Busy Weekend

We had a busy weekend. On Saturday we went to a local matsuri (festival) where Sanae regressed to her early childhood and ate all sorts of bizarre food (sugar-coated, deep-fat fried frankfurter anyone?). On Sunday we took ourselves off to a garden centre near Chitose that prides itself on recreating a typical English garden experience. In the middle of an aspen forest.

Next to an air force base.

The English tea set was bang on though, freshly baked scones with lashings of whipped cream and a heap of home-made blueberry jam washed down with a pot of organic assam tea. Momentarily displacing the present as you found yourself in a little piece of Japan that is forever England.

And then an F-15 would roar low overhead, afterburners blazing, as the Japanese 'Top Guns' practiced their take-offs and landings, and the moment would be gone.

Sanae has updated her blog

Sanae has just posted a new blog about life in our new 'mud house'. I am not too sure if that is a reference to the amount of muck Cian has been trekking into the house lately, or one of those, charming, endearing, that's-why-I-married-her-folks, misspellings of hers.
Lots of photographs too, of Daddy slaving away in the 1 metre garden while Mammy and son laze around on the couch or play blue-masked Batman. In a cool cardboard tunnel.

Promises, promises...

Yes, I know, I promised in my last post to have more posts, daily posts, posts for everyone!
But.
But, well me and promises are a bit like the Muroran weather in May - fickle, changeable and prone to fog. And I am shockingly busy - in a way that makes me think I might have a proper job. First term here in university runs from April to the beginning of August and for some reason the majority of my classes get front loaded into this period. At the moment I have 10 a week, which will drop to 5 a week in the Autumn. I also have a slew of reports, articles and meaningless assignments to do (example: "How is technology improving your classroom?" - 400 words, in Japanese for the university's faculty development newsletter. I am trying to figure out where I can find another 398 words to go with "It's not").
But, yeah, I know, these are all baleful excuses. The real reason I haven't been blogging more is Eyjafjallajokull, the Icelandic volcano that has showered ash all over my keyboard and prevented me from typing anything.
Damn you Mother Nature, and your fiery tantrums!
Regardless of the risk to our personal safety from poisonous ash clouds, red-hot lumps of molten lava, and hungry bears, the three of us went for a walk up the mountains behind the house last weekend. Again 'walk' is applicable to myself and Sanae. His majesty was regally carried most of the way because of a bizarre gravity-stimulus illness that suddenly afflicted Cian. Every time his feet touched the ground he would instantly get a pain in his stomach that could only be cured by sitting in a carrier on Daddy's back.
I wanted to leave him for the bears but my wife wouldn't let me. Sometimes she can be no fun at all.

A Month Later...

Alright, alright, stop shouting down the back. Yes, I know, this blog has been on an extended vacation, but there are reasons people. Good, valid, unobjectionable house-buying reasons.
At the belated age of 40 (but you'd never think it to look at me), I have become a property owner, in Japan of all places. A country where land prices have been decreasing on average by 3% for the last 18 years and where an ongoing demographic implosion will probably see this devaluation accelerate in the near future.
Who's the savvy real estate expert, then, eh?
Despite being a hairy-chested foreigner, with a temporary three year work visa and extremely sketchy grasp of financial Japanese ('homu-roan'? That's the stupid movie with Maucaulay Culkin, right), I was able to buy a house and the land it rests upon. To think, I now own a little (very little, if truth be told) piece of Japan.
My Japanese wife on the other hand, besides being born and raised in the country and having eaten nothing but wholesome home-grown rice every day, was refused a loan and had to transfer of the deeds of the house to me.
Score one for the gaijin! Yeah, high five foreign people!
Anyway, the upshot was we moved from one rain-lashed, wind-swept part of Muroran to an equally rainy albeit somewhat less wind-swept part of Muroran. This counts as a progressive move in this part of the world.
As we both have full-time jobs, the move was a long, protracted process that pretty much accounted for every spare non-working moment up until yesterday. When we finally got a telephone line installed, and more importantly, broadband access.
So from now on, daily updates, people. A rash promise I know, but hey, that's me, always pushing the envelope, be it in my blogging, surfing or singing the 'ABC' song.