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Figuring out the gardening
Yesterday Tod and I planted potatoes in the hatake. It’s a bit late, but I hope they will still be okay. Once they were in the ground, I started to think about the rest of the field and what I might try planting. The monkeys and boars would enjoy most of what I would prefer…
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Taiken #2: papermaking
I am working my way through the hands-on workshops at Oyama Senmaida in order to create English handouts for students who may need them. In January, learned how to weave a turtle from straw. Today I assisted with the paper making experience. The paper is made with a pulp of old milk cartons, using a…
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Mineoka Walking
In a couple of weeks, I will be helping with a hike event for Oyama Senmaida. Today, Ushimura-san walked the route with me, Kawasaki-san, and mizuta-san, the unofficial Oayma Senmaida photographer. This was a hike I’d never been on before and oh my goodness, it was amazing. The full hike event is 7.5 km, but…
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Roundup of Little Bits
None of these things is worth a full blog post, but they paint a picture of life here in this winter-into-spring season. Little bits that I want to remember later. Yesterday I hauled out my sewing machines for some play time. The serger is acting up (the lower looper won’t stay threaded, so clearly I…
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Long walk between rains
Kali came to visit this long weekend and though it rained on Friday and poured on Sunday, Saturday was a lovely day. We decided to head up to Futatsuyama from home. It’s about an hour’s walk one way if you aren’t rushing, and we weren’t. Most of the journey is a paved country road, narrow…
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Flea Season
Forget spring, what we really have is flea and tick season. After yesterday’s tick bite on my leg, I went on alert and sure enough, I caught a little tiny tickling wandering on Maura’s fur in the evening. I combed him carefully and found two fleas as well. Great… Flea combing the cats is a…
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Two Mice & a Tick
Here in Japan, spring has several heralds: Here at 555, I have additional metrics based in nature. MOUSE #1I was doing a crossword puzzle after dinner when I heard the cadence of a cat with a mission. There’s a certain pattern to Maura’s movement when he has caught a snack. Fast and steady steps, low…
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Sisyphean raking
A storm is coming in and there’s too much wind to safely burn the margins of the rice terraces, so today at Oyama Senmaida we raked grass into piles to be torched later. But there was a lot of wind, so the piles blew down the embankments. I felt like Sisyphus rolling his rock up…
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Ideas in Dreams
A while back, I had a dream that I was attending an event held by an author. I woke up with the recognition that everything in the dream was my actual creation. I mean, it seems obvious, right? But this dream pushed a lot of my buttons. The main character was a pastiche of successful…
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Cassoulet
I made my first cassoulet yesterday. I didn’t get a photo when we sat down to eat it, but I snapped one while making it. Tokyo friends with good food sense came to visit and I had a freezer full of random meat, so I emptied the freezer in pursuit of a special dish for…
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