I’ve had a dull week.  It had the potential to be fun, my wedding anniversary was on Monday, but I’m still ill.  I’m finding it hard to concentrate, I have no energy, and I’m sure there are many things I would like to be doing other than sleeping.  I don’t understand what is going on in my head but I’m driving myself mad.  When I’m healthy curling up with a book in the afternoon and having a nap is such a luxury yet when I’m ill it seems like such a waste of time.

I was reading somewhere* recently that one of the central tenants of the Western worldview is that we should always be engaged in some sort of outward task.  The author talked about the Swahili word for “Westerner” which translates to something like “one who moves around” or “who wanders aimlessly”.  There is no doubt that when I’m sitting at home I feel as if I should be doing something, that I should achieve something every single day.  Today I managed to make dinner, which is more than I managed yesterday, but it still feels like I’ve wasted a day.  Of course it would be idiotic to do too much when I’m ill, but I have not found the balance between listening to my body and fighting illness.

*I’m not entirely sure which book I was reading but it was probably “Hide and Seek – The Psychology of Self-Deception” by Neel Burton.

I have a family event to sing at soon, and my voice won’t behave.  As well as being out of practice I have a cold that makes me sound nasally.  I have been using vocal exercises to try to strengthen the lower end of my range but I got bored singing “ne-aw” and “me-may-ma-moo” and decided to use one verse of Summertime as an exercise instead.  That way I got to sound less like a donkey, or at least I hope I do.

Summertime Practice

I wasn’t expecting snow this morning.  Even when I looked out the window and saw white I thought it was just low cloud.  But it’s been snowing all day.  I did venture out to do some grocery shopping and I took my camera with me.  I wanted to take pictures of the Sky Tree, but visibility was poorer than I was expecting and I couldn’t see the Sky Tree.  I ended up walking to Minowa as I thought it might be interesting to take pictures of the tram line in the snow, but it really wasn’t.  I was more amused by the classical music that was being piped into the older streets as I had forgotten that happened.  It did take me a few minutes to work out that the music wasn’t coming from a shop or a house.

I didn’t stay out too long as it was cold and wet.  I’m hoping that spring arrives soon.

Statue at Minami-senju

I have decided that today should be Valentine’s Day as I wasn’t at home on the 14th.  I did leave Marty a gift but he didn’t get the meal I had planned and he won’t be expecting it today.  You might think that if I want to surprise my husband that I shouldn’t write about it on my blog but he’s not really into the Internet.  I think he only discovered YouTube last week.  (I’ll admit that’s not a completely fair statement, he knew it existed but he hadn’t realised that you could use it without Flash).  He might read this post at some point over the next year, but I won’t count on it.

Surprise dinners can go badly wrong when people ring to say that they’ve forgotten to leave work so I am going to make food that doesn’t rely on him arriving home on time.  I’m planning on making carrot and tomato soup, chicken a mushroom skewers in a chili marinade, shepherds pie, and for dessert I will bake heart shaped strawberries and cream cupcakes.

I have also picked a movie for us to watch – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  This may not be considered a romantic movie but there would be nothing romantic in arranging an evening for Marty and expecting him to watch a romantic comedy.  I’m hoping that my choice works for both of us, that it’s intriguing enough to interest him even if it doesn’t have lots of death, explosions, or giant killer robots.  I know he’s talked about watching Real Steel but I don’t know if he realizes that the robots in that appear to just thump each other in a boxing ring and don’t actually go on killing sprees in the hope to destroy humanity, and even the lure of watching Hugh Jackman wasn’t enough to entice me to buy that.

Hopefully he will be pleased.

I travel a lot, and at times I imagine that I’m quite good at it. I know how to arrange a round the world trip, I can keep calm when airport security are horrible, and I can accurately judge the weight of my suitcase.  But I haven’t been able to train my body to cope with long distance flights.

Yesterday’s flight has left me out of sorts as my body objected to being in the air for thirteen and a half hours.  Between planes, trains, and waiting around it took me about twenty hours to get home.  When I did get  home I broke the rules and climbed into bed after a shower knowing that Marty would wake me when he got home from work. I woke in pain.  My knee joints were stiff, swollen and bruised, my wrists ached, my head throbbed from the start of a sinus infection, and the ankles I misplaced somewhere over Russia sadly hadn’t made an appearance yet. Being described as a “puffball” didn’t do a lot for my mood but given that even my face and eyes had swollen it may have been an accurate description.

My next flight is in twelve days.

I have always loved books.  I used to dream of having a house big enough that one of the rooms could be used as a library.  The room would have lots of light, a reclining chair, silence, and of course shelves and shelves of books.  I never built the library but I did buy the books.  Owning so many books led me and others to believe that I was a collector.  But then I moved to Japan and gave away hundreds of books.  It wasn’t hard to do, the most difficult thing really was lifting the boxes after I overfilled them.  I kept enough books to stuff six large bookcases, but I only kept books that I was likely to read again, or books that had been given to me as gifts.

