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Windy Day
A dust devil spinning itself three stories into the sky above the grocery store. A hundred seagulls facing into the wind as they bobbed on the choppy water. Dozens more gulls swishing in the wild winds over the harbour. A mountain of full-grown trees being brushed by the wind like a Kansas wheat field. A…
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Happy 2017
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25 Words
Half century joys: circus successes; drawing again; driver’s license; warm neighbors; loving husband. Sorrows: multiverse branched and Zoupi vanished; my heart broke; mould ruined everything. And all the 25 Word entries I’ve written since 2001: 2015 A new era began with Japanese eijuuken and freedom to do anything! We quit Tokyo for rural Chiba. Now…
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Open 2017
My guiding theme for 2017 will be Open. Some years, choosing the theme word for the year involves a lot of thesaurus consulting, debating and mind-changing. But this year it came to me in a flash and I haven’t considered anything else. Open is just right: honest, undecided, unobstructed, obvious, objective. I may find myself…
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Evolution of Christmas Spirit
This year end has been hectic and stressful with driving school, health issues, a broken fridge, blah, blah, blah. I was not feeling the usual “I hate Christmas’ mood this year as much as I was completely indifferent and almost ignorant of the holiday coming up. Boxes arrived from family overseas. I stacked them up.…
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Omens, Talismans, and Offerings
I am solidly superstitious, though usually pretty quiet about it. Omens are things of legend and talismans are for the weak and foolish. Despite that, I’ve always had a feeling that there are objects and actions that will improve any situation. Yesterday, when I went to the Driving License Center to take my final exam,…
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On the Roads
Yesterday at driving school, we went out on the real roads with our new learner’s permits. I expected this to be a brief circle around the school, but it was a gorgeous drive along the coast. We did it three times in three hours and each time was better than the last. Learning to drive…
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Going to Driving School
Whooo! Watch out on the roads; we have our learner’s permits now. Three weeks ago, after a year in the countryside with only bicycles and busses for transportation, Tod & I enrolled at Kamogawa Driving School. Our neighbor, who runs the Korean restaurant, heard we were considering it and insisted that we set a date…
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OMG, Mould
This September was the rainiest one on record, which was really bad for our house and all the stuff in it. When we returned after visiting family in the US for a month, our home was completely coated in mould. The kitchen counter was green. The bedframe was sprouting three dimensional orange mould. The futons…
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Chocolate Cake, 1933 style
“All About Baking”, published in 1933, is an excellent primer on baking with lots of lost wisdom about how to prepare pans, to set baking times, and to perfect mixing techniques in the days before electric mixers. Doing this with a hand mixer makes it so very easy. Creaming butter by hand is a good…
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