My fingers are sore.  I kept stabbing them with the sewing needle I was using earlier.  It must be years since I tried to alter a garment by hand.  The alteration looks good but it took me longer to do than it should have and I kept missing the fabric.  I imagine that I’ll get better with practice.  Earlier this evening I was able to keep knitting whilst watching T.V. in the dark, but my knitting needles aren’t quite as pointy as that sewing needle was.

It’s not long after noon and already tonight’s dinner is simmering in the slow cooker.  Yesterday I made Jamie Oliver’s Beef and Ale Stew. It had a lot of flavour and I would definitely make it again.  I mostly followed the recipe but I had to change the ale.  The local supermarket is no longer selling cans of Guinness so I made do with a dark Ebisu stout. I don’t drink Guinness so I’ve no idea how similar the two things are but it was the best substitution I could find.

The only problem with the stew was that it made me think of British bar food and large chunky chips.  I don’t have anything to cook chips in and even if I did they don’t fall under my definition of healthy food.  But I couldn’t help thinking of how well they would have gone with that stew.

I have been trying to find ways to make it easier to eat well.  I’ve noticed that I get tired around 5pm and sometimes I just can’t be bothered cooking.  This can lead to eating fast food or snacking to try to increase my energy levels.  While I was in America my friend used a slow cooker to make breakfast.  I hadn’t seen a slow cooker in years and had forgotten how useful it could be.

I bought one at the weekend and at the minute the room smells of the beef and ale stew I prepared at lunchtime.  I am hoping that being able to prepare dinner in the morning will stop we eating rubbish at night.

I’m not really a breakfast person.  I have been trying to change this, as I keep getting told it’s the most important meal of the day, but I rarely feel hungry in the morning.  It’s not even an interesting meal to cook as it involves breakfast food like cereals and toast.  Marty, on the other hand, loves breakfast and is always trying to persuade me to eat this.

As part of Marty’s Christmas present I agreed to make him breakfast once a month.  In January I made scrambled egg and smoked salmon bagels served with freshly squeezed orange and grapefruit juice.  This morning I am going to make Irish sausages, smoked bacon, fried eggs, and toast.  I have just finished squeezing the juice.  I ordered the sausages and bacon from TheMeatGuy earlier this month as it’s not possible to buy Irish sausages locally.  There is nothing in our agreement that means I can’t just give him cereal and toast but if I’m going to have to make breakfast I may as well try to make it special.

In the U.K. when you are ill you go to see general practitioner (GP). It’s the GP who decides if you need to see a specialist. But in Japan they don’t seem to have GPs. I wanted to talk to a doctor last week about multiple things, but I couldn’t do that. I had to pick one of the things and see someone about that. I went for the joint pain as it’s keeping me awake at night.  The receptionist said, “you wish to see an orthopedics specialist”? And I looked blanked while I tried to remember what orthopedics is. I did eventually remember but would not have remembered the word myself if someone hadn’t suggested it.

I saw the orthopedics doctor and was sent for blood tests and x-rays.  I am still amazed that I can have x-rays done right away and sit down five minutes later and talk to the doctor about them.  The x-rays didn’t show anything out of the ordinary and I was told that the results of my blood tests would take a week.  I went today to get the results.  They weren’t very interesting.  They show that I am sick.  But I knew that already, it’s one of the reasons I went to the doctor.  It doesn’t give any indication as to why I have joint pains, but it does at least rule out rheumatoid arthritis.

As well as not being able to see a GP I also can’t get re-fill prescriptions.  I find this incredibly annoying.  It means that I have to go and see a dermatologist once a month if I want to have feet that don’t bleed.  I tried to see the dermatologist today but, unfortunately, they don’t work on the same day as orthopedics.  It would be easier if they were closer, the surgery is about an hour away, but it’s my limited Japanese that means I have to travel so far.

I’m not overly happy.  I left the doctors today feeling sick, with blood tests to back that up, but with no actual cure.  I need to go back and see someone in internal medicine.  I also need to see a dermatologist.  But first, I need to go the thyroid hospital, as I’m due another set of blood tests.  This is not going to be a fun week.

It’s been a strange experience using the Internet while watching the Olympic Games. I’m used to watching events by myself and was really shocked at the live Twitter and Facebook feeds. I am a figure skating fan and I would love Takahashi Daisuke of Japan win the gold medal. I’ve been yelling and clapping at the T.V. but I do this for other skaters too. I want to see them all perform perfectly. I don’t want anyone to fall or mess up and it’s amazing when a skater manages a new personal best.

But the live streams are full of comments about people being rubbish, how they want people to fail, and how country x should just go home. It’s really horrible. There are no rubbish athletes at the Olympics and while I can understand national pride the hatred towards Asians and Russia is shocking. I have tried to limit how much of this I read but the main Olympic web-site has a live feed of Facebook right beside the live stats feed. I was aware that the Internet was full of idiots but usually I do a better job of shielding myself from them.

In Japan Valentine’s Day is a day when women buy gifts for men. For the past few years we have ignored this tradition and bought gifts for each other but  this year we decided not to bother with gifts or cards. Instead, we stayed at home and cooked together, though Marty did buy me a piece of my favourite chocolate cake.

Valentine's Chocolate Cake

This afternoon I decided to brave the Century 21 department store.  I had a pleasant morning and an enjoyable lunch with Marty and Nozaki-san, so today was a good day to try it.  I would love shopping to be a pleasant experience, but with a slogan of “fashion worth fighting for”, Century 21 is not the place to go if you are looking for calm.

