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.

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 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

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

This lead to a more general conversation on the cost of living and how we don’t always know exactly how much money we spend on things.  (One person at the table had detailed financial records on every penny he spends, but he only started to do that when he realised that he wasn’t sure what he was spending his money on.)

When I was in Europe in August and September I was surprised at the price of food.  I believe that I spend a lot more money grocery shopping in Tokyo than I would if I lived in the UK, but I could be completely wrong.  If I had to guess I would say that I spend 4,000 Yen (33 GBP, 52 USD) a day on groceries.  28,000 Yen (231 GBP, 364 USD) a week seems like a lot of money to spend on feeding two people.  I imagine that we spend more money on food than the average Japanese couple, as I still buy some Western ingredients.  I know it would be cheaper to eat Japanese food every day but I haven’t adapted enough to eat Japanese food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Of course my grocery shopping also contains non-food products, but then we also eat dinner out maybe once a week and Marty buys lunch every day.

I know that Tokyo is one of the world’s most expensive cities (Mercer’s 2011 Cost of Living Survey ranks it as number 2), which does mean that I expect to spend more money on food than if I lived in another city.  The Yen has also strengthened substantially over the past couple of years making everything feel expensive when I covert it to another currency.  But now I want to know exactly how much I do spend.  This will mean keeping records but maybe I’ll find out what I’m buying that’s equivalent to the grande latte or packet of cigarettes.

I did peek in last week and the room has been breeding boxes.  I don’t use the room that often and when I do it’s mostly to play the piano.  Given how little space I actually need to do that the room ends up being used as a dumping ground for boxes and other items that need to be recycled.  We really do mean to recycle the cardboard once a month but the door to the room stays closed and the boxes get to stay for another while.  I love the convenience of being able to buy things like bottled water and rice online, but it really does use an alarming amount of packaging.  Mind you, instead of writing about the packaging I should really go and start recycling.

Cartoon by xkcd

But last night it was devious.  Instead of refusing to play the film or stopping every five minutes it managed to skip whole chapters.  We were watching “Thor” which had a predicable plot, so it took us a while to work out that this was happening.

It is a cheap player as we wanted something that was multi-region and our only choices were badly hacked together machines.  When we first moved to Japan I wasn’t expecting this problem as both the UK and Japan are in region 2.  But our Japanese region 2 player wouldn’t play UK DVDs.  Something to do with having a player that wanted NTSC DVDs and not PAL DVDs.

Today it’s sitting sadly in the corner, no longer plugged in, as having to guess if the DVD is playing all of the movie was the last straw.  In its place is our XBox 360 which appears to be capable of playing Japanese and UK Region 2 DVDs.  Not quite sure yet what we are going to do with our Region 1 disks, but for now I’m happy that I can watch “Mad Men” over lunch and don’t have to venture near that scary thing the Japanese call T.V.

When we moved there were so many things that we didn’t recognise and the pickles in Tonkatsu Heaven were on that list.  We had no idea what vegetables they had pickled so we named them after their colours.  My favourite were the white ones, which turned out to be daikon.  They served us pink, purple, white, and various greens.  But tonight I could name the pickles in English and Japanese.  I wonder what else I’ve learned without noticing?