling community!  I've got another month left to fill in the journal I'm working in now and then I start on the elegant journal Leiya sent.

Japanese heat and humidity is making the summer miserable and everyone finds the coolest place they can for an all day nap.  Here's Toi on a bag.

And John in front of the room fan.  

Cleo spreads out by a window (which actually turns into an oven when the sun hits it.)

Tetsu takes over the sofa...

On July 13th we celebrated our 45th wedding anniversery and Tetsu surprised me with a set of dishes and mugs.  One set for each of us.

They got put to use immediately.

This is what we looked like back then...

And this is what we look like now...

We celebrated our anniversary by going to an onsen with the Yamadas who are also celebrating their 45th anniversary next month.

I was awarded an appreciation certificate and a gold pin for serving as a crosswalk guard for 15 years.  Can you believe I've been doing this morning activity for that long?  I remember writing in my blog about how I was a bit leery about the commitment I was making and if I'd last at the job for any length of time...  The prayers I asked for then, worked!

And then just a few days ago, we celebrated Tetsu's birthday by going out to another cutlet restaurant.  Guess what Tetsu's favorite food is...

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Luka and Taiga are keeping cool with ice cream!

Yummy!

And they seem to have met up with my brother's family who was in Tennessee for a wedding. Wish I'd been there too!

Luka's and Leiya's vegetable garden!

That's all til next time!

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!