When describing the age difference between myself and my baby sister I have often said, “I’ll be 40 when she’s 18”.  That year has finally arrived, Sarah is 18 today and I’ll be 40 soon.  I’ll have to come up with a new phrase.

 

I took ill at the start of March and every day since I’ve  expected to feel better.  There were days in the month when things did improve, but then a day later I would wake up and feel as if someone had stabbed me in the throat again.  Yesterday I went to see the doctor as it was fairly obvious that wishful thinking the infection away wasn’t working.

I will only go and see a doctor if I feel I have no other choice.  But in Japan you are expected to go and see a doctor as soon as you suspect that you are ill, even if you think that illness may be nothing other than a cold.  The doctor was not happy that I had waited nearly 4 weeks to see someone.  I was not happy that the doctor spent his time with me typing notes on his computer and asking me questions as I was expecting him to examine me or maybe even look at me.  At the point where I was wondering why I couldn’t just have sent an email diagnosing myself he did look at my throat.  He then prescribed four different types of medication.  He didn’t tell me much about them, but then I knew that the pharmacist would do this.

When I saw the pharmacist he also wasn’t happy that I had waited for weeks, his assumption being that the symptoms had started maybe a day ago.  He told me that I was being given medication for my throat and sinus infection that included a pain killer, throat tablet, decongestant, and something for the cough.  I was given detailed verbal instructions on how to take the medication and a detailed printout.  If I had received this medication in the United Kingdom I would have been given some additional information.  The throat tablet was an antibiotic.  I wasn’t told that nor was I told that it is important to take the full course of antibiotics.  It makes me suspect that in Japan people take the medication that they are given and don’t just stop taking it when they feel better.  I also wasn’t told about possible side effects the most important one being that one of the drugs would make me drowsy.  Maybe I’m supposed to stay inside and do nothing for the next 7 days?

As always after a visit to a Japanese doctor I arrived home with what seemed like far too much medication.  But I will be good and take it for the next 7 days as I would like to be able to talk without pain.

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.

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.

The hotel we stayed in during our Osaka trip had a spa on the same floor as the restaurant.  I ended up reading about their services on our first morning when Marty was sent back to the room to change his footwear.  (He was wearing the slippers the hotel provided, which is a fairly common thing to do at a Japanese hotel, but wasn’t allowed at this one.)  The sign describing the spa services was written in both Japanese and English.  I stopped reading when I came to “Head or Horn care”.

I couldn’t read the kanji so I had no idea what they had decided to translate as “horn”.  When Marty got back he looked it up in his dictionary and came up with “scaly horn”, which wasn’t much better.  After we got over our childish amusement we decided that the correct translation was probably “keratin”.

When I looked out the window last night I saw a city covered in white.  There is something about snow that makes me think of being a child, something nostalgic that makes it magical.  I decided that if the snow was lying today I would go for a walk and take pictures of the local area.  In my head it sounded almost romantic. I could take pictures of the local shrine, the river, of the flowering hedges, and the bare branches of the cherry blossoms draped in snow.  The reality was somewhat different.

I set an alarm to get up at sunrise, which highlights the fact that I wasn’t thinking straight.  This morning I ignored the alarm and two hours later wandered on to the balcony and took a few pictures of the view.

It did look beautiful and once I was dressed in many layers of clothes I ventured outside.  I wasn’t even a block away from the apartment when Marty’s strange comment about snowboarding started to make sense.  He had rang from the train station, when I was still half asleep, and said something about being glad that he’d been snowboarding all weekend.  Once I tried walking on the ice I realised that he was talking about balance.  I had forgotten how hard it is to walk on half-frozen snow.  Instead of enjoying the view I spent my time concentrating on my feet.  Instead of walking without thinking every step became deliberate.  I like to walk briskly and was not pleased to realise that it was moving at least three times slower than my usual walking pace.

Then there were the roads.  I wasn’t that far from the apartment when I saw a snowman.  I’ve never seen one in Tokyo and I wanted to take a picture, but that meant crossing the road.  Since there was a zebra crossing conveniently placed beside the snowman this should have been really easy.  But the roads hadn’t been gritted and I noticed the snowman because I had been watching two men attempt to push a van that was stuck in the ice.  The zebra crossing was covered in a sheet of thick ice.  So I stood and waited until the road was clear because I had no idea how long it would take me to cross it and I wasn’t keen to find out if the cars could actually stop at it.

I soon discovered that it was better to walk on the shaded side of the street, as it’s easier to walk on snow rather than ice, and that I should avoid areas that had been cleared.  There were people outside many of the buildings attempting to clear up the snow. What they were actually doing was creating icy death-traps that looked safe to walk on as it was hard to see the thin layers of ice.

I did manage to get to the river and at that point walking became easier.  There were lots of young children out playing and I did get to see the frozen flowers and the trees.   But I didn’t find the shrine.  I have been there before, but I just couldn’t remember which part of the river it was close to.  I usually cycle in that area, not walk, and everything look really different covered in snow.  I really wanted to take pictures of the shrine but my legs were starting to hurt from all the deliberate walking, and I was a bit lost.  I then remembered Marty telling me last night that there was no way I would remember where the shrine was and that I should look it up before I left the house.

As I was just about to leave the Shiori Park area I was able to find a map.  (Even writing that makes me feel stupid, after all I had my iPhone in my bag, have an unlimited data plan, and access to lots of maps…)  The shrine was about 2 kilometers back the way I had just walked, if I went back along the river.  I have a fondness for walking along the river as it’s hard to get lost doing that.  It’s in no way the shortest route, as it curves, but usually the extra walking doesn’t bother me.  Today I decided to try a new route through the streets, aching legs will do that, and I did manage to find the shrine.  When I got there it was no longer as pretty as I had imagined as the snow was melting. But I took pictures anyway and then slowly made my way home.

By the time I got back home both my legs were aching at the top.  I think I must have been waddling, a bit like an un-cute penguin.  Maybe the next time I feel like going for a walk in the snow I’ll remember some of this and stay inside.