stuffed on a Saturday

This was one of those days when it feels like there's 34 hours in it, and it's only early afternoon.

We made it to the morning market at Nagai, a fishing village a few kilos down the coast. (It's the most reasonable morning market starting time I've every heard of: the gates open at 9:00am.) It's just a small area in the port, where the fishermen pile their morning catch, and the wives make a few rice dishes with squid and octopus. Awesome. We were a little late so we just got this crab, five uni (sea urchins), and two kamasu--a white meat fish that I don't know the name in English for.

After we finished shopping, we sat out on a sea wall overlooking the bay and ate our squid and octopus breakfast, then stopped at one of the unmanned vegetable stalls to buy some cucumber. Got home, dropped in a few more of the garden stones while M took m to her shigin (traditional Japanese poetry singing) practice. Started a fire and then broke up the uni shells to get the tasty bits out.

After the girls got home we grilled the fish. . . .

. . . . which we then ate with the raw urchin and rice.　Then M went shopping and m, her friend and I made some chocolate chip ice cream and stuck our faces in the ice cream maker and licked out every bit of it. And with that, I've just overloaded on the permissible limit on food mentions, so I won't continue on with how we gorged on the crab and pickled cucumbers later in the day.

death and life in the afternoon

A bad day for wildlife on the beach. While m and I were playing late evening tag, we dodged around this dead gull only to just miss tripping over this beached fish, which almost looked like a salmon that had laid its eggs and expired.

But there's a lot of life in our garden, and we spent a large part of the weekend weeding and planting. M's mom sent a care package of seedlings from the Nagano forest, and while some of them didn't take the replanting well, others are thriving.

The garden now includes this year's addition of:
thyme
rosemary
Italian parsely
several kinds of mint
cammomile
lavender
basil
oregano
lemon grass
tomatoes--Italian and fruit
cucumbers
zucchini
eggplant
peppers--red, green and orange
shiso
halapeno
shishito
edamame
negi
green onions
myoga
goya
fuki
ruccola
one magnolia tree
one june berry tree
one lemon tree
four blueberry bushes (two kinds)
one raspberry bush
two maples
one olive tree

and more . . .

And then there's the life in this little one, who keeps us in awe, in fact, at just how much there is.

rock on

Oh, to be a cat. And yawn a lot and stare nonchalantly at the world with not a care--unless you're hungry, of course, and then you think nothing of having to move the earth and the stars in order to get someone to feed you.

Oh, to be a cat. Cats don't have chores. I have chores. I have lots and lots of chores. I make lists of chores, and strike them out one by one while adding others two by two, resulting in a long line of things to do stretching into something very near infinity. I've never found chores so reassuring, but somehow now my chores have "meaning"--meaning I guess that I'm stuck with the results of my chores in a way that was never true with rental property.

And one of my ongoing chores is sinking the rest of the Sajima stones that were once part of the old house's foundation into the earth to make uneven stepping stones through the garden. I have finished embedding five of them, but I chose the smaller ones to start, which was a good thing, since I've found that it's a much more tiresome task than I first imagined.

The contractor finished the garden with a layer of new soil, between a couple centimeters up to about 15 centimeters, over the top of the clay and gravel that made up the former driveway. The old landlady had been conned a while back by a company that just dumped a load of gravel and charged her a fortune, and that's what we have to deal with--unless we want to dig up the entire place and replace it with better earth.

Anyway, I discovered that clay and gravel were not a welcoming medium for a shovel, so I've switched to a pick, and chop away, sparks flying, to make a bed for the stones. I'm guessing that they weigh around 100 pounds, so once I drop them in, it's backbreaking work to haul them out again (if the pit isn't deep enough, for example, which has been the case for every stone so far). This has kept me from doing more than two per weekend, since I find myself quickly looking for other, less taxing chores, like chopping wood, or pulling a stubborn cork from a cheap bottle of wine.

Stella Maris

The view last Sunday from the study window. 

I don't remember ever seeing this before: a planet (I should probably look up which one) ready to drop into the moon's crescent like the action of a pinball game--or pachinko. If it were to bounce out, there's the very faint cone of Mt. Fuji waiting below to catch it. (If you can't see it this size, click on the photo for a larger version.)

M has opened her therapy salon, and found a name for it: Stella Maris--or Star of the Sea. She's got an account of our making the sign on her blog, and has her home page up--thanks to a lot of friends helping out with the design, etc.

I say tomato

That was quick. It was just a week or so ago that we planted the tomato seedlings, and this morning m and I noticed that we already had a couple of new friends. The garden is small: tomatoes (several kinds), zucchini, green, yellow and red peppers, shishito, shiso, cucumbers, goya (the bitter Okinawan gourd), garlic, and some eggplant. Almost everything has already started to flower, since the weather has been so sunny recently. In Tokyo, vegetable prices are high thanks to the cold spring, but the open markets down here are far cheaper. We got a whole bunch of radishes for ¥100 the other day from a roadside stall and they were so sweet that we went back for more but they were sold out. Cabbage is a spring specialty of this area, along with the Miura daikon, and they're so cheap and huge and sweet that M has found all kinds of ways to cook--woooooooooooh a kite (the hawk, not the toy) with a wingspan of about a meter just caught a perfect wind right outside my window and was hovering motionless for about 10 seconds--them (the cabbages, not the kite).

The first eggplant flower.

Scar Tissue

Here's the start of my two-hour (one-way) commute: my Honda Super Cub that got me back and forth between my job and my Tokyo home for five years. What would have taken me 45 minutes door-to-door was cut to 15 minutes and change, though I had to hide it from the company. We did about 20,000 kilometers over those years. Now I'm doing the same 15 minutes a day on the bike, but unfortunately it gets me only to Zushi Station, which is where the trip really starts.

The first day was ominous, if I were someone who saw omens in daily happenings. It was raining, so I decided to park in the pay parking garage. Motorcycle parking is on the third floor, up some ramps and stairs, and I was tired and not paying attention since it was late in the evening, and I found my back tire sliding off the ramp onto the stairs and my leg caught between the muffler and the cement stairs. The result was a painful scrape that has left a pretty nice scar, and that--and the fact that it's not cheap--convinced me to use the free lot.

It's a free-for-all, first come, first served, slice of mayhem. When the lot gets full, people just pull up to the entrance and heave their bikes onto the tops of others, so you have to be willing to spend some time digging your bike out of a jumble of spokes and mirrors and kickstands. Now that the weather is really starting to warm up, I'm wondering if it will get even worse.

Twattler

What were once pristine expanses of sugi flooring now host innumerable scratches and gouges--the result of midnight carousing by the cats, who run up and down and around this house in scenes right out of Tom and Jerry, their legs spinning recklessly as they careen around corners until they once again get traction, sending chunks of wood from the soft sugi flying. It bothered me when we first moved in, at least until the inevitability of it all sank in. Now the house bears the scars as markers of the time we’ve spent here.

The six months since I last posted have seen a lot of other milestones. M’s massage therapy salon goes into operation tomorrow. m has been a first grader for a month already. I’ve almost done 13,000 kilometers of daily commute. A ton of wood was burned in the wood stove to keep us warm over the winter (and a cold April saw us burn more than January). Trees and a small garden have been planted. Wood sheds built. Parties held. Milk spilled. Shoji torn. Mother's Day candles extinguished.

It may be illegal to use a blog to write about the distant past, but what the hell. I’ll think of it as the anti-Twitter, the Twattler, so to speak, and try to catch up with what’s been going on. It all has gone by so fast, it will be nice to think about it again.