Cats and more cats

Cats and cats and more cats. They spend most of the day sleeping or meowing for more food or urping up on the carpet. One or two keep my feet warm at night. A couple sit and look out the window once or twice a day.

Only Mi does anything that attracts attention. She LOVES to play and turns anything into a toy.






Tetsu and Mi have a love affair going.

Mi has three or four stuffed animals and mice that she throws into the air and wrestles with. You can just see that she is pretending to be a ferocious tiger. Other times she is happy to bat the lamp pull back and forth occasionally turning the light off or on for us.

Let's see. I guess Toi and Patora are trying to earn their keep... They have learned to turn on the washing machine and do the laundry.

Toi and Patora get locked in the laundry room at feeding time with the door locked (small cord on a nail--they know how to open doors too). As soon as they finish eating the two of them jump on the washing machine asking to be let out. More often than not, one of them will step on the START button. That really doesn't do anything but put the washing machine in starting mode for a few minutes until someone pushes the ACTIVATE button. If the ACTIVATE button doesn't get pushed within a certain length of time the washing machine will turn itself off. BUT... with Toi and Patora are trouncing all over the washing machine they sometimes manage to stomp on the ACTIVATE button and then I hear the washing machine filling and swishing and washing a load of clothes. Toi and Patora are very undependable about fulfilling their laundry duties. They need a little more training...

And here we have another cat ball. 5 of the 6 cats gathered on the sofa in the sunlight. We need a new sofa just so that Tetsu has someplace to sit!

Movies

I am afraid Tetsu and I don't enjoy seeing movies together because of our different tastes. Tetsu finds me very limiting...

"Okay. What shall we see? You don't like love stories. You don't like horror stories. You aren't fond of musicals and you absolutely refuse to see an animal story. Science Fiction is out, anything with too much violence or s*x is out. Not too thrilled about mysteries nor action. There's not too much left for us to watch, Tanya."

Last week Tetsu was at the video store picking out a video for us to see.

"I picked out two. Maybe you'll enjoy at least one of them! The first one is really popular. There were lots of DVD cases for this one but there was only one DVD left. It MUST be a good movie if so many people are renting it!"

Think again. Somewhere through the first 30 minutes the monsters and aliens started appearing.

"Tetsu. I'm not watching this. It is dumb and revolting and I don't care how many people have rented it, you can watch it alone."

And I disappeared upstairs with my Kindle.

The next night Tetsu came home early (relatively).

"Okay. Last night's movie was a flop but I'm sure you'll like this one. It has won International awards! Just sit down and enjoy."

Yes, sit down... And watch 5 minutes...

"Ummm. Tetsu. This movie is not in English."

Tetsu didn't realize that. He knows I have to use my brain a bit more than I usually do to watch a non-English movie because that means I have to read the Japanese sub-titles. I don't know why there wasn't English for this DVD but there wasn't. And reading Japanese subtitles at the speed which sub-titles change is a challenge for me.

Yes, this was probably a very good movie. But not lighthearted and it had more violence than I like. I actually watched it again with the director's comments (in English) and was given a lot of food for thought. Tetsu slept through the English so we still didn't really watch this movie TOGETHER.

We should have lived in the Saturday night with Disney era.

I've never been able to watch Lady and the Tramp though....

"Irrashaimase"

This morning Tetsu and I were at the local department store just as they were opening their doors and we had to laugh when the whole arsenal of clerks and department store girls bowed to us as we made our way through the store. All the personnel stood at attention on either side of the main aisles and with hands clasped over their navels, bowed a proper 30 degree angle bow to each of their customers and formally welcomed us.

"Irrashaimase." 'Welcome (to our store)."

Sort of like being greeted by robots that were activated by motion sensors. No eye contact, modulated voices and plastic smiles from each and every one of them. Might they be mistaking me for the Queen? Should I bow back to them? Nod royally?

As we quickly walked to the book department I whispered to Tetsu,

"Would someone get angry if I took their picture?"

but he shushed me up and hurried us on. I don't know how long the clerks bowed to people. Probably only for the first couple minutes or until they needed to offer assistance to someone.

When I first came to Japan there were elevator girls and escalator girls in all the department stores but I think those jobs have faded from the Japanese employment scene. The escalator girl's job was to stand for hours at the bottom of an escalator with a dainty towel in her white gloved hand and wipe the escalator hand rail. She didn't really wipe, she just held the towel to the hand rail and bowed over and over and over to all the people who were so kind as to ride her escalator. I read somewhere that a Japanese escalator girl bowed 2500 times a day!

