The remote remote

We have an absurd quantity of remotes that litter our family room. There is the DVD player remote, the home theater remote, the Wii-mote, two remotes for the DVR, the HikariTV remote, and finally, the actual TV remote. Invariably, one will go MIA under the cushions and toys, but it usually shows up before Ampanman. Not so, this week.

The actual TV remote (from hereafter referred to as ATVR) has been missing since maybe Tuesday or Wednesday. We're not sure because the other remotes can turn the tv on, so if we aren't watching regular tv, there is no need for the ATVR. I have turned the house upside down looking for it. It is in none of the usual hiding places; between the stacks of teaching material on my desk, wedged between toys placed on the counter, in a basket on my fridge because the boys have lost tv privileges.

I have to believe that it went out in the raw garbage on Friday. DS1 was threatening to throw it away when I refused to let him watch tv at one point this past week. Usually, those threats are empty, but who knows? Of course, questioning a 5 year old is a lot like reading a Zen koan. It leaves you with more questions than answers.

The upside to all of this is that I've sorted and thrown away more stuff in the last 4 days than in the previous 3 months. It's amazing how many milk carton creations one small boy can bring home from hoikuen. And yet, none of them had a remote in them...

And April arrived

DS1 started the new school year last week. He's in the Wisteria class and gets to wear a green hat to school this year, instead of a purple one. He's officially a Nen-chou, which means getting him ready for 1st grade next year. The hiragana practice (Japanese syllabary, instead of alphabet) has commenced. We are slacker parents and have never encouraged him to learn how to write in any language. Though occasionally, I dig out the alphabet books and hope he will want to practice.

DS2 is a holy terror. He is too big and too strong for his 4'11" grandma to handle when he has a tantrum. I spend most of my days planning outings so that he doesn't watch more than the recommended daily allowance of TV. Having said that, I'm filling out the paperwork to enroll him in the 2 yo class at big brother's daycare/preschool. I wasn't going to do it, but a temper tantrum at our local Jusco involving Grandma and resulting in a hurried trip by me to the supercenter, convinced me to enroll him at least two days a week.

Anywho, the cherry blossoms are out. Our house in Seattle is sold pending inspection. And I'm still contemplating who I am, what I'm doing (or not doing) and how much chocolate a person can eat before she explodes.

End of the school year

It's the end of the school year here in Japan. The new school year starts next week for my son. Gotta love that long spring break. Ha ha ha.

DS1 is in hoikuen, or day-care preschool. He is currently a nen-chuu, which is the 4-5 year old class. Next week he will be a nen-cho, which is the the equivalent of American kindergarten or 5-6 year olds. Here the nen-cho year is attached to either hoikuen or youchien (regular preschool), not to the elementary school. It always blows my Japanese friends' minds when I tell them that DS1 would already be an elementary school student if we were still in Seattle.

I have one more year of leisurely mornings and getting him to preschool by 9:00 a.m. Next year at this time, he will have to be out the door by 7:15 and I'm dreading that.

How I spent my morning.

This is not some fabulous blog about an outing with my 2yo. It's not even a rant about the everyday problems that I face as a foreign mom in Japan. No, it's about a "time suck" and how you can look up and realize that you've gotten nothing done and your 2yo is still watching the Japanese Disney channel which you meant to turn off after a reasonable 30 minutes of English language preschool programs.

Let me back up. I have iGoogle as my home page. I have various RSS feeds which include the Washington Post, Weather Underground, and People magazine. People is my secret addiction. I used to only read it at the dentist's office in Seattle, but I have yet to find a Japanese dentist that I trust, and even if I did, I doubt they would have People in their waiting room. So, I click through an innocent enough link to a blurb about Charlie Sheen's new twin sons.

I scan the article, and I remembered that he had two daughters a few years back with ex-wife Denise. But he has a 23 year-old daughter? Huh. I google her name and find an article about her and it leads me to Wikipedia about Charlie Sheen. I scan that article and find a link to a controversy he had about 9/11. I click on the footnotes and find a video of Charlie's dad Martin Sheen talking about how WTC building #7 was brought down using explosives and how it had to be planned in advance.

Up until this point, I was just curious and thinking, "Wow, crackpot Hollywood actors and their messed up lives." And that's when I get sucked into a website called http://www.ae911truth.org/
And I start reading. And I realize that it may not be so crazy after all. And when you realize what organizations had operations in WTC7 you think, I really hope that there is no truth to it, because it would mean the painful 8 years under Bush were even more horrible than I thought.

And so, I closed the browser window and took my 2yo out for a walk and to the supermarket to buy stuff for dinner. I fed him his lunch. I put him down for his nap. And I sat down to blog. And part of me is a little worried that someone is tracking my ip address and putting my name in a file somewhere. And the other part of me is worried that I've watched too many conspiracy theory movies.

