March 15, 2011

Tuesday - Cloudy and then rainy then snowy.

Had an okay day today. I woke up when F was getting himself off to work, then went back to sleep. I next woke up when my keitei’s earthquake alarm went off right beside me. Talk about a rude awakening. I got up, but didn’t feel anything and turned on the TV and they didn’t say much about it either.

I went back to sleep until my usual alarms went off, only to wake up at 9:30 with no alarms. I’d forgotten to set them. Sigh. I got up and took a quick peek out the window. The Fire Alarm Inspection guys were out there. Yikes. We didn’t get any notice this year. I only thought they might come because I have blogged about it at this time of year before. I quickly dressed, made the bed and tried to clear a path through F’s stuff to the smoke detectors.

They came in, all FOUR of them. What the heck? I complained to F later that 1) I am a woman in my apartment alone, and even though they have name tags and badges, I have no freaking clue what they say and 2) When they are doing their checking, they all split up. I can’t watch them all. That’s dangerous for all of us. I don’t know if any of them have light fingers or I could accuse them of stealing and they wouldn’t have any proof they didn’t. (I do believe that they were honest, BUT I used to work in a bank and the motto there was trust no-one.) Anyhoo, they left and I’m good for another 6 months.

I spent a lot of the day sending email and reading some too. I had asked yesterday about going on holiday yesterday and my readers were quite positive about going. So, in light of that, we’re going to go this weekend, but not as far as we had originally planned. We’ll stop in Niigata and spend some time there. We’ll save the other place for another time or year. I’m worried about getting enough gas to go, but F is, as always, optimistic. We’ll also meet up with a friend of mine and her husband, another “international couple.”

It started to rain as I was beginning to think about going to work. Oh yay. Of course, by the time I was on my way to work it had turned into snow. I still rode my bike as it was really wet slushy stuff, but I did ride very carefully.

I got to work and set up my school. I wasn’t sure if my student would come today as she sometimes has to cancel, but she did. We had a great class and talked about telephone English. We even went a few minutes overtime! It almost never happens with her.

After class I got a message that F had called me so I called back and asked him to give me an hour to finish up. I did, and he came to get me.

At home we got dinner underway. I washed the salad and discovered that the unusual new plant we’d bought needed to be cooked, so F did that. He also did something with some fried tofu. Our kitchen is so small we just kept getting in each other’s way! It was annoying! Still, we didn’t get really angry with each other. We could have, but we managed to hold our tempers. I grilled the lamb chops and then arranged them on a plate. We had salad, lamb, fried tofu and something that looked like baby cabbages. (not brussels sprouts) It was all quite yummy.

F did the dishes and I hit my computer for some quality time. I find some of the postings on some of my groups to be so contradictory that I’m just not sure what’s going on with things here.

We watched American Idol and it was nice to have something fun on the TV again. I did notice that one of the NHK channels was running children’s programming again, and a few commercials have started popping up in the broadcasts. I don’t mean to lesson the importance of the Earthquake or Tsunami, but watching the same clips over and over again doesn’t enlighten anyone. New information or let me watch something else.

And that’s about it for today. I did a lot of laundry somewhere in the day as well. Hurray for me. Tomorrow I have the day off, and have to try to get to the post office. Wish me luck with that. Night!