January 1, 2021

Friday - Cold and snowy and windy.

It feels so strange to be writing January and 2021 after the not great year that was 2020. Oh, it started well for me. I was in Canada with my sister and her family, I went to Las Vegas with my BFF, but after I got back, the year seemed to go downhill quickly.  A friend asked me to take over her classes, but then Covid19 hit and most of them were cancelled. There went that money I had plans for. Sigh. Then, the same friend left Japan and the real quarantining and worries began about the virus. The rest I’m sure you know and DON’T want to hear all about again.

I know it is going to take rather a long time before we are “safe” due to our inoculations and since Japan hasn’t even started them, I’m not sure when people in Japan will be safe. I also worry about people in poorer countries. Will they be getting the vaccine too? Now that there are three or so sources of the vaccine, hopefully more companies and countries will be able to vaccinate their populations. 

On with my day. Last night was another late night. I didn’t get to bed until 5 am. I watched rather too much YouTube! It was fun though.

Today I got up around 11 am. F was up already and had made o-Zoni for his mother and himself. He offered me some, but honestly, I don’t like it and eating anything with mochi in it isn’t something I want to do. People can die if it gets caught in their throats. I don’t want that!  Instead I had cereal and yogurt and was happy. I really felt like I needed my lovely plain food again.

We had a very veggie afternoon. F napped or used his computer, I used mine and we just drank some tea and relaxed. The sushi we had ordered arrived just before 4 pm so we ate almost right away. I was hungry since I didn’t have a “lunch” but that was on me.

We ate all the sushi and really enjoyed it. It came with a clear soup and chawanmushi. I finished up the spice cake afterwards, I toasted it and spread a little cream cheese on it. It all disappeared, and made a light dessert. 

F washed the dishes and I dried them, there weren’t all that many anyway. We planned to go out to get a few groceries, but went back upstairs to relax a bit more!

We left the house around 7:30 and did a bit of snow shovelling outside. I cleaned off the house steps while F cleared the roadway. The snowplough had gone through during the day.

We drove to the post office first to drop off my one response nengajo that I sent to a lady who sent one to me. I’d left her off my list this year as I only made a few. Well, she sent to me so…

We drove to the grocery store and tried to go in, but the clerk was locking the door as we got there. F had said all day that they were back on their regular hours, but they weren’t! I had a feeling, but F didn’t!

We had to drive across the city to go to MaxValu which happily was still open. We picked up a few things, mostly for lunch or brunch tomorrow I think.  F got even more soba so I’m a bit nervous about lunch tomorrow. I like soba, just not so much in such a short time, or the way he makes it!

When we went to the first grocery store, I suggested stopping in at Starbucks afterwards. I had a gift certificate from my women’s group and I wanted to treat F. He usually buys, so I thought I’d return the favour. I assumed that because we went to the grocery store across the city that he wouldn’t still want to go, but he did. He sort of surprised me by going there too.

Starbucks wasn’t terribly busy, we could get good seats easily. We had new drinks, I had a houji-cha latte with honey cream and F had a chai latte with something. As usual, he complained about the sweetness, but mine was great. Perfect. 

After a while at Starbucks, we came back to the house. F put away the groceries and we came back upstairs. We’ve had a fairly relaxing evening. It’s nice to be able to just relax, but I do admit to missing my favourite TV programmes and the news. Why is there no foreign news during this time of year? Fortunately for me I do listen to CBC news podcasts, but I missed them today. Sigh. 

And that’s really all the stuff that went on this day. It was quite a good day, all told. I discovered however that if we had gone to Yamagata city as we usually do on the first, we could have seen the remastered Back to the Future, which F loves and I also love, so that would have been too cool. Oh well, c’est la vie!

No idea what we’ll get up to tomorrow. I’m kind of hoping it’ll be a little bit of a quiet day like today was.  Come back later if you like and hear all about the second day of this year!  Until tomorrow….