The horror started as soon as I entered the store. I tried to find some new socks for Marty but got fed up really quickly of getting pushed out of the way by the men shopping there.  Maybe they didn’t see me, but it seems that good manners are left outside the shop.

I moved to the handbag section and tried to find a new bag.  There were some lovely things and they were certainly inexpensive but I didn’t see anything I liked enough to fight my way through the crowds.  I did overhear an argument between a member of staff and a customer.  The customer was asking the sales assistant to please not kick the baskets at her. The sales assistant was standing with her hands on her hips saying “I didn’t kick anything”, sounding horrifying like a defiant child.  I moved quickly away from that fight and went to look at ladies clothes.

It was chaotic and disorganised and I was disgusted by how much damage had been done to some of the dresses.  Beautiful dresses made from high quality fabric with plucks and tears.  I did manage to find some clothes and went to try them on.  Well, wasn’t that an experience.  Someone took the clothes from me to make sure that I wasn’t hiding items.  They don’t trust the customers to be truthful about the number of items they have.  They also take everything from you when you leave so they can count the clothes again, and then hand back the items you wish to purchase.  But the strangest thing for me was hearing the sales assistants talk about the customers stealing things, and the big signs up about shop lifters.  There are ways of checking clothes that don’t make your customers feel like suspected criminals.

My final stop was at the shoe department.  I haven’t quite worked out how you are supposed to try on shoes that are joined together with cable tags and I yelped the first time I didn’t notice the security tag at the back of one shoe I tried on.  I only managed to put shoes on my right foot, but even if I had managed to put on both it’s not like there was room to walk around.

When I went to buy the shoes the sales assistant didn’t actually speak to me or even look at me.  She continued a conversation with two other assistants about one of the customers in the store.  The words old and fat were used.  Truly delightful.

And why did I put up with this?  I’m now the proud owner of a beautiful Calvin Klein suit that cost me about 25% of the original price and a pair of Stuart Weitzman evening shoes that cost $21 instead of the retail price of $340.

Every time I knit something for myself I pick a pattern that contains either a new stitch or a new technique.  I want to improve and to eventually get to the stage where I’m an expert.  But I have a problem, I’m left-handed and I knit left-handed.  Knitting patterns are written for right-handed knitting.  If I want to follow a pattern, and I want my finished piece to match it, I need to be able to read things in reverse.   If I don’t, I will end up with something that is a mirror image of the original pattern.

I’ve been knitting lace and I have been trying to work out why people think that left-handed knitters should always reverse lace charts.  The patterns I’m knitting are symmetrical.  I haven’t reversed the current pattern I’m working on and it’s incredibly difficult to see that there is a difference in my finished product than the pictures of the design.  I also don’t know why following every pattern to the letter is so important.  Who cares if my beautiful piece of lace was created using left-slanting decreases instead of right-slanting decreases?

The problems come when I’m trying to match a diagram and I suddenly realise that my added on piece is on the wrong side.  I’ve been working on knitted on boarders and all the instructions are for right-handed knitters.  I need to try to reverse these pictures in my head and I am not good at doing that.  Even something simple like “my new piece will actually be on the left and not the right” isn’t an easy thing for me to understand.  I know what all those words mean in English but something about the words “left” and “right” makes my brain freeze and begin to panic.  If I try to read the written instructions it might use the words “left” and “right” 10 times in one paragraph. At that point I turn into a robot out of a bad sci-fi movie who just wants to say “does not compute” over and over again.  Thankfully I live with someone who can understand and reverse diagrams, even if he doesn’t knit.

I have been trying to get more information on left-handed knitting but often the only advice is that you shouldn’t do this.  I have tried to knit right-handed. Knitting was taught in the primary school I attended, when I was about 7 years old.  I was the only child in my class who couldn’t knit.  I can still remember how frustrating it was to not be able to produce squares like the rest of the class.  My teacher realised that my problem was that I was left-handed and taught me how to knit the basic left-handed stitches.  In no time at all, at least it appears that way in my cloudy memory, I was the best knitter in my class.

Recently I tried this again thinking that maybe my right hand will work better now.  It doesn’t.  I can’t even make the needle go through a stitch.  It would be comical if it didn’t confuse me so much.  I also can’t use a pen in my right hand.  I thought it would speed up my knitting if I used my right hand to record rows for me.  All I had to do was write tally marks or the number one on a sheet of paper.  I find it hard to hold a pen correctly in my right hand.  I also can’t draw anything that looks like a straight line and since it takes me about three attempts to write the number one it’s much quicker to set the knitting down and use my left hand.

I’m glad that I didn’t grow up in a generation forced to use their right hand for writing.  If I can still remember how frustrated I was with not being able to knit I dread to think how badly it would have affected my academic progress if I had felt the same way about writing.

I wish I was one of those people who can sleep on command.  The first train has gone by the apartment and I’m still awake.  I haven’t managed to adjust time zones.  I could try forcing myself to stay awake all through the night and day, but since I change time zones again in just over a week, I don’t think I’ll be able to drum up enough will power.

I also can’t work out why I think I should be sleeping at 4:30am.  Why does it matter to me?  I’m not doing anything tomorrow that’s tied to a particular time.  I was going to start the day by answering some TPF email, but I can just as easily do that now.  But I still feel that being awake all night and sleeping all day is a waste of the day.  Maybe it’s some silly thing I was taught as a child to try to make me get out of bed in the mornings. I need to lose this feeling though.  Feeling bad about being awake makes me go to bed where I end up gazing at the ceiling for hours, driving myself mad. And that is a complete and utter waste of time.