For awhile I thought that maybe being a Japanese escalator girl might be the most boring job in the world. Wrong. I decided that an even more boring job was being a Japanese elevator girl. I even knew someone who had this job for a few years before she married! A Japanese elevator girl just rode up and down in an elevator all day manning the elevator buttons with her white gloved hands.

"Ue ni mairimasu." "We are going up." and the gloved hand would gesture upwards.

"San-kai de gozaimasu." "We are on the third floor." and the gloved hand would brush tenderly over the elevator doors lightly holding them open while keeping a finger of the other hand on the elevator OPEN button.

I don't think the elevator girl experienced as much back pain doing her job (very difficult to make a 30 degree angle bow in such a tight space) and I suppose announcing each floor and elevator direction added variety to her life but being trapped in a crowded, dark elevator for hours on end in high heels, a tight skirt and a cute hat does not make it on the most popular jobs list.

I must say that being greeted by the department staff today brought a smile to my face and let me know that someone would be around if I needed them. (pictures from the Internet)

"Irrashaimase." "Welcome (to my blog)."

No school day

You are all so sweet. I spritzed myself yesterday but then the cats didn't like me...

Yesterday was a holiday so no school. I had a full day to sew and with no purpose in mind made a Mariner's Compass block. Yuki had sent me some patterns at Christmas and I had some bright fabric from Calico Cat (from ages ago!) thus a day of paper piecing.

This is actually NOT the way paper piecing should be done. (I realized I couldn't open up the fabric to iron the seam open. Luckily the piece I was making was symmetrical so I could still use this.) Got all the quarters made. Then made the compass. The paper mess afterwards and the picking out of paper in the seams is what deters me from doing paper piecing regularly. But this worked out nicely. Now, what to do with it. I have lots more patterns from Yuki so I may start working my way through those.

Since there was no school yesterday, there wasn't supposed to be any English class either. BUT who should show up on the doorstep but Y-kun. Thankfully it had started snowing so I had disbanded my plans to go to the swimming pool and was home, but Y-kun could easily have been left sitting on my porch in the cold and dark for an hour before someone realized he wasn't supposed to be there.

Well, come on in and let's see what we can do... He came up to the sewing room and I showed him my scrap basket and helped him cut squares and rectangles. The end result was a small Happy Village but he didn't find this an interesting project at all and instead wanted to use the sewing machine.

Finally after teaching him a few rudiments, Y-kun just haphazardly sewed pieces of fabric together and ironed them every which way.

Y-kun went home happy, my sewing room is a mess again (he REALLY wanted to check out EVERY scrap in the basket before choosing) and I have promised to quilt up his mini-Happy Village this week.

The outer me

I have some very beautiful friends. Since they are my friends I can plainly say that ALL of them are beautiful on the inside. It's the outside that I am talking about today.

Japanese women are slim. I'd guess it is safe to say that none of my Japanese friends are larger than me. I could easily get a complex because I know I wear bigger clothes, and take up more space in the car etc and have a bigger appetite (that could be the problem...) I'm trying, but all my swimming is still not paying off... Anyway I always feel BIG in Japan. People will innocently say

"Well, I knew from a distance you were a foreigner because of your build."

Sometimes they mean it as a compliment and hint about wishing they had something to fill their blouses etc, but to me it always sounds like BIG.

I also don't take as much time to polish up my outer self as my friends do. I don't wear make-up. I don't dye nor style my hair. My wardrobe consists of 5 pairs of jeans two pairs of tennis shoes and some sweaters. I don't own a skirt. Many of my friends spend a lot on fashion or skin care or beauty salons. And a few of them have beautifully long polished nails that I so admire.

"My gosh Tanya. You ought to do a little more SOMETHING to make yourself pretty. DO you want to dye away the grey strands?"

Not really. I'm trying to convince myself that the increasing abundance of white on my head is just year round tinsel.

"Are you going to try acrylic nails?"

Oh heavens, no. I wouldn't be able to quilt with nails like that...

"You could stop off at the cosmetics counter and buy some goop. Or splurge on clothes."

Not at the prices I've seen! I've always been a "make do with what you've got" kind of girl and if this is all there is, this is all there is. Anyway I'd rather buy fabric.

I guess I'm just feeling middle aged and dumpy this week. I want to polish up something besides the bathroom mirror and feel feminine! Maybe I should go spritz myself with the ancient perfume I've been using to keep the cats away from the laundry room...

April?

I'm off for another busy Wednesday. No time for blogging today...

