I’m bad at new environments

30 April 2008 | Text

When I opened the window

23 April 2008 | Text

Multiplication

22 April 2008 | Text

Weekend cherry blossoms

7 April 2008 | Text

Just a little impulse buying

4 April 2008 | Text

Flower viewing lunch near our house

3 April 2008 | Text

A spring gift

1 April 2008 | Text

Rainy Sunday

31 March 2008 | Text

Cats and horror music

29 March 2008 | Text

Ba-na-nah, ba-na-nah, bana—na

26 March 2008 | Text

A new face arrived

24 March 2008 | Text

A present, again and again

15 March 2008 | Text

A present, again

‘Go Away White’
Unexpectedly, the title could be suitable for White Day!?
It’s the first studio album since 1983 from one of our favourite bands: Bauhaus!
I didn’t open the wrapping so we haven’t listened to what it sounds like yet.

14 March 2008 | Text

Presents this month

I got two birthday presents yesterday so I took their photographs.
(But when I looked at the pictures later on my monitor I was disappointed about the bad quality. And maybe I should say that I should have done a more serious table arrangement. People may say I am rough.)
I told everybody before that I didn’t like my birthday because I get one year older, but now I say getting presents is delightful. Am I just cheeky?

13 March 2008 | Text

It should be ready soon!

Last year, a friend asked me how I was doing with my personal manga, so I told her about my plans for it.
I am almost finished work on a disease diary related to the detached retina I had in 2006, which was our biggest event. Yes, it’s a disease diary. I could call it an essay, but I don’t think it is a report of my struggle with a disease. And I couldn’t write serious medical topics.

12 March 2008 | Text

Our boom

We were able to rent Neubauten DVDs starting 7 March! The band’s full name is Einstürzende Neubauten. They started to perform in 1980 in West Germany as an industrial and noise band. The band leader Blixa Bargeld has been one of Chris’ heroes for a long time. (Hmm. Blixa’s given name is also Chris! Chris is Christopher, but he is Christian.)

11 March 2008 | Text

Catching up with the modern world?

The other day, I got a sales call from NTT, and he said that because we already owned a telephone line, our NTT charges would be cheaper than the current ADSL plus telephone charges if we agreed to change to their fibre optic service. I usually can’t find much advantage in this kind of telephone sales call and just ignore them, but I like it when similar services from the same company become cheaper. I asked him to send me detailed materials and asked Chris about it, and then we thought it might be all right for us.

16 February 2008 | Text

Valentine’s Day supper

This year, I gave Chris a lot of M– sweets company’s ‘Enjoy Packs’.
Also, as a surprise, I sent him a gift set including six packs of sausages and four bottles of German style beer from Iwate prefecture, and two bottles of chocolate stout from the same brewer (because it was Valentine’s Day, and I was also interested in the product!).

15 February 2008 | Text

So today is married couples day…

Chris’ ‘week of cold’ and my ‘week of mysteriously puffy eyelids’ is finished today, which is married couples day.
It was sunny yesterday but it has been cold and cloudy so far today.
The weather forecast says it will be chillier next week.

2 February 2008 | Text

Gloomy us

A dark cloudy day.
My eyelid, which has been feeling itchy, became very puffy!
I don’t know why.
Could it be a pollen allergy that I never had before?
Aargh. I became more not-pretty.
I don’t want to see anybody, but I can’t do it.

30 January 2008 | Text

Winter pleasures

I don’t like cold weather.
But the vegetables we only see in winter are pleasant.
The veggies (potatoes) I bought this time were Awakening of Inca (which we ate last winter, too), and Northern Purple, which we tried for the first time.
They were both from Hokkaido.

23 January 2008 | Text

Somehow we felt happy

We have some nieces and nephews.
The other day, one of our nieces gave us a souvenir from her school trip. This was our first experience of something like that! (We don’t have any kids, so we haven’t received any souvenirs from school trips.) We didn’t expect it at all so we were surprised. It showed good taste, and also tasted good.

17 January 2008 | Text

Katakana words are Japanese!

Last week, we were casually watching a quiz show, and Chris suddenly became unhappy with something.
The problem in the show was what katakana words, which Japanese people think are English words, should really be.
Indeed, we have many misunderstandings about katakana words, such as celebrity, naive, moody, and so on. We should know their actual meaning when we use them as English, otherwise we may be misunderstood.

16 January 2008 | Text

Almost once a year?

Going to the movie theatre is just about an annual event for us.
We feel the admission is too expensive after we experienced cheaper prices: CA$5.00 for a matinee and CA$8.00 for the regular price.
Although we do think there are many nice Japanese movies…
Anyway, we went to see The Box of the Môryô, which is from an original story by Kyôgoku Natsuhiko. (It was the first time after we saw The Inugami Clan at the theatre!)

7 January 2008 | Text

It seems a bit late…

5 January 2008 | Text

Happy New Year!

1 January 2008 | Text

The 2008 calendar is ready!

