Last weekend Marty decided to take me away for a belated birthday celebration.  I ended up in the Four Seasons eating afternoon tea while dressed in ripped jeans and a faded conference t-shirt.  I was adequately dressed for the walk we took in a Japanese garden but in no way prepared for dining amongst ladies who lunch.  There were even people wearing traditional kimonos, though I imagine they were part of the many weddings taking place in the grounds of the hotel.

My sister asked me today if they put us in a corner.  She was right, we were seated in a corner and hidden from the view of passers by.  It hadn’t thought about it but it had happened to her when she visited an expensive tea house in Tokyo.  But then not only was she wearing casual clothing, she had also managed to cover herself in mud after falling in the gardens.  I wasn’t covered in mud, but I was rather hot and sticky.

Once the afternoon tea arrived my concerns about my outfit were quickly forgotten.

I don’t know much about pumpkins and squash.  (I can’t even work out if the plural of squash should be squashes.) Today I saw a vegetable in the supermarket called “kabocha” that looked like a pumpkin.  It was cut into pieces and had dark green skin with a bright orange centre.  I have a recipe for mini chocolate cupcakes that is supposed to be made with butternut squash.  I was fairly sure that “kabocha” wasn’t a butternut squash but I bought it anyway as I imagined that I could make the cupcakes even if the squash was different.

The cakes are moist and the change of squash hasn’t caused a problem.  They are a little too bitter and I think that next time I need to use chocolate the isn’t quite as dark.  I also need to even out the cakes before I put them in the oven as they came out in odd shapes.  I was expecting them to melt and become smooth, but I was wrong.

I noticed today that the call for papers for YAPC::Asia is open.  I need to decide if I am going to submit a talk. The conference is taking place in Tokyo, 13-15 October.  I will be at home in October so I plan to go even if I’m not going to speak.  I’m looking forward to hearing Ricardo Signes, who is one of the guest speakers. Actually one of things I like about YAPC::Asia is that I get to hear a lot more talks. When I’m at YAPC::NA or YAPC::EU there are a lot of people that I want to speak to and the hallway tracks are very beneficial to me. But I do a lot less chatting at YAPC::Asia and as a consequence go and hear more talks.

I only got round to submitting a talk for YAPC::EU last week.  I’m not very organised this year, but I have flights to Europe and I do plan to arrive in Riga a couple of days before the conference starts.  I really don’t want a repeat of last year’s travel disasters that meant I missed more than half the conference.

I like to bake but I need to be careful not to eat too much.  I have been trying to find ways to make cakes that are both healthy and tasty.  I have discovered that some low-fat or low-calorie recipes rely on bad food substitutions that I want to avoid.  I wouldn’t consider replacing butter with margarine – but I will replace it with apples or even aubergines.

Baking with fruit and vegetables is time consuming.  There is a lot more grating, beating, and whisking than I would like.  So far though the results have been worth the extra effort.  This week I have been experimenting with recipes from “Red Velvet Chocolate Heartache“.

I made “Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cupcakes” with carrots and ground almonds.  I also used rice flour for the first time.  I will admit that the cake mixture looked all wrong in the bowl.  It was gloopier than I expected and I was worried that it was too heavy.  But the cakes were beautiful.

At the minute the room smells of toasted coconut as I am making coconut cupcakes. This time I have used aubergine instead of butter. I didn’t like the consistency of the cake mixture and I thought that grated aubergine looked quite yucky, but I suppose the proof with be in the eating.

The cupcakes are good. Marty is now eating his third one. I can’t taste the aubergine and I’m impressed with how moist the cake is. The frosting was based on a Jamie Oliver recipe for lime cream cheese frosting, I simply replaced the zest with coconut and the lime juice with coconut milk.

There is no doubt that discussing the weather is an important part of Japanese culture.  Every summer conversation starts with, “It’s hot today, isn’t it?”.  Even email conversations start with the weather and then move on.

But it is incredibly hard to ignore.  I was born in Northern Ireland. I’m used to the weather being mildly annoying.  The sort of weather than means you don’t really want to plan a picnic in summer because it could be a bit damp or a bit cold.  But you make the plan anyway because, as my grandmother would say, a drop of rain won’t kill you.

Then we have Japan where weather is not mildly annoying, in say the way that an insect can be, but is much more like the giant stomping monsters that the Japanese love dearly.  My lunch plans today were cancelled because it might rain.  The airlines are also cancelling flights for the same reason but then this isn’t Northern Irish style rain.  This is due to the arrival of  Typhoon Ma-on which is expected to cause flooding and damage to areas of the city at some point today.  This is weather so powerfully destructive that it gets to have its own name.

And it’s not just the storms that kill.  So far this summer 26 people have died because of the heat and 54,000 people have been treated in hospital.  I no longer just glance out the window to see what the weather is doing.  Now I plan in advance.  I read the extreme high temperature forecast and the weather warnings and advisories.  Today I get to hope that the worst thing said about the weather is, “It’s wet today, isn’t it?”.

