Almost Umaji

The rice is almost cooking in my rice-cooker. Whenever anybody asks me if I can cook, I reply, No. But I can push buttons with the best of them.

Since I have no hot water in my kitchen sink, I am also boiling a kettle on the stovetop so I can do my dishes. I swear, every time I turn around there are more dishes in that sink. I don't know how. I am going to mix up the rice with some beef and sesame seed mix I bought yesterday, then wrap it in nori. And maybe make some soup... oh. I see how that works. Like just now. Experimented with a little dashi (fish stock) to see the taste because I'm going to make miso soup later. Then poured soup base into a different cup, apparently just for the joy of washing it out later. Two new dishes in the basin. One more added to the chore. That makes THREE dishes. In the Basin. @$F%!! But wait. There's more.

Yesterday I beat the cold by taking a wild bike ride through Yasuda out towards Umaji-mura. Umaji is a tiny village up the mountain about 14 kilometers off the main road. I road out about 4 of those kilos and then came back. It was pretty much straight up the mountain at that point. But I took some pics.

the road out towards Umaji. That road goes up and then just keeps going.
It winds around the mountain like an obi around your kimono.
If I had a kimono, I would show you, but I don't. They're expensive.

Here is where the road branches off to Umaji and Sanase, I think.
But don't quote me on that.
The bag of rice was apparently left for the temple, pictures of which
will follow shortly.

I can't quite express the beauty here. It's austere, it's solitary, it's crystal-winter-clear, but it's not
something that happens everywhere or everyday. The sky is icy blue and the wind is like clean
water, freshly melted from an ice-cap, drifting down to drown New York.

The road looking backwards. I was nearly run off the road by logging trucks and
regular people just trying to get through their day. Maybe I shouldn't have
stopped to take so many pictures.

Everywhere on Shikoku, there's a temple or a shrine or just a little statue of some unhappy-looking fellow.

Case in point:

This dude has about 37 cents at his feet.
They are generous givers, his followers.
And he looks pretty pissed to be out here
in the cold. 

Damn! It's cold!

I woke up this morning to a thermostat reading of 7.5 celsius. It is so cold in my house, I have to pile up the blanket that is supposed to live in my lounge on the heating table on my bed. My bedroom is the warmest room in the apartment, but that's not saying much. And they tell me February is actually the coldest month.

After a great trip home with the fam, I find myself once again in the little town that modernization looked at briefly and then blithely marched on by. I can't help thinking my apartment would be just a bit more moderate in temperature if they hadn't turned window into a sliding-glass door with no curtains. It's not unlike living in a fish bowl, except that fish die when the temperature changes this drastically on them. I remember this from Biology. About the trip back: Tintin was a great movie. Not necessarily completely true to the books, but definitely capturing the spirit of our spunky kid reporter. My dog is so totally like Snowy, it is uncanny, except for Snowy being all white and Caboose being grey and white. In attitude and deportment, however, they are twin-ish. The new Sherlock Holmes was decent in its way. One thing I will say for Guy Ritchie, his imposition of modern style on the Holmesian world actually works quite well. No, that's not how Holmes would say it, nor how Watson would act, but it's rather like what they would both do if you view them through our current-day lens. Why not? Entertaining.

My brain is a wee bit addled from the cold. And from the jet-lag.

But I have been back at the office for three days now and I am looking forward to doing anything new and exciting again. It really is a great little gig. I teach one class a week, co-teach one class a week, am a human tape-recorder (for which there is zero prep) three times a week, and come up with awesome topics for my adult class once a week. All of this leaves plenty of time for study of Japanese (3-4 hours a day), researching music scores, listening to recordings, practicing Japanese conversation, taking a walk, practicing piano and/or clarinet, and generally wandering around making a nuisance of myself or hanging with whomever happens to be around. There's a lot of learning going on here. And more to come.