I finished another block of the Bunny Hill patterns so I'm done with April (that's why there are Easter eggs). Maybe I should wait to show these on the months they are supposed to be done... Of course it would be nice to be showing a picture of a December block in July like some people can do but that may be hoping for too much.

Festival of the Broken Needles

Christine brought it to my attention that yesterday was the Festival of Broken Needles in Japan. Although I have seen mention of this in Japaneses news I have never seen the festival myself so maybe it is not celebrated everywhere in Japan. Of course I rarely get to a shrine or temple except if I'm sightseeing so it may be a big thing that I just don't come across.

On February 8th, women bring broken and bent needles to the shrine and place them in a block of tofu as part of a ceremony to thank the needles for their hard work. Christine sent a very interesting link if you would like to read about the custom... One sentence stood out for me...

"...women have many secret sorrows in life. These sorrows are often passed to the needles during the long hours of stitching and the needles are thought to take on the burden of some of these sorrows thus taking them away with the stitching that they do." (picture from the Internet)

What do you do with your needles when they break or get bent? Mine go in a piece of tinfoil to be thrown out with the "dangerous trash" once a month. Compared to most people I have a lot of unusable needles and pins. Let's see... I go through numerous hand sewing needles when I'm quilting just because they seem to bend so easily. Sometimes they remind of me of a doctor's curved suturing needle! I must credit the manufacturing companies because they can bend pretty far before they actually break! Of course a bent quilting needle doesn't make for even quilting so I end up putting another needle to work.

And then there is the problem of dull quilting needles. When I start to hear "plunk-plunk" or have trouble pushing the needle through the fabric I can assume I need a new needle. These needles never "look" dull. I always think I can squeeze a few more stitches from them but sooner or later my needle finds it's way to the tinfoil pouch.

Experts suggest that sewing machine needles should be changed after every quilt that's been quilted. I work my needles far much longer than that and occasionally they actually do break! I have a feeling a dull needle may be some of the problem of skipping stitches or thread breaking but I'm not sure about that. Usually I'll change my machine needle if I start to run into problems (and then clear away the lint, and then oil the machine, and then go eat chocolate.)

Unfortunately I have absolutely NO idea what the numbers on the packages of needles mean. For one reason the Japanese packages and American packages are different (but I can still get Milward needles) so it is really hit and miss with buying needles. Short are better for me (higher number right?) but I don't understand sewing machine needles at all. The last package I bought had various sized needles in it and I've gone through them all without noticing a difference... yes I really am a quilter...

And pins... My pins get ravaged by laziness when I sew over them on the sewing machine, and also because I use them to tack things up on the wall... They temporarily hold things to the wall paper. Ooops. Pushed a little too hard there and another pin goes into the tinfoil pouch. And for some reason my pins seem to rust very easily. It must be the dampness in the air... A pin that's left unused in a pin-cushion or a piece of felt gets a rim of rust around it pretty quickly.

Well, I'm not pushing my broken needles into any block of tofu... But even so I am thankful to them for adding pleasure everyday to my life. And if I may say so, I'm not just sewing secret sorrows into my work. My needles are picking up a lot of joy and happiness and FUN (okay... sewing machine needles get some of my frustration when I'm quilting.)

Say thank you to your needle and give it a hug! Gently... please, gently!

Weekend

I felt so sorry for showing a dirty Choco on my blog that I had Tetsu give her a bath yesterday since she didn't want to be out in the cold and wind and snow anyway.

Although Choco doesn't much like water, she is now looking beautiful and smells great! Our beige dog became white! Her black spots shine! Unfortunately (or fortunately) today is a sunny day and so Choco is back outside, and probably will find some place to dig and be all dirty again in a few days...

On Saturday when I camped out in the sewing room I started quilting on the Mini-Round Robin that is in my possession this month. Oh my! Have I ever broken the rules now! I am the only machine quilter in our group. Most of the other ladies smile politely at my machine quilting (machine quilting in general) and show absolutely no interest nor attraction to this technique. All except one quilter (this month's MRR recipient!) who has given it a try but is afraid to practice on any of her quilts. If anyone in my group is going to be accepting of my machine quilting then this lady will! Go to it Tanya!

My own go-ahead may have put me in high gear because I've been machine quilting this little thing like there's no tomorrow! Egads! Will anyone even be able to see the fabric under my quilting? I've put in a modified SUN and LEAVES and FLOWERS and still want to do a bit more today. I sure hope people don't ask me where the MRR quilt went. This isn't looking like anybody else's.