Values at the Max Valu

I'm still buying the bruised produce in the discount bin at Max Valu Supermarket, but the vegetables and fruits have changed with the season. These days, I score Chinese cabbage, carrots, potatoes, long onions, tangerines, and strawberries.

Strawberries? Yes! The winter strawberry season is in full swing, since all the greenhouses start growing berries for the Christmas cake rush and it continues on until April or so. The varieties are amazing. I'm used to the hard, tart berries that came from California when we were in Seattle. These berries are fab. Especially when I buy them at half price because they've been sitting for a day.

I'm now one of the regular's scavenging for values at my supermarket. There's Skunk Woman, a portly woman with a head of short black hair except for the white landing strip down the center. I think she runs a savory pancake shop since she hoards cabbage if it shows up in the bin. There's also Crow Woman, a short, frail, elderly lady dressed all in black. She looks malnourished and I hesitate to buy something that she might want. I figure she needs the cheap vegetables more than I do.

There are others, but none that have earned a nickname. I call them the shark pack. At 11:30, we start circling the produce, tofu, refrigerated noodle section waiting for the produce person to wheel out the blue bins. Some of us go as far as the sashimi and seafood section before we turn back looking to make the kill. My mother-in-law might laugh at my hunting instincts, but she is the beneficiary when I buy cheap lettuce and turnips. A gal's got to get her thrills where she can...

The winds they are a-blowin'

I'm at my desk after frantically securing everything not tied down on my balcony. To understand this, you have to realize that my balcony is where I hang the laundry, store the 4+ trash cans needed for sorting garbage, grow a few scraggly plants, and let my boys play when the weather is nice. We are having gale force winds and the infamous "kousa" or yellow sands of China blow through. The air is gray and I used my dryer today to avoid polluted clothes. Just as well, since any clothes on the line would have blown off by now and some perv would be fondling my underpants.

The weather matches my mood. Blustery, gray and irritated. Wednesday was a national holiday, Constitution Memorial Day, but I had the same stomach bug that my boys had last week. Hubby was in a foul mood and not very helpful. Grandma also caught the bug at the exact same time, so I was getting no help from my usual sources. It was a very long day and by the end of it, I just wanted to crawl in my bed and never come out. Of course, hubby catches it the next day and I'm all sympathetic, but what I really wanted to do was ignore him and make him figure out meals for small hungry children.

I'm still in a foul mood and I know that I will get nothing for Valentine's day since this is Japan and women give the chocolate to the men here. That's another post. I did remind the master of my house, that I am American and he better produce something. Not exactly romantic, but at least he can't claim that he forgot.

And now I must end this here and get some lunch. I also need to plan my Friday English class for the preschool set. Yippee. At least they can practice, "It's windy!"

Max 9 kg

My 2yo has had a stomach bug since Tuesday evening. While we should have been celebrating Setsubun (a midwinter festival) and throwing beans at ogres, we were throwing sheets and towels and pajamas in the washer. Which brings me to my favorite topic of late: Japanese appliances.

My combo washer/dryer is the latest high tech appliance in Japan. It's a front loader with more functions and buttons than a 1990s VCR. I have the ability to siphon my bath water and use it for the first wash. (Which I don't do, because that kind of eeks me out.) I have the ability to "hot mist" my clothes. I have the ability to wash and dry all in one extremely long cycle. What it doesn't have is capacity. It's the largest washer on the market, but it freaks out if I put in two bath towels at the same time. It weighs the laundry in the drum and tells me how much detergent to put in, so I know if I've hit max weight of 9 kgs or 20 lbs.

9 kgs is not a lot when your 2 yo has gone through 3 sets of PJs, two comforter covers, two sheets, 4 pillowcases, numerous towels and also got Mom's polarfleece and Dad's sweatshirt. I spent Wednesday doing 4 loads of laundry and hanging them on my laundry pole. Fortunately, it was a nice day. Why didn't I use the dryer? Well, another fabulous Japanese design feature. Since my combo W/D runs on 100 volts, it takes over two hours to dry a 6 kg load. Yes, you can wash 9 kgs, but it can only dry 6 kgs at a time. And while this tiny load is drying, the rest of the stinky laundry is piled high waiting for a turn.

Lest you think I am ungrateful, I do appreciate that I have a washer and it is a fully automatic one. My first washer in Japan was a pink twin drum outside on my balcony. You had to load the washer and turn on the tap to get the water in the wash drum. When it was done, you had to transfer the wash to the spinner drum and turn on the tap to rinse and spin it. This was fabulous in February when it was snowing. Of course, at that time I was single, so I could avoid laundry for several days.

So, instead of "Oni wa soto, Fuku wa uchi" (Ogres out, Happiness in), I am "Sentakumono wa soto, Fuku wa uchi" (Laundry out, Happiness in). Happy Belated Setsubun.