Screw-top wine

I'm drinking a glass of Chilean screw-top wine purchased from Max Value supermarket. It's almost 7:00 p.m., my mother-in-law is making dinner, the kids are watching Anpanman and the hubby is still trapped at work for at least another hour.

What does this have to do with anything? Nothing really, but I'm listening to the bread truck outside our building with its catchy jingle of "come buy delicious bread from the yellow truck" and I'm not rushing outside. Although part of me is curious and I just want to buy a loaf for the hell of it. Instead, I savor my slightly astringent 680 yen bottle of wine and try to remember that screw-top is not synonymous with bad wine. It's apparently all the vogue these days. Except that in Japan, it serves a more practical purpose since most people don't own a corkscrew.

I'm not really a wine snob, but it's rather sad that I drink my wine alone these days. My in-laws won't drink any wine unless it's sickly sweet. My husband doesn't drink at all since he's usually too tired to drink. And none of my friends can come over for a glass of wine since they can't drive afterward. Besides that, none of my Japanese friends are really the wine drinking kind. They are more of the grain alcohol spritzer type.

I drank the three bottles of decent wine that I bought at Costco last month, so now I'm stuck with screw-tops. Yeah, in this case, screw-top means mediocre wine.

Pinworms

My 4 year-old's preschool sent everyone home with a pinworm collection kit. Oh joy. I realize that preschoolers are not the cleanliest of creatures, but does the school really have to make all the parents check their child's intestinal tract for microscopic parasites?

I don't really mind the fact that they check my child's weight and height once a month. I actually welcome the visit from the dentist, since I'm hoping it will convince some of the snaggly-toothed kids to brush their teeth. But I rather resent having to collect samples of fecal matter. Over two days, no less. Ugh.

I think this is where I hand the kit to my husband and tell him that I can't read the instructions. I know, it's really not fair to play the "dumb gaijin"card, but if I screw it up, I will have to do it all over again. Better to let the native speaker do it right the first time.

Life at a different angle.

One of the few incontrovertible facts of life is that the sun sets in the west. Having lived in Seattle, with its convenient grid of N-S-E-W streets, I was used to the sun rising in my bedroom and setting in my family room.

That is not the case here in St. Honore Nibankan condominiums. The condo faces the sea, but dammit, the sun seems to set in the southwest. By the end of the day, it's beyond my in-laws balcony and I'm feeling the laundry to see if it actually dried in the pre-rainy season sunshine.

It bothers me, the sun's lack of respect for my sense of order. Instead of a diagonal sliver of sun coming across my bedroom, I want the full-on retina burn that only direct sunlight can give. (Oh, and our bedroom is a BED Room now. We have a bed! Woo hoo!) Also, I resent the perpetually hazy, indirect sunlight that never makes it into my family room. Perhaps I will change my mind during the long, hot days of Japanese summer.

I'm not sure why Japan is the land of the rising sun and why the flag reflects that. Maybe no one could figure out where it sets in the this curvaceous mountainous country, so that's why it's always rising...