13 December 2007 | Text

Today’s presents for us

It has been getting chilly so I was careful not to catch cold, but I have a chill and think I caught one.
But, unexpectedly, I got something from one of my friends that is good for me now.
It’s a package of ginger candies. And I was surprised after eating one. The usual ginger candies and drinks from local supermarkets just taste sweet; this one, however, was so spicy that I could expect it to have a good effect for my cold.

26 November 2007 | Text

Our small complaint for this month

We heard that quite a few musicians are giving away their music because they can’t depend on CD sales any more. (They focus on concert profits more than that.)
The other day, a band we like offered their new album for sale as a ‘pay what you like’ download. Because we like their music, we bought it for a price that we thought was fair for the band, the music, and what we could pay.

12 November 2007 | Text

A gift in autumn

We got a bunch of lemon grass and two big sweet potatoes from the same person on different occasions.
He said that they were organically grown by someone!!
The lemon grass is taller than my height. The sweet potatoes are about 28 cm (11 inches) long.
All I can say is: it’s wonderful!

20 October 2007 | Text

A somewhat trendy event!

We (Chris) downloaded Radiohead’s new album In Rainbows, which was released yesterday all over the world.
The price was up to the buyer and now it’s only available as a download.
We also had the choice to buy a special edition for £40 (about 9,500 yen) which contains two LPs and two CDs with artwork in a custom jacket. We seriously thought over which we should buy and finally decided to get the download-only one.

11 October 2007 | Text

Purple evening

I’ve only been baking bagels recently, so for the first time in a while I tried to bake a new kind of bread.
At an outdoor veggie market, we bought the last bag of purple sweet potatoes.
One was over 500 g: it was very big to use. So I decided to bake ‘potato bread’ for the first time, using the purple sweet potato instead of a regular potato.

5 October 2007 | Text

Still more about ‘Humanoid Monster BEM’

I’m always going on about this, but the 5th BEM DVD arrived!
It includes the last two stories of the first series and two stories that were made in 1982 but never broadcast.
In the last original story, the good people Bem, Bela, and Belo were treated coldly and were afraid, then finally were burned as monsters in a house where real evil monsters lived: it tells us how humans are inconsiderate and also stupid. It’s a great story to educate people.

4 October 2007 | Text

When we walk downtown…

When we go downtown, we often see people wearing ‘Gothic–Lolita’ and ‘Lolita’ fashions. There are usually two or three people walking together. We sometimes see a couple wearing nicely matching outfits, and we feel they are kind of cute.
So, I vaguely guessed that such fashions came about because they are fans of certain kinds of music (like ‘visual-type’ bands), and researched it. But I learned that’s not the only reason.

27 September 2007 | Text

Did we try hard?

‘Humanoid Monster BEM’ vol. 4 arrived!
Every time each of the six (19th to 24th) stories started, Chris took photographs of the opening scenes that I really like more than the stories themselves. He took a total of 159 pictures, including the ones I could and couldn’t use. A digital camera is so handy, isn’t it!
I have introduced a simple version of this before, but I let myself go and tried again to make a perfect (?) version!

21 September 2007 | Text

Midnight…

It sounds a little late, but we watched Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims DVD.
We rented (and really liked) the DVD of the TV drama Tiger and Dragon, which got many-star good reviews.
We weren’t familiar with the writer, Kudo Kankuro, but anyway we rented his other movie.
Many people who reviewed this movie said that it was hard to follow the humour, so we wondered if we would enjoy it. Well, it was all right. We enjoyed watching it!

20 September 2007 | Text

It finally arrived!

‘Humanoid Monster BEM’ volumes 2 and 3 finally arrived. We’d been waiting for them since June.
For some reason, there are no DVD/CD rental shops around our house, so we use an internet rental service. (We also don’t have driver’s licences and a car.)
Fewer copies of ‘Humanoid Monster BEM’ volume 2 seem to be available than the other volumes, and we had to wait for a long time. After volume 3 it seems almost 100% are available any time. We had to wait longer for volume 2 than we did for a CD they had only one copy of!

11 September 2007 | Text

Are we catching up with modern technology a little!?

Even though we often got annoyed with the blurry photographs from camera shake, and with the slow shutter speed of the camera, we thought that was just the way it was with our digital camera.
But we were attracted by a digital single lens reflex camera set when we found it at a web shop.
It might be too out of place for our lifestyle? But…

29 August 2007 | Text

Our small complaint

I don’t mind that Saga prefecture (my home ground) has come to be better known these days, but I feel uncomfortable to hear familiar words being used in different ways from their original sense.
That’s right! I’m talking about gabai (which has come to mean ‘great’ in Saga dialect). But I’ve been feeling uncomfortable about it for a long time.

24 August 2007 | Text

Today is an anniversary day for me!

