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.

A while ago I joined the Perl Iron Man Challenge to motivate me to write more regularly about Perl.  I’m not sure how successful that has been.  I was reading Leonard’s post about how he finds it hard to come up with a topic every week, but he has managed to do this for eight months.  I think the longest consecutive run for me was eight weeks.

I should have things to write about as I am working on a variety of community projects.  But lots of what I do isn’t overly exciting and I find it hard to be inspired to write about it.  Even when I am really pleased about something, like Dave Mitchell’s grant being accepted, I can’t think of anything much to say.  Maybe someday I’ll get better at this.

Living in Japan can make it difficult for me to buy certain ingredients.  I try to find suitable substitutions, I use natural yoghurt instead of crème fraiche, milk soured with lemon instead of buttermilk.  But sometimes I can’t find what I need.  While I was chopping soup vegetables this morning I was thinking about how great it would be to be able to buy parsnip.  I have never seen a parsnip in Japan.  There are some other tuber like things in the supermarket but I have never bought them.

I’m not the only member of my family to make food substitutions.  My great-uncle used to make dinner for his mother, my great-grandmother, and he didn’t always have what he needed.  Apparently, if he didn’t have enough salad vegetables he would go out into the garden and pull up some weeds and substitute grass for spring onions.  I’m not planning on doing that with my soup but it didn’t seem to cause my family any harm.  So maybe I should just try cooking with some of the strange looking tubers in the supermarket and not worry so much about having the exact vegetable.

Yesterday I finished knitting the sleeveless tank-top I started when I got home in February.  It’s the first seamless project I have tried.  I didn’t have a problem with the technique, but I do have a problem with the finished size.  The pattern is based on chest circumference and I picked the size according to that.  It fits me perfectly around the chest, but it seems that it’s expecting me to have some sort of mutant stomach to go with the chest.

If I had been less excited about starting to use my new circular needles I may have taken the time to calculate the size of the bottom of the top, but then again I might not.  It never occurred to me that the pattern actually makes something that is 16 inches (40 cm) bigger around the bottom than it is in the chest.  The picture looks O.K. but it is showing the smallest size which has less of a difference between the two measurements.  The person wearing it isn’t shaped anything like me but people modeling clothes rarely are.

Maybe it’s supposed to flair out but it looks a bit more like I’m hiding something up my jumper.  I’m thinking of either giving it seams and taking it in, which defeats the purpose of my seamless knitting, or knitting a belt to go with it.  It’s not all a complete disaster.  I have learnt a new technique and I now know that basing something like a jumper on one measurement isn’t going to work for me.

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 think this is the first time there has been a tsunami warning for Tokyo since I moved to Japan.  Every Japanese T.V. channel is showing some sort of warning.  Some stations have subtle little wave images at the top of the screen and others, like NHK, have the screen dominated by a flashing map of the country highlighting the problematic areas.

The advisories state that they are expecting a wave of up to 2 metres to hit Tokyo bay and that people should evacuate the seashore.  We are going to stay at home today and we don’t expect the tsunami to cause us any problems.  We will, however, still pay attention to the advisories in case anything changes.

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.

I was trying to find a Japanese T.V. program to watch while eating lunch earlier this week.  While flicking I came across what I thought was an exercise program.  There were three woman skimpily dressed in yellow, orange, and purple sports wear doing aerobic exercise while chanting, “Are you serious about anyone” in English.  This was strange but not as strange as the next scene which showed three salary men in business suits doing the same thing.  At this stage I still thought it was some strange exercise program and they were showing people carrying out these exercises in the work place, some sort of lunch time exercise madness.

But then it moved on to two Western people sitting at a table laid out to look like a romantic dinner.  There was soft lighting and hideous outfits more suited to the 1980s than 2010.  The woman said in ridiculously slow English, “Shall we make a toast”.  And the man responded with, “Here’s to your lovely eyes”.  Well, since the program also had subtitles showing a translation of the English I finally worked out that this was a program designed to teach English.

I couldn’t decide what was more strange – the weird exercises or the phrases they were teaching.  I mean, if I was on a date and someone made a toast to “my lovely eyes”, I would either burst out laughing or try to think of a way to quickly be somewhere else.  But then watching salary men do what looked like bust improvement exercises while chanting, “You look sensational in that dress” was one of the strangest things I’ve seen on T.V.  Well, at least in the last month, I do after all live in the land of strange.

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.