I should have realised that I wasn’t a collector a long time ago.  I was about thirteen when I first came across someone who could read books without marking the spine.  You couldn’t tell that the book had been read at all.  I wanted to read those books badly enough that I borrowed them and held them rigidly, never opening the book fully.  I was careful to make sure that I didn’t leave any indication that I had been there, but it was hard work.  The concept made no sense to me.  Why did it matter if you could tell that a book had been read?  Was a line on the spine really so terrible?  I was also able to buy boxes of second hand books.  Old grotty books that look like generations of families including their dogs had read them.  And then there were all those hours of my childhood spent reading in the local library without ever feeling a desire to own those books.

This is on my mind because of the Kindle.  I have friends who are really surprised that I like the Kindle.  It smells and feels like a lump of plastic, even with its leather cover.  It’s not that book-like and it did seem to everyone around me that I loved books.  But it’s not the smell of books, how they feel, or how pretty they look on my bookshelf that matters to me, it’s the words that are written inside them.  I want to read stories, learn new things, spend my evenings mulling over poetry and philosophy, and as long as I can do that quickly and without hurting my eyes I’m not that concerned about how that information is delivered.

Alan, in his post about his Kindle, talks about how he doesn’t really read books on it.  I’ve had mine for about 14 months and I’ve read 94 books. I’m in the process of reading 3 books, and I have a another 11 books still to be read.  I also have reference books stored, but those are not the sort of thing you read through from start to finish. I do still buy paper books but only if I can’t get them for my Kindle or if they are books filled with coloured pictures where the visual layout is as important as the words.

My Kindle isn’t perfect.  Just the other night it rearranged all my books and I was once stuck on a plane when it decided to turn itself into a lump of plastic.  Perfect or not I find it hard to leave home without and given its storage capacity I’m less likely to get stuck reading the labels of shampoo bottles when my addiction to reading kicks in.

As I watched the chocolate cupcake mix fly across the room I couldn’t help but think that maybe today wasn’t the day to be having people over for dinner.  The antibiotics and painkillers I was taking weren’t exactly making me feel good.  The pain of the infected impacted wisdom tooth was keeping me awake at night and I was a bit out of it.  What I should have been thinking was, “turn off the electronic whisk!”.  Seriously.  There were little flecks of chocolate all across the room, the room that I had only finished cleaning about an hour ago.

Winter seems to be at time for me to stagger from one infection to the next.  I hope that things improve in the spring.

I was once asked what we do in the West to ensure that all our Christmas cards arrive on time.  I wasn’t quite sure what I was being asked.  Arriving on time usually means arriving before Christmas Day and that’s not that difficult to do.  But the person who asked the question was Japanese and they were referring to the fact that in Japan New Year’s cards are meant to arrive on New Year’s Day.  To facilitate this the post office will have a special box for the cards and an army of postal staff who work on New Year’s Day.  But we don’t expect Christmas cards to arrive on Christmas Day and we wouldn’t wish the task of rushing around to deliver them on anyone other than Santa.

I don’t even think that the cards need to arrive before Christmas.  I received another card in the post today and it’s lovely having the part of the holiday that involves hearing from friends and family extended.

Christmas Cards

I’m waiting to board a flight, which is a dull way to spend an afternoon.  Given how often I do this you’d think I’d be good at it, but I keep watching the clock wishing time would move faster.  I have another couple of hours to wait in the airport before boarding a plane to wait about 11 hours for it to land in Tokyo.

It’s the time of the year when Tokyo Disneyland becomes more like Harajuku, when the streets are full of people in costumes, and the crowds are taught how to dance along to the Disney Hallowe’en songs.

Posing Guests

Marty loves the Hallowe’en parades as he gets so amused watching the audience try to dance along.  The song started with a chant of the letters O-B-A-K-E and cast members then spent about 10 minutes teaching the audience the actions. This year, Marty attempted to learn the hand movements, but they were a bit complicated.  And although it was possible to follow along when we were being taught, the song played during the actual parade was a lot faster.

Dancing Skeletons at the Halloween Parade

We don’t own Disney costumes and I’ve no idea where the adults got their costumes as I’ve only really seen Disney outfits for children.  We should investigate this for next year as I quite fancy spending the day dressed as a Disney villain.  I saw some great villains during the day but I thought it would be rude to try taking pictures of strangers who weren’t standing around posing.  One of my favourites was a mother dressed as Cruella de Vil with her children dressed as Dalmatians.

Marty at Disney

The Haunted Mansion has also be refurbished and turned into the Nightmare Before Christmas. The queues throughout the whole park were long and I didn’t really want to wait for 90 minutes to see the Haunted Mansion so we waited until the Electric Parade had started and then tried to make our way to the Mansion. We finally found a gap in the crowds and only had to wait 20 minutes for the ride.

Nightmare Before Christmas