On August 22nd, 1994, I flew to the country where I later met Chris, planning to study English for one year.
That summer was also hot. And there was a serious water shortage.
I had forgotten, but it was the day Saga Commercial High School won the all-Japan high school baseball tournament championship. (I heard about it later.)
When my relatives got together for this year’s Obon, one of my brothers-in-law said that he hadn’t been able to follow the game because of my departure (his family came to see me off). So it brought back my memories.

22 August 2007 | Text

Summer just keeps on going!

However, according to the old calendar, it became Autumn. We have to be patient for one or two months more, even if it is 33 or 34 degrees every day. Because we are who we are, we’ll probably be saying ‘It’s chilly! ’ soon. (So we tell ourselves.)

20 August 2007 | Text

It’s been a year

A year ago yesterday was the day I had surgery for the detached retina in my right eye.
A friend of ours who comes back to Fukuoka during Bon season visited me in the hospital last year. Now that I became better, finally I could go out for lunch with her yesterday. It is a bit of a happy event, isn’t it?

10 August 2007 | Text

It probably would have been postponed if it was planned for today

Typhoon No.5 has been getting closer to Kyushu.
Yesterday was sunny. Sultry and not windy at all. So the 45th Nishinippon Fireworks went ahead as planned. We went to almost the same spot as last year, and had bagels filled with ham and leftover potato salad, and some cans of beer and sparkling water.

2 August 2007 | Text

Mr C, these days – things he doesn’t want to do

Just some days ago, we finally had to upgrade the system for our money sucking computer, and we bought Mac OSX 10.4 Tiger. We wanted to keep using OS 9.2, but it seems everyone else has already upgraded their computer systems, and it sometimes made trouble for Mr C. We carefully compared prices among net shops, and finally ordered it. It arrived quicker than we expected.

10 July 2007 | Text

Mr C, these days

A small African xylophone that Ms M gave him when she moved away.
And a few original self-made string instruments.
After that, a used keyboard that C says used to be popular in the ’80s.
Then, at a recycle shop, we found and bought a Taisho koto (it was invented in the Taisho period in Japan; the lady who used to live next door also used to play it).

6 July 2007 | Text

E-mail troubles

Actually, I am writing this thinking about a woman who probably lives in Fukuoka. (She mentioned that she heard about us at Rainbow Plaza in IMS, Fukuoka City.)
We want to contact her, but she gave us an incomplete e-mail address, so our reply mail to her bounced. We guess that she probably feels we are insincere people who aren’t answering her question.
We can’t mention her real name here but:
Ms. M.E., who sent in a question to Chris on the night of June 23rd, please send him another e-mail with your e-mail address!

1 July 2007 | Text

My zeal still hasn’t cooled?

Since this year’s Golden Week, I have baked bread every couple of days.
It’s mostly for breakfast, so my repertoire is not so large – just bagels, table rolls, Heidi bread, and the like – and somehow they’ve come to look like bread. I get better results if I stick with it. I could even leave some rolls and frozen bagels for Chris when I was in the hospital!.

22 June 2007 | Text

What’s up these days

Finally I could have a lens implanted to replace the lens in my right eye! I hadn’t been able to see well since the surgeries I had last summer, after I had a detachment of the retina. This time I also had to have surgery and stayed in the hospital for six days. I want to write about the details of my eye’s condition later, all at once, after I can make new glasses and contact lenses: after my right eyesight becomes stable. Happy, happy.

19 June 2007 | Text

Goth indeed: it’s ‘Humanoid Monster BEM’!

I watched it when I was a kid:
‘No-one knows when it was born. In the dark, soundless world, a cell divided, grew, and three creatures emerged. Of course they are not human, nor animal… But inside their ugly bodies hides the blood of justice. These creatures… are the humanoid monsters who could not be human.’

5 June 2007 | Text

The past week

Our wedding anniversary. We were going to eat lamb for dinner but we couldn’t because for some reason the shop we ordered it from couldn’t send it on the day we requested. So we had a simple supper of pork in a salt based sauce and Heidi bread. Yes, I baked a double quantity of bread without giving up. (Am I getting better at it?)

23 May 2007 | Text

Revenge lunch!

‘Right! Today, I’ll try to bake Heidi’s bread again! ’ I said that this morning with great enthusiasm. If it turned out all right, we could eat it for lunch.
I baked terrible Heidi bread during Golden Week, then baked butter rolls and bagels like scones or cookies. After that, I tried to bake bagels twice, and somehow it got a little better. I don’t care if it’s ‘Even a poor shot will hit the mark eventually’ or ‘What one likes, one will do best’ or ‘Practice makes perfect’. But I don’t want to be ‘Enthusiasts are often the worst at what they do’.

16 May 2007 | Text

Marc’s TV show

It’s a TV program from 1977 that Marc Bolan MC’d.
From the first the plan was to make only six shows; the shows weren’t taped one at a time: it says they were edited together after they taped Bolan, Bolan & T.Rex, and each of the guests. There are a few times when we see guests behind Bolan when he introduces them; however, there is no talking or singing with the show’s guests except for Bowie.