And in the evening I took a break from machine quilting to... sew. The crosswalk where I volunteer has been missing its little crosswalk flags. They are plastic and become brittle and break in the winter. Or they get blown away by the wind. Or someone deliberately comes along and breaks them. All of the above. I bought some felt and cheap yellow fabric and sewed up my own flag on Saturday. Last year I spent a lot of time and brain power to wonky piece a STOP SIGN and I carry that to and from the crosswalk every morning (it's the only quilt I own that really gets seen by the world and "works" for a living). If my new little flag is going to be subject to weather and vandals I didn't want to spend too much time or money on it and this is the result. It will get left at the crosswalk and we'll see how long it lasts. I have more felt and fabric so if I can find another pole I'll make a couple more...

Cats and dogs and cold

I ended up housebound yesterday because of snow. Fine with me! More excuses to sew! It sure was cold though! Choco and I went out for a short walk and she really looked like a bird dog. Choco is still dirty but I decided to show pictures of her anyway since she usually gets gypped out of appearing on my blog. The cats are just cuter (and cleaner) for photographing. So here is Choco in all her doggy glory!

"Hurry up Mom! I want to see what's out in the forest!"











Choco wishes (and I wish) that I would let her off the leash to run. With all this space out here it would be nice but she takes off and won't come back. Here she is trying to be very good on a "Sit! Stay!" She will behave while I am still in sight.

See, with that black around her eyes Choco really isn't very photogenic.

Paw prints in the snow. Even cat paw prints are cuter!!







These are Mi's prints because she got out when I was putting kerosene in the heater. Why do my animals want to run away when I love them so much! You would think they were escaping from jail or something. Mi was across the street and up a tree before I caught her.

And here is a rare picture of Velvet. Look what he is sitting on. A cat hot water bottle! My friend Mrs. Nakazawa visited this week bearing gifts of pound cakes and a cat heater! This neat little gadget gets put in the microwave for 5 minutes and then slipped into a furry pouch to set in a cat box or in this case Tetsu's cat shelter. Vel likes to go out into the shelter (and freeze) but he's keeping his rear end warm.

Mi says she wants to try it too!

Thank you Mrs. Nakazawa!

Nine-Patch finished!

My Nine-Patch baby quilt got finished yesterday. I really wasn't making a race of it but this quilt basically was done in three days. I spent Tuesday morning sewing together the nine patches and making a flimsy and then I spent most of Thursday machine quilting it. Yesterday I put on the binding and it is done!

I always feel that my machine quilting is inferior to what I could do by hand quilting, but the many comments about a baby quilt being washed often and used regularly convinced me that this quilt should be machine quilted. I still wanted a soft feel though so I quilted the center very sparsely with a few "roses".

I decided to try "Sashiko" quilting in the squares and that worked out better than I thought it would. I just made waves down one seam between squares and then went back up making waves on the other side of the seams (making an 8 figure) and then did the same horizontally. The "circles" seemed very lopsided and misshapen when I was making them but overall they don't look too bad.

A few small flowers in the last border and the quilting was done! I managed to get a couple wrinkles in the backing which happens a lot no matter how careful I am. I'm thinking that using bonding spray on the backing would help that problem next time I do this.

So another small quilt done and on to other things!

Hangman

More tales of English classes.

When you were a child and it was a rainy day and the class couldn't go out for recess what did your teacher do? In sunny California there weren't too many of those days but I remember playing indoor games like 7-Up (I still can't remember how that one goes... Something about putting your head down on the desk and holding your thumb up in the air...) and Hangman. Do you remember Hangman?

A few years ago when there was a little time leftover after an English lesson I decided to teach my children Hangman.

"I am going to choose a word and put spaces on the whiteboard for each letter. I want each of you to guess a letter. If you guess a correct letter I will put it in the space. If your letter isn't in my word then it goes to the bottom and each time I will draw in another part of a little man on a little scaffold. See if you can guess the word before the little man is all drawn! (My little man had fingers and toes so that he never got hung...)

So we started the game and the kids seemed to be having fun. Except for one little girl. She got more and more restless as more and more of the little man appeared and then she started saying that she didn't like this game and wanted us to quit.

"It's okay. This little man has fingers and toes. He isn't going to get hung."

Nope. My student was standing up, hiding her eyes and covering her ears and getting very upset. Since the other kids were enjoying themselves I suggested that the little girl sit and wait in the next room which she did but by that time she was crying. The rest of the class quickly finished our game and started something else.

"Teacher, let's do it again!"

Not while I've got a child in the living room crying about the poor Hangman! Anything but Hangman!

