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Milk Cement
Today, a company called Something or maybe it is Some Thing, bored 45 holes in the space that will be our house and filled them with “milk cement,” which I think we’d call cement slurry in America. This was done to solidify and reinforce the soft spots that were uncovered in a Swedish sounding test…
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Recycling electronics in Japan 2022
I recently cleared out a too-long neglected drawer of small electronics. Almost all of them were dead or long past their last upgrade cycle. I have been putting off this decluttering because recycling electronics is a troublesome process. There’s no central system, despite various recycling laws coming into effect in the last decade. So for…
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Mandala meditation
Once a month, I put on two hats at once and lead a Satoyama Yoga class that incorporates Drawing Meditation. Today we worked with mandalas. Before we started to draw, each of us set an intention or asked a question by writing it on the back of our sheet. The seed of my drawing reflected…
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A record year
Tod & I celebrated our 33rd anniversary yesterday with our first overnight trip since January 2020. Where did we go? What did we do? We visited Otaki Herb Garden and stayed overnight at Mochinoki. It’s only an hour north of home, but a refreshing change of scenery and tempo. We relaxed to the max and…
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The mystery hole
Today we went back into ujiko mode. The next big step for Monaca Doken is to set the drains around the barn. It’s going to involve a lot of hand-digging and after the mess of groundwater yesterday, I think we all want this to go well. But a piece of information about the height and…
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Too much water
Today, after almost a week of break due to rain, Maru-chan levelled the lot by scraping away all of the yamasuna down to the cinders of the old house. It is neatly piled up like a mountain of gelato. With the top layer of soil removed and the ground bare, the drilling can begin next…
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Black Panther Bake Sale Pie
A while back the the dreadful heat of summer, Lawrence was reminiscing about a pie he recalled from his student days. “The Black Panthers use to sell it at their bake sales. Made with beans and spices. We ate it up.” I promised him I’d make one when the weather cooled down. And so over…
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Platitudes for Failure
My latest art project is a snarky perspective on trite phrases. What can you say to someone when they fail, fuck up, or falter? Why not use some platitudes that sound positive and supportive on the surface, but have a multitude of other meanings between the lines. “C’est la vie.”You failed and don’t want to…
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Kitchen stairs
The Monaca Doken guys surprised me twice on Tuesday. Once by moving a boulder to form The Giant’s Teeth, and again when they built me a staircase of foundation stones. The stairs sit at the northwest corner of the house, which will be the kitchen. They reach from the end of the retaining wall up…
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Shuttle driver
This week is the F1 Grand Prix in Japan and Fujii-san is a fixer for the Renault team. One of his extracurricular responsibilities was to host the related journalists for a day of interviews and meeting some of Japan’s Alpine owners. So he organised a daytime event at Monaca with lunch at Hangar eight yesterday,…
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