My sister was chatting to me about my grandmother just the other night.  I live far away from my family and I haven’t found a good way to keep in touch with people who don’t use computers.  I can easily chat to my sisters on Facebook, or my dad on Skype, but my grandmother doesn’t use a computer.  Using a phone also hasn’t worked as conversations usually consist of repeated phrases like, “Is that you Karen…”, “What are you saying…”.  We say words, but we aren’t communicating.

My sister Christine and I spent hours walking with my grandmother when we were children.  We also used to sing silly songs about rainbows, dragons, and puffymelons.  It was only when my mum sang similar songs to my baby sister that I discovered that “puffymelons” are not the gnome-like little men my childhood self imagined should work at a train station but were really a mispronunciation of “pufferbellies”.

Not all the songs were childish as my grandmother also taught me to sing “Acushla Mine”.  I used to think that was a place in Ireland but I now know it’s term of endearment so I recorded it for my grandmother.

Acushla Mine

 

I’m back in Tokyo after my trip to America.  I’m told that it’s no hotter here than where I was staying in America but the high humidity makes a lot of difference to how comfortable you feel.  I liked the weather in Asheville.  It did get hot during the day but the cooler mornings and evenings were beautiful.  Here I get to spend the day dripping with sweat.  There is no breeze and the evenings are as hot a mid-afternoon.  At least the sun goes down early so I can stop stressing about my sunblock sweating off in the evenings.

I’ve been trying to sort some things out in the apartment but after washing the dishes I looked and felt as if I had been working out for an hour.  I’m sticky and disgusting and I have been since I arrived back.  We are supposed to be limiting our electricity usage so I have the doors open instead of using the air conditioner.  We will be using the air conditioners at night as sleeping in this heat is difficult.  It is possible, once you get really tired, but I wake up feeling ill.  I’m not even back 24 hours and I’m already dreaming of leaving.

I arrived in Asheville yesterday afternoon.  I was very happy to meet some other Perl people at the airport, but they aren’t staying at the venue yet.  So, I spent the evening by myself and it looks like I’ll be alone most of today as well.

I’ve been asked to write up my first impressions, as some of the other conference attendees are interested to know things like how much my taxi from the airport cost.  It was $41 which I thought was quite expensive for what appears to be a 13 mile or so journey.  The hotel does run a shuttle-bus for $30 that you need to call and arrange and I didn’t think to do that.

My first impressions of the venue are good.  I’m staying in a Villa as I wasn’t able to get a room at the hotel for my entire stay.  It’s a bit big for me with a living room, bedroom, kitchen, and two bathrooms, but it’s quaint and I’m getting used to the space.  The hotel staff have been friendly and helpful.  When I told the bell captain that I was here alone he offered to drive me into town so that I could do some sightseeing and told me that someone from the hotel would come back and get me later.

I had dinner in the bar last night.  I was really pleased that the bartender actually spoke to me as it isn’t always easy to eat alone.  I arrived in America on Wednesday so I’ve been eating alone for a few days and last night was the first time I didn’t feel as if I was putting the restaurant out by taking up a whole table by myself.  The food was fine but there was far too much of it.  I ordered a turkey sandwich and wasn’t actually expecting it to come with a large plate of fries, as the turkey sandwich was already a bit big for me.  But then I always find the portion sizes in America to be ridiculously big.  My meal and ginger ale came to $14 (including tip) so I think I got my money’s worth even if I did eat less than half of it.

I had the continental breakfast this morning for $7.41.  I had raisin bran and fruit, but there was a wider selection than that.  I’m not sure how much the full breakfast was but given the number of people eating it I’m sure it was overly expensive either.

I was concerned that it would be overly hot but it’s beautiful this morning.  I believe that it’s going to be quite a bit hotter during the week, but I’ll be indoors for most of that.

I finished knitting my Japanese bag.  The novelty wool was hard to focus on which made it difficult for me to take a decent picture.  I’m not really sure what I’m going to do with the bag, but I had fun making it.

Today I got my first Japanese knitting pattern.  I was admiring a knitted bag in the local craft store and noticed that it had a couple of signs attached to it.  I had seen the first one before, it’s a sign to tell you which yarn the item was made from.  But it also had a another label that said “S-19”.  I looked at the other samples and they all had this type of label attached.  At first I thought that it was a shelf reference to make it was easy to find the yarn, but the shelves didn’t have labels.  I decided to take a closer look at the label that told you which type of yarn the sample was made from.  The bag I was looking at was made of two types of yarn using two different sizes of needles.  And then there was a sentence that I couldn’t read.  I knew some of the characters, the one for knitting, and one that is used in the word for “map”, but I couldn’t make enough sense out of it.

Marty to the rescue!  I had dragged Marty into the shop with me, since he made me look at mobile phones in another shop.  I asked him if he could read the sign.  He couldn’t, but he could type it into a dictionary.  The sentence stated that we should ask a shop assistant about the knitting pattern.  There are days when we wouldn’t have asked for help, since we didn’t really know all the right words, but we must have been feeling braver today.  I do know lots of knitting related words, the one I didn’t know was “knitting pattern”, but that was the one printed on the label.

It turns out that I can get free knitting patterns for all the samples that are in the store.  All I needed to do was ask for “S-19” when I was paying for the yarn and they would find me a copy of the bag pattern.  I’m very excited by my Japanese pattern, but it might take me a while to translate it.