10 May 2007 | Text

Finally, (a bit of) success?

It first happened on May 4th, Greenery Day.
It was free admission day at the Fukuoka City Zoo and Botanical Gardens, so we wanted to have a picnic lunch there.
So I thought I could try to bake ‘Heidi’s bread’, which I saw in the newspaper the other day.
I’ve never yet had a good result baking. I haven’t learned how. I have done some baking, but anyway I am very much a beginner.

7 May 2007 | Text

Free day at the Zoo and Botanical Gardens

Today was May 4th. It’s a Japanese national holiday, and starting from this year it’s called Greenery Day (changed from a generic national holiday).
So admission to the Fukuoka City Zoo and Botanical Gardens (right up the hill from us) was free!
We usually avoid going to crowded places, but we happily go if the admission is free and it’s close to our house. In the morning it was raining: we gave up on a picnic lunch, and made our way there in the afternoon when the rain stopped.

4 May 2007 | Text

A visit to the flower garden

It seems there are many sizes and kinds of Paeonia. We had the impression that Paeonia is much smaller than Paeonia suffruticosa, but some are big. We took some pictures but there aren’t any signs to tell us which is which, so we amateurs have no idea about their proper names. We just say ‘I like it! ’ or ‘This is so beautiful!’ and look around. Well, maybe that’s all right for the pretty flowers we were able to see, right?

3 May 2007 | Text

I thought it was snow

It’s been getting warmer.
However, whenever I open the curtains, I always think that it snowed.
Our jasmine has passed its peak time.
It almost looks like the afternoon view of a rare snowfall.
In short, it looks like melted snow mixed with mud.
To enjoy the beautiful view for a little longer, let’s pick dried brown flowers.

1 May 2007 | Text

So, it was that kind of story!

When I was a little kid, I watched ‘Ultra Q’ on TV, but I only remember the title and the music. I really liked it.
I didn’t remember the stories, but only the names of some of the monsters: Tarantula, Garamon, Kanegon.
However, we visited the Ultra World Exhibition in the summer of 2004, and since then we’ve been hoping to watch it. And it came true! We rented the DVD.

20 April 2007 | Text

Talking about flowers, 3

For the past few years, at this time of year, we’ve gone to see the Paeonia suffruticosa and Paeonia.
Last week we saw that one kind of Paeonia suffruticosa, called kaoh, was in bloom, and it had been warm for a few days. So we anticipated that it was the right time for them all to be in bloom, but only about ten percent had flowers.

17 April 2007 | Text

Talking about flowers, 2

Somehow the warm weather makes everything feel nice.
At our house, the view from the window is also getting to be lovely. (Only one window, though…)
It’s thanks to the Naniwa rose, which blooms beautifully even though we don’t take proper care of it.
A friend of mine said that the view below looks like a window in a foreign country, although the window itself is a typical Japanese wooden window from the early 1960s.

14 April 2007 | Text

Talking about flowers

We wondered if the ukon flowers might be in full bloom and visited the Minami Park parking lot (ten minutes away from our house on foot).
It was about seventy to eighty per cent in bloom. We thought that ukon was the great light green cherry flower, but actually the gyoikô, which was in bloom next to the ukon, has a stronger green colour. It still had many buds, but the flowers were droopy looking. (Or so I felt: it doesn’t mean they are actually drooping, I think. But I am not a flower expert.)

10 April 2007 | Text

Flower viewing party with friends

It’s that time of year again: time for the usual flower viewing party!
The wind was strong, and sometimes there was a bit of rain. Would we be able to eat our box lunch without the wind making trouble? Would the full bloom of the cherry flowers be gone already? Anyway, we decided to go to our usual spot.

5 April 2007 | Text

Are we a little late?

We have a plan to have a cherry blossom viewing party with friends at another park. That location had its peak flower time earlier than the park near our house, so the flowers might be gone. Well, we can think of it as just an outdoor picnic. But then again, this week has been chillier compared to last week.

3 April 2007 | Text

Small pleasures (C’s case)

Some months ago, at a Net shop, I found out about blind sales of beer, for 99 yen per bottle. It’s cheap because the beer is close to its sell-by date. Of course Chris always wants to buy it every time there’s a blind sale! We can drink beer, if we don’t choose the purchase date, the country the beer was from, and the brand. If we bought those beers at the proper Japanese price, they would cost 300 to 400 yen per bottle.

30 March 2007 | Text

Are my small pleasures escalating?

It was my birthday the other day.
Chris wanted to buy me a CD, so after we went to hand in our income tax forms, we visited Tower Records and HMV. And we couldn’t find any CDs we wanted. But I found the ‘Very Best of Japan’ DVD by accident!

16 March 2007 | Text

A small pleasure

I don’t know how drinking might effect my right eye as it recovers from the operations I had, but I thought it was probably better not to drink until the eye recovered completely, so I have not been drinking since last August. So I naturally started to pay attention to drinks or foods other than alcohol, such as sparkling water or tea or vegetables.

