10 Months and Counting

The New Year holidays were spent looking at sunsets that seemed, each day, to outdo the one from the previous day. Or it seemed like that in the presence of an evening like the one above. Actually, they were pretty busy: we did the annual cleaning of the Tokyo house, drove up to Nagano for New Year's Eve with M's parents, then down to Akiya for three days. Tokyo was mild, Nagano was cold, but not as bitter as usual, and the days in Akiya were spent once again in shirtsleeves.

I fell out of writing for a while, since there hasn't been any particular movement on the house front, and I wanted to keep this based around that theme. We've got another meet with the contractor set up for next week, and we've sent several revisions based on the scaled-down plans to see what they'll come up with. One of them has the main bedroom moved off of the sea-side, though there will still be windows from the bedroom into the small atrium and beyond, so it will only be eight-feet away. The study would be on the ocean side, which I'm not sure is a good idea if we want to get work done.

Time is starting to become a major factor, which is not what we wanted and why we had started working on this last year with so much to spare. Now we have to finish the architectural plans for approval and start the process of tearing down the two present houses at the same time. We've gone ahead and asked to do the second ground test, this time using ultrasound technology.

The other thing that is starting to dawn on us is that, once the construction starts, it's the end of our weekends at the old house. That is very sad. It means fewer moments for a while of moments with friends like this:









or this:












or this (photo by m):