October 25, 2014

Saturday - Warm and sunny

A good day!

I got up fairly early this morning. F went off to the dentist a bit later and I relaxed a bit.  When he came back, I put lunch together.  It was really just leftovers.  We have tons of couscous left and we finished the nabe from yesterday.  It was really nice to have a cheap and cheerful meal at home!  

F wanted to go for a drive in the mountains to see the greenery…or properly the reds and yellows! We drove off and drove through Haguro and went on our way to Mt. Gassan.  Unfortunately, I noticed halfway up the mountain that there were a couple of big X’s marked on the GPS map.  The road was already closed for the season.  Oh no!  We had hoped to go up to the top. 

We got up to the road closure.  Luckily there was a big area to turn around in and so we parked and got out of the car.  We took a few pictures because it was really beautiful up there and got back in the car.  Then, F turned the key and nothing happened.  

Panorama

He’s been a bit worried about the starter, but hadn’t thought about it much lately.  However, there we were, out in the boonies, with no working car.  Yikes.  He couldn’t find his JAF card either.  Luckily, I heard another car coming so F asked them for a boost.  They had to stop in that area too.  It was a little embarrassing, but F was able to get the car started after that.  Happily, _I_ had bought F jumper cables a few years ago as a Christmas present!  Yay for me.

We drove back down the mountain, but did stop a couple of times.  Once was in a visitor centre, just for a look-see, and the other time was at Mt. Haguro’s museum to get some postcards.  At the visitor centre F left the car running as he was worried about getting it started again.

We went shopping when we got back to Tsuruoka. F wanted a hardware store and I wanted a hundred yen shop and the foreign imports store.  We were both happy.  I got a new binder for my recipes and a new “touchpen” for my phone.  At the import store I got some rooibos tea, a soup mix, some granola and some pasta sauces.  F got some ramen from Thailand!  

We came home and I discovered that I had received 4 postcards.  I’ll be dealing with them shortly on my postcrossing blog, but I want to mention one of them.  The person complained about my profile and told me that it wasn’t what postcrossing was about.  I mention that I’m not a big fan of some types of cards and asked not to receive them.  Honestly, I don’t know what they were complaining about!  I’ve also been a member for much longer than they have!  I wrote her a fairly polite email saying thank you for her card and that I like my profile the way it is.  I’m in Postcrossing for the personal connections I meet, the postcards are important, but I’d rather “meet" the person behind them.

We went out for dinner at Jiro and both had the same thing, chicken. It’s not our usual dish there, but it was very nice.  After dinner, we headed over to Machi-Kine for a film.  Tonight we saw The Queen of Versailles, a documentary about a couple of very rich Americans who lost most of their money due to the banking crisis a few years ago.  It was a very interesting film.  I liked it a lot!

After that, we came home.  I’ve been blogging and catching up with various things that I need to do.  Tomorrow, I’m not sure what I’m going to get up to.  F will go over and visit his mother early on and then who knows!  Come back and find out what we get up to!  Night.