27 February 2007 | Text

How about a free 2007 calendar?

Sorry to not update these pages for such a long time! Here it is, already December. I had to do many things, and now here we are. By the way, I made next year’s calendar. The design is almost the same as last year’s, though. Sorry about that! If you want a copy, please download it and print it out.

11 December 2006 | Text

I’m late to tell you again, but I came back home!

Well, I skipped this summer, and I almost skipped October, too.
Anyway, I got home from this latest stay in hospital on Sunday, October 22nd.
Even though only one of my eyes has trouble, I have been feeling that many things became inconvenient. Now I know how much I had depended on my eyesight! Even though I’m badly near-sighted, I miss the good old days. Until I get proper eyesight, for the next few months, I will have a lot of bother. Aa–ah.

28 October 2006 | Text

It happened again!

I’d been sensing flashes of light in my right eye since last weekend.
But it only happened a couple of times a day, for a very short time each time, so I wasn’t sure if it was real or not.
My next appointment at the outpatient clinic was a few weeks away. I wondered if I should go to the hospital or wait. Finally I decided to go and see my doctor on Tuesday.
The result was that I had to stay in the hospital again, and I had another eye surgery on the 4th. I was in the early stage of proliferative vitreoretinopathy.

5 October 2006 | Text

Another notice (current situation)

This is another late notice, but I finally got out of the hospital on September 6th after three surgeries on my right eye! However, it will still take time for my right eye to get back to the same condition as before. (The doctors said it takes three to six months.) For now, of course I can’t see well with my right eye. It makes me very tired when I wear a contact lens in my left eye, and I can’t see well using my old glasses. (My eyesight has changed over the last few years.) And I’ve lost my sense of distance perception, too. Everything makes me tired easily.

13 September 2006 | Text

Notice (a little late)

Since 8 August, I’ve been in the hospital for surgery on a retinal detachment in my right eye.
I had to be admitted right after going for a check-up in the outpatient clinic, so I didn’t have time to announce that this weblog would be on hold for a little while.
I’ll start up again when I leave the hospital. Please wait for me!

1 September 2006 | Text

The 44th Nishinippon Ohori Fireworks Festival

At just about 8:00 p.m., we and our friends went to the field near Ohori Park. We watched the fireworks from beside Fukuoka City Art Museum until last year, but we tried a different location this year. (Of course, we can watch the set fireworks inside Ohori Park, but there are too many people there, so it’s impossible to eat and drink and watch over there.)

2 August 2006 | Text

We have some stories that are not about cats

One may feel we are spending a lot of time for cats. However, there were some other events not related to cats. We went to the ‘50 years of Modern Vietnamese Paintings: 1925-75’ exhibition at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, and Fukuoka City Museum for the 40th anniversary year exhibition of the Waseda University Egypt Archaeological Mission.

26 July 2006 | Text

After shock!

Since Kuro stayed inside our house for two weeks,
Kyoku has had some strange habits.
It could be to display himself, or to hold a dominant position,
but he usually prefers to be in high places.

12 July 2006 | Text

It has been one year since we found termites!

It has been one year since the fearful time that we found termites after some gaps appeared between the walls and posts of our house after the 2005 Fukuoka earthquake.
Last week, a person from the termite extermination company came for the last check of the one year contract term that our landlord made. We heard they got rid of the termites that attacked our house, so they wanted to remove the chemicals inside the house.

10 July 2006 | Text

C’s cooking

Chris often used to cook. Probably he had more free time in the evening before. Even now, he sometimes cooks when I’m out, but he doesn’t have a chance to cook in the evening. He originally likes to cook though. But today it was my turn to lie down and wait until supper was ready. I read a mystery story I hadn’t finish to read. A nice smell came from the kitchen.

26 June 2006 | Text

Tired Kyoku

Kuro, who is undergoing medical treatment, has been staying with us for a week.
We have been tired, and we guess Kyoku is suffering the most: his lifestyle fell into disorder. We guess even easy-going Kyoku has been irritated about Kuro, who suddenly appeared for reasons he doesn’t know, and who gets to have his own way.

25 June 2006 | Text

Days of not enough sleep

When we say we don’t get enough sleep these days, people might think it’s because of the World Cup. No, it is clearly Kuro’s fault – the cat that has been staying over at our house for the past five days.
Kuro’s attack usually starts at around three in the morning. He rams my neck with his head while miaowing loudly. And licks my face.

23 June 2006 | Text

Kuro made trouble again!

Somehow, three nights have passed.
Even though we couldn’t get enough sleep, house cat Kyoku and garden cat Kuro have been more calm than we thought they would be. However, Kuro’s unbelievable appetite never stops, and he wants to be too close to us, and he challenges Kyoku, so they don’t seems to be nice friends. (But it has been better than last time.)
Being a cat is convenient. Because they are originally night time animals, they can sleep whenever they want.