My student was so distressed and traumatized by Hangman that she couldn't join in any more activities that day. I could just imagine her going home upset and telling her mother that the English teacher was into occult or something and was terrorizing the students with gruesome stories of dead people hanging from the rafters.

Did I do something amiss? Was it all my imagination that this was a FUN word game for elementary school students? Wasn't this part of my American education? I even went to the Internet to make sure that there really was such a game! I was beginning to doubt my memory!

That night I told Tetsu about my class and the game (he'd never heard of it) and the reaction of the little girl. And Tetsu thought I was WAY~~ out of line bringing something like that into my classroom.

"What is the MATTER with you, Tanya? Why would you want to subject little children to scaffolds and hanging people? That is so unlike you. I can't understand what you were thinking. That child has every right to be upset and you need to go and apologize to her parents as soon as possible!"

Which I did. I went to the family, explained my position and how this was an English word game in America that it could be found on practically any children's website dealing with language. Nevertheless, there was no excuse for upsetting their daughter and I hoped that the girl would return to English where I promised NEVER AGAIN to play Hangman in the classroom.

Just an example of what is and is not common sense in different cultures. When I think about it, Hangman really is a gruesome game...

Baby quilt flimsy

I have a flimsy!

I spent most of Tuesday morning flag sewing 2 inch squares into nine-patches and then put it all together to make a scrappy baby quilt. There is supposed to be one more border on this but I'm leaving it as is. On the docket today is quilting.

Every single time I make a quilt I go through the agonizing process of deciding whether to quilt it by machine or by hand. I wish I could just get set a policy in my head.

"All baby quilts will be by hand. All tapestry quilts will be by machine.' Or"All gift quilts will be by machine. All family quilts will be by hand."

Or something similar to that. But at each and every quilt I stop and think and at night even DREAM about which way to go.

"Hand quilting is so much softer for a baby quilt."

"No non-quilter would appreciate the time that goes into hand quilting."

"With machine quilting I might really get some cute designs in this and I do need the practice."

"That baby is born. This needs to be done quickly! Machine is the way to go!"

I'm still deciding...

I also have the Mini-Round Robin ready to quilt and that will definitely be done by machine. (Small and the recipient is a fan of machine quilting.) Now to agonize over WHAT to quilt. I need to stop thinking and start doing.

Snow!

It started snowing last evening so I did NOT go out to swimming. I don't drive in snow nor when anything is slippery. I am a Southern California girl and can barely keep my footing let alone control a car on the ice! (I sometimes think Tetsu and my courtship went well because we met in snowy Northern Japan and in order to walk the streets with him I HAD to hold his hand! Such a forward, American girl! Tetsu was much too shy to grab hold of my hand so I had to grab hold of his!)

After 30 winters of snow I haven't learned to drive in it but I can walk without a hand to hold me up and so this morning Choco and I went out to see God's glory in the snowy morning skies. Poor Choco looks brown against the white snow so no pictures of her. She really does need a bath but I don't want her to catch cold being damp outside... so she is just dirty.

I know this isn't much snow to people in the US Midwest but it is enough to be beautiful without being too inconvenient.

No English this morning because the ladies who usually come didn't want to brave the slippery streets either so I'm using my free morning to do some sewing in the sewing room. Vel will be happy!

Homemade love

Takumi's friend is going to the States to visit him this week and the young man offered to take anything I could think of that Takumi might like. How nice! What should I send with him?

Big question! I realize that in the 7 years that my son has lived in the States that I don't know what his interests are any more. I have a feeling his style in clothes has changed (he has a girlfriend who coordinates for him these days) and I don't know what his hobbies are anymore. (He used to be a big game fan but I don't think he has time to play anyway.)

Saturday I spent the day looking but not buying.

"No... No... I don't think he wears things like this. No... There's no big thrill in a bath mat or a towel. All these things he can buy in the States anyway and probably cheaper."

A very frustrating shopping experience.

So yesterday Tetsu and I did the rounds again. He couldn't understand what the problem was... until he went shopping himself.

"No... No... Why would a 24 year old need comics?" (Tetsu's old standby for presents for the kids.) "We can't even buy him shoes." (Another standby).

So we ended up with a couple of Japanese books since that was what I craved for when I first came to Japan. I don't know if Takumi will have time to read those.

So today I need to take the books and a few other little things over to Takumi's friend.

AND COOKIES! I baked cookies last night.









I don't even remember if Takumi liked these cookies or not, but maybe he'll have some memories of Mom's baking sprees when he was little...

Say it with cookies!