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...

Nothing in particular...

I don't really have anything to write about. It's late, I'm tired. There's a sink full of dirty dishes and writing is more avoidance than anything else. I've already checked the yahoo group I belong to for foreign women married to Japanese men. Nothing new, just a discussion of favorite TV shows and which hospitals allow pain relief while giving birth. (Note to self: do not give birth in Japan. No wonder the birthrate is so low. Pain makes you bond with your baby? Puh-leeze!)

I could clean off my desk since it is piled high with crayons, cellphone bills, teaching materials, glue sticks and preschool info (all in Japanese, argh, where is my kanji dictionary? what the hell does that character mean?) We are having house guests next week and my house looks like the rubbish monster urped all over it. (See the previous post about my built-in babysitter being gone all this week. No babysitter=Hellhole of a condo)

So tomorrow I'm planning more avoidance. I'm going to a flea market and an arts and crafts fair in the same morning. Because nothing cleans your house like bringing in a load of more crap.

All right, I'm going to wash dishes and go to bed.

The importance of having an 'out'

I realized as I was washing dishes just now, how important it is to always have an "out." Kind of like the first year of my marriage. I think K and I joked about divorce pretty much every week or so. It wasn't that we were unhappy, it was just that we needed to know we could still return to our single lives even if that wasn't really the case.

The last 9 months have been weird. We sold off our possessions, rented out our house, committed to a new life and, for my husband, a new job. When things have been at their worst, we have joked that we can kick out our tenants and K could get a new job back in the U.S. The truth is, we have so deeply entrenched ourselves here, that it seems highly unlikely that we'd do that now. How deeply, you ask? Gee, we now have two Japanese mortgages, one of which is for my in-laws who live next door. My kids are so bonded with their grandparents that my mother-in-law doesn't want to go away next week because she'd miss her youngest grandson too much. Mind you, she's only going away for 5 days to Fukuoka which is less than 3 hours away. I have two aunts-in-law who have no grandkids of their own and view my kids as their own grandkids. For mother's day, I bought 3 presents, and my mother isn't even alive.

So, for my mental health, I believe that I could pick up and move on at any moment. It's the escape valve of my ego-driven, angst-ridden pressure cooker of a mind. And while I'm plotting all of my life scenarios in my pink rubber gloves, I realize that all I really want these days is a dishwasher. And maybe now I should go get the littlest one from Grandma's condo, since I let him fall asleep there tonight.

The in-laws next door...

My in-laws moved into the condo next door to us this past weekend. Actually, they only moved their futons, the dialysis machine and a couple of pots and pans. The rest is waiting until 4/15 when Sakai movers (the ones with the panda logo, as opposed to the kangaroo, black cat, or pelican logo) will move them.

At 7:45 this morning, a cheery hello rang out in the hallway as MIL unlocked the door and carried a pot of coffee in. (Ah yes, she also brought a kettle and a drip filter to the new place.) This was not entirely unexpected. Fortunately, my in-laws and I have a close relationship, which is about to be even closer. It was lovely having a built-in babysitter as I drove the big one to preschool and left the little one with Grandma.

Time to wake up the little one from his really late nap and go pick up the big one from school. Unfortunately, neither grandparent is around at the moment or I would leave him sleeping.

Taxes

Today I decided to do the double whammy of Japanese and U.S. taxes. Actually, Japanese taxes are done by your employer, so all I had to do was file some forms for Kazuya so that we can get our mortgage interest deduction next year. All in all, it was fairly painless, but it did require a trip to the city hall for a family register and a trip to the tax office to hand off the paperwork.

I wish I could say that our U.S. taxes will be so easy. I installed TurboTax today and was shocked to find out that I can't e-file our taxes if our address is overseas. Bummer. I started reading the foreign earned income credit and my first response was, "What a colossal pain in the ass." But, at least, I don't have to file out the forms in Kanji...

I decided to close TurboTax and blog instead. After all, I get an automatic two-month extension for living overseas, so why should I rush? I think I'll go clean my kitchen and eat my sandwich instead. De-nial, it's not just a river in Africa.