21 June 2006 | Text

A most eventful Sunday

Last Sunday, we decided to go to the ‘Beautiful Ryukyu Kingdom’ exhibition, which we hadn’t had the chance to visit yet. We went to the Kyushu National Museum (in Dazaifu, Fukuoka prefecture) for the first time! (We were offered free tickets for the exhibition. Thank you so much!) If we can find the time, we would like to go there on a weekday so there might be fewer visitors. But we didn’t have any more time, because it will be over next Sunday, so we couldn’t be leisurely about it.

20 June 2006 | Text

We don’t eat out very often.

We don’t eat out very often. However, a friend of ours suddenly came back to town for a few days, so we had an opportunity. We could eat out at night, for the first time in a while. (Even we sometimes visit a friend’s house for eating or drinking. Anyway, when was the last time we went to a restaurant? Maybe it was our neighbourhood yakitori restaurant?)

16 June 2006 | Text

We actually like eating out…

However, there’s a simple reason why we find it difficult to eat out. But even people like us sometimes want to go to a new restaurant. Actually, when I was searching for lunch spots in the Tenjin area before, I found some places I was interested in. So the one I picked this week was a Latin-style café restaurant.

13 June 2006 | Text

Recently we wonder: why is it so?

The hydrangea (next to our slightly listing gatepost) and the passion flowers (around the kitchen garden) are blooming naturally, and there are flowers on the impatiens we bought from a shop. But generally our garden doesn’t look great these days. (Although we can see our neighbour’s amaryllis from our gate.) And there are many strange things going on…

7 June 2006 | Text

I just want to pay the proper price!

Oh-oh. No good. Two new-looking part timers came on shift at the check-out… So we thought as we stood in line, carrying the discount stuff we’d picked up after seeing it listed in the post-renovation opening sale flier at a neighbourhood supermarket. It was around 5:00 p.m. Even though we don’t like shopping at the busy time, we went to get stuff there at a nice price.

27 May 2006 | Text

The first time this year

When I rinsing rice, I suddenly noticed it. It was an ant parade: the first time we saw it this year. We have seen some ants, sometimes; but this time was a big parade. Ay ya. We thought they were aiming for Kyoku’s bowl, but actually they didn’t seem to be carrying anything with them. Many, many black ants were just busily parading.

23 May 2006 | Text

Somehow dull…

We usually don’t watch TV shows, and of the sports programmes, we only watch sumo. But even we suddenly watch soccer games before the World Cup. The Japan vs. Bulgaria game had a good picture. But Japan vs. Scotland didn’t. (Our shichirin buddy Ms H went to see that game at the studium in Saitama.) The bad picture started at almost the same time as the game.

19 May 2006 | Text

A note of the season

It has been dull all this week compared to nice sunny Sunday. Between showers, we got some plums from the people across from our house. They said a landscaper would come soon to trim and spray, so they offered the plums to us. (Thank you very much!)

17 May 2006 | Text

It’s a familiar topic as usual: the peony garden on Sunday

We were wondering where to go on a clear sunny Sunday afternoon, when Chris had a nice idea! Go to Ozasa Central Park and have a picnic lunch (just eat lunch outside), go through Baikôen Walking Park and Ropponmatsu, then go have another look at the peony garden that wasn’t in full bloom yet when we were there on May 5th.

15 May 2006 | Text

Peony tour of Golden Week 2006

May 5th was Children’s Day. Thanks to an acquaintance, we had free admission tickets, so we decided to go to Hakozaki Shrine Flower Garden (Higashi Ward, Fukuoka). Originally, we couldn’t tell the difference between tree peonies (botan) and herbaceous peonies (shakuyaku). So we didn’t know what was the best season for their flowers.

6 May 2006 | Text

Horsehair crabs of Golden Week 2006

How nice it is to eat nicely. People might say that crab is our only treat, but here I am: talking about horsehair crab again. This time we felt like trying to buy by internet auction. We could get 400 gram horsehair crabs from the Sea of Okhotsk, off Hokkaido. I don’t know how to bid, but I could make a successful bid somehow! Two horsehair crabs, 660 yen each!

2 May 2006 | Text

Start of Golden Week 2006

April 29th is ‘Greenery Day’ in Japan. Because the Shôwa Emperor (also known as Emperor Hirohito) studied plants, his birthday has become one of the few days in a year when admission is free at public parks that usually charge a fee. So, just after noon, we went to the Fukuoka City Zoo and Botanical Gardens, which are near our house.

1 May 2006 | Text

The story of our recent purchases

Computers are indeed money-eaters. In our house, Chris uses two computers and I use one computer, each in our different rooms, and they are all not the newest Macs. Chris edits for a living, so he has to have them. As time goes by, the maker announces a new product, and we can’t afford to buy it, but we are somehow forced to buy something compatible with it.

12 April 2006 | Text

Salt-baked sea bream night

The other day, I had to bring home a red sea bream from my parents’ house. I usually grill sea bream, or deep fry it fish-and-chips style, but we decided to bake this one in salt – we’d been meaning to try this technique. Of course, it’s better to do it the the fish is fresh, but I came back home late, and brought back something to eat from my parents’ house. So Chris just cleaned the fish and prepared it for the next day.

4 April 2006 | Text

Cherry blossom viewing, this year too!

There are still a few more days until the cherry trees will be in full bloom, but it was our friend’s day off, so we went to Maizuru Castle. The blossoms were half full? We found a place in the same area as last year and put down a green sheet. It was a sunny day but the wind was cold. This year, we had a deluxe three-layer box lunch called hanakasumi (flower haze) from Minokichi in Kyoto, which was recommended by Mr. M. Mm—m, beautiful.

30 March 2006 | Text

Start of the shichirin season!

In the morning, it was cloudy and a little bit windy, but the sun came out and it got warmer in the afternoon. Yesterday’s weather forecast was right. Let use the shichirin! Four o’clock in the afternoon. It’s still chilly at night, so we started early. Probably we’ll use the shichirin many times this year, too. Neighbours, please come and join us!

27 March 2006 | Text

Crab and sea urchin and nice rice

Yesterday, from the morning on, we had a plan to eat a crab – because we saw a flier from a big neighbourhood supermarket announcing they would sell boiled snow crab shoulder for ¥1,000. It might have been frozen, but that was all right: we usually don’t eat such expensive stuff.

13 March 2006 | Text

Memories of flowers

Time passes so fast, as I said some days ago, and my birthday is getting closer. Aah. I get many presents, and that simply makes me happy. I don’t usually mention my birthday but I had an unexpected present yesterday, so I would like to write about it.

9 March 2006 | Text

The beginners’ potato shôchu night

Well, today was the début of the serving pot that we were looking forward to after making the mixture of water and potato shôchu. However, we are both potato shôchu beginners. We only drank wheat and black sugar shôchu before, but Chris tried potato shôchu at a neighbourhood yakitori restaurant at the end of last year, and it was unexpectedly easy to drink.

16 February 2006 | Text

Our Valentine’s Day

February 14th: many people plan some kind of event for Valentine’s Day. Contrary I may be, but I live in Japan – so I gave something to my husband, who doesn’t get any ‘giri’ (obligation) chocolates from co-workers, because he works at home. However, I had one more plan for him – something a little bigger!

14 February 2006 | Text

A little happiness has come!

We – who don’t have a car – often use internet shopping sites. Bags of cat litter or bottles of wine are really heavy to carry. (Although, really, Chris usually carries heavy things.) And because of our careful net shopping, we could win a ‘January present’!

4 February 2006 | Text

Our weblogs

We think many people don’t know about the following so we want to give you the information! In fact, there are three ‘blogs’ on the Nishigawa Kobo web site. Usually blogs are renewed almost every day, so we hesitate to use the word, because ours is irregular. We can hardly say it’s renewed frequently, but we don’t know what else to call it, so we use the word ‘blog’.

16 January 2006 | Text

Happy New Year!

Time flies, and it’s already 2006. We are happy that we could manage to clean our windows and the kitchen stove before the end of last year, even though we had a lot of things to do. We made woodblock print cards and sent them, but we are not sure if they could reach people on January 1st.

5 January 2006 | Text

Do you want a free 2006 calendar?

Times flies very quickly, and it’s already the middle of December. We didn’t make our New Year’s cards yet, and we wonder: we who have no backbone, we who soon give up in the cold, how will we manage our year end cleaning? Anyway – we did have time to make this nice little calendar for you…

15 December 2005 | Text

It’s finally out!

This morning the book Ozasa by C.F. Ryal finally arrived. We’d been planning the printing of this book since last year, and we were going to order it in August; however – we don’t know why – it was postponed. So we sent it to the printer in November, and it finally arrived on the 2nd of December.

2 December 2005 | Text | Comments (1)

The things we care about

We always look at the fliers delivered with our newspaper. We mainly pay attention to those from our local supermarkets, or from the DIY shops. We also like to look at real estate advertisements, even though we don’t plan to buy a house or apartment. Other ones mostly go straight into the basket for recycling.

28 November 2005 | Text

Popular fellows around our house

One day, a dry day despite the monsoon season, we found some globby somethings emerging from a gap between the post and wall in the entrance hall, which had opened up after the earthquake. We wondered if it was some kind of egg and inserted a palette knife in it: some white ant-like stuff dropped to the floor. ‘What? This may be termites!’

7 July 2005 | Text

Mother?

He said ‘Yes, we do. Hard work, eh mum? Carrying heavy stuff like milk up this hill.’ At that moment, I got annoyed! ‘But “mother” I’m not.’ (I don’t have any children, and moreover I am not his mother. Even as I become older, I never want a stranger to call me ‘mother’.) ‘Oh, you’re a young missus, aren’t you.’ He tried to patch it up. Phum!

11 June 2005 | Text

Plum wine

We were wondering where to buy plums to make plum wine – we got 1.8 litres of white liquorr last year when the lady next door moved, and we bought a package of crystal sugar at the supermarket. Then yesterday Mrs. U from across the street said that we could get plums from the plum tree in their garden.

8 June 2005 | Text

Our recent trend

Recently, C has a passion for charcoal grilling on the shichirin (a charcoal brazier). Whenever we have an opportunity, we use it to grill whatever we have on hand, in our small front yard, which can accommodate four or five people at most. We’ve also barbecued in our parking space, facing the road, and we sat down to drink beer in the yard before the mosquitoes appeared – so we think our neighbours don’t feel we are strange. (Or so we guess.)

7 June 2005 | Text

A fun and fearful thing…

Free shipping, free shipping when you spend enough, group purchasing, secret sales, and so on: I am puzzled which one to buy. I feel it swirling around me: a certain day’s special, or double points after R—ten’s baseball team wins, or members-only ten times points sales, or…

28 May 2005 | Text

Happiness of a charcoal brazier

When C saw a 980 yen clay charcoal brazier – called a shichirin – at a discount store yesterday, he wanted to buy it. ‘What? We have a barbecue set big enough for a few people!’ I said so and hesitated to buy it. But I finally agreed with C who said he’d take charge of making the charcoal fire and save our gas rate.

26 May 2005 | Text

Split the bill

Today’s newspaper had an article on how, in Korea, they haven’t had the custom for people to divide up a bill between them, so there is no Korean term for it. But they recently adapted a phrase of foreign origin – ‘Dutch pay’ – and so it’s possible for them to explain what it means.

12 May 2005 | Text

Beer story

I noticed after visiting several countries that many people don’t share the Japanese idea that beer must be super chilly when one drinks it. Of course many people like to drink chilly beer as well, and it depended on where I visited or who I met. But I felt many people in Asian and Western countries didn’t care much about chilly beer – and it’s not related to the popularisation of refrigerators.

28 April 2005 | Text

Beer happiness

We don’t know why, but my elder brother, who lives in Saga, sent ‘Men’s Guinness’ and Guinness goods (three glasses and two small bags) to Chris. It wasn’t one of our birthdays, nor we had we done him a good turn. Anyway, we like gifts any time. Especially, this is an Irish dark beer we used to drink and usually can’t buy here!

27 April 2005 | Text

Disaster strikes when we least expect it

20 April 2005, 6:11 a.m., when we were still in bed: it came after a typhoon-like wind and rain in the night. More than ten seconds of big shaking, although it was smaller than the quake a month ago. One does meaningless things when one gets a sudden shock: unconsiously, I firmly grabbed a nearby house post.

21 April 2005 | Text

I caught a cold…

Finally, I caught a cold. During the cold winter, I sometimes had cold symptoms, and thought ‘Did I catch a cold?’ But now that the cherry blossoms are gone and the rhododendron is almost in bloom (which means it’s been warm) I caught a head cold: my typical kind of cold.

16 April 2005 | Text

Mystery of katakana Japanese

I think there are many words in Japanese imported from foreign languages – written in the katakana script – that I hope you won’t use, like ‘naive’, ‘moody’, ‘fancy’, ‘mansion’, and ‘arbeit’. You shouldn’t say in English the same as the Japanese meaning in your mind.

14 April 2005 | Text

Cherry blossom viewing

Wednesday, April 6th, 2005. It was in the early afternoon, the cherry trees in full blossom, and we went for a cherry blossom viewing party at the Fukuoka Castle remains with some friends.

9 April 2005 | Text

More than 10 days after the Fukuoka earthquake

I feel it’s a little late to write about this, but here we go. 10:53 in the morning on March 20th, 2005: we knew that there are faults all over and around Japan, but we never guessed we would actually experience Fukuoka’s biggest earthquake in three hundred years. But it suddenly came to us.

2 April 2005 | Text

Post office West and East

Do we ever think of the differences in post office culture between countries? It makes a big difference. This March, we had an interesting experience with registered mail delivery here in Fukuoka. Just over five years ago, we had another experience in our former country that pointed out just how different the post can be. We are glad that Japan’s post office is so nice…

23 March 2005 | Text

Why Nishigawa Kobo?

Some people might have noticed that we gave the name ‘Nishigawa Kobo’ to our (Chris Ryal and Yaemi Shigyo) project. We guess this is not a stylish sounding name, but people sometimes ask us why we are called Nishigawa Kobo. Of course, sadly, many people don’t care about our name at all…

14 March 2005 | Text

J-style cultural life: language

When I lived in an English speaking country, nobody cared who I was: wherever I went, everybody expected me to speak fluent English. Japan is also an odd country, in a different way. If a person who doesn’t look like a Japanese speaks some Japanese, they get excessive compliments.

26 February 2005 | Text