We’re still on quarantine due to the pox, so here’s another rambly home post.

It’s 11 am. It’s sunny and blue sky-ed outside, with a nice breeze coming through the windows.

I have this song stuck in my head.  The Imagine Dragons album Night Visions has become my go-to listen album, just like the Killers’ Hot Fuss and Neon Trees’ Habits before it. I do have a type, I suppose.  I’ve also been LOVING this song by Pink and Nate Ruess from fun. . And I love it for all the reasons that Kacy lays out in this post, so you should read it, because it’s insightful. Nate Ruess’ voice slays me, and it counterpoints Pink’s really nicely. I’ve always liked Pink- I had one of her first singles back when she was doing R & B. (This totally reminds me of the Portlandia sketch about Cat Nap…) I’ve enjoyed her music, but I total love her after seeing this video of her at one of her concerts where she saw a little girl crying in the crowd.  I love how sweet she is to the little girl, and how blunt she is with the people around her. “You all are fighting around a little girl? Cut it out, y’all! Y’all are grown a– women!”

The girls have been playing beautifully all morning.  They recently got new little toys, and decided to put on a puppet show this morning.  They came in and gave me my ticket, which I presented at the door.

Two characters, Choco-moco and Flonut (half flower, half donut), were lost on a strange pink planet. There was a song involved, and they eventually made it home again.

Then they decided to be pirates- Captain Crabby Face (Zo) and Buccaneer Toons (Tiny). They’re kind of crazy people. (The pictures are blurry because they would NOT stop moving.)

Tiny’s grin just cracks me up. I love it when they play and are creative. I read an interview with Will Smith and his son the other day, (side note- people are calling it the “most bizzare interview ever”, which I just don’t see. It made perfect sense to me.) and he said something that resonated.

I think that if you were to come to the house, people would really be ­surprised at how simple and basic it is. Our whole dream for our home was for it to be an artist’s haven. So there are paint supplies; there’s a piano with a microphone and a recorder right there to capture things right in the second. There’s editing equipment. There are cameras. I think the only thing in our house that people would be surprised by is the efficiency.

For our family, the entire structure of our life, our home, our business relationships—the entire purpose is for everyone to be able to create in a way that makes them happy. Fame is almost an inconsequential by-product of what we’re really trying to accomplish. We are trying to put great things into the world, we’re trying to have fun, and we’re trying to become the greatest versions of ourselves in the process of doing things we love.

I love that. That’s what I want for my home, for it to be a place where we can create and learn and grow and become better people. I love (and miss!) having art supplies where the girls can pick them up whenever they want. When we move back here, we’ll be doing school with both girls, piano lessons, art, B will be working on a business degree,  I’ll be editing my novel, and we’ll all be learning Japanese. So many things to create and do, and I love that we can do it all together in a gorgeous, magic house.

Speaking of creating, this is one of the assignments I did for my map making class. I turned the campus of UCSC into a continent. I started out intending to trace out the roads at UCSC to create templates to cut out paper and create a mosaic-like depiction of the campus, but as I started marking out the roads I noticed that the areas were beginning to resemble little countries. The school itself is separated into “colleges”, each with its own focus and personality. So instead of following the roads, I began to break up the campus by “territory”, until it became its own little continent within the larger city of Santa Cruz. It was fun trying to determine what “country” got what buildings along the borders.

Let’s see, what else? I’m currently reading Easy To Love, Difficult To Discipline: The 7 Basic Skills For Turning Conflict with a virtual book club, and enjoying it quite a lot. It’s one of those books that you have to read a bit, then think about it and try to apply it, and then read some more, so I’m also reading The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura. It’s about a thief (surprise!) and set in Tokyo, and it’s compelling so far. I have the feeling it’s going to get quite dark by the end.

Speaking of Tokyo, but not of dark, just a little weird, here are your weird Tokyo pictures for the day. They come from a pamphlet from Starbucks in Ginza. I’m not sure if the idea is to accessorize your outfit with the drinks, or accessorize the drinks with your outfit.  But the pictures amused me.

There you have it.

Oh, I’d forgotten, I wanted to answer a question Brandy asked quite a while back about why we buy bread so often. The bread here isn’t shelf stable, which is wonderful because that means it doesn’t have a bunch of extra stuff in it, but also means it doesn’t last very long at all. It also only comes in packages of 6-8 slices, so we get two packages at a time and that gets us through two days and then we go get some more. It will be nice to have the capability to make bread here, so we don’t have to do that.

And because my cousin Mike requested it, a picture of me.

What’s going on with you at this moment?

At this moment it is 9:27 am on Monday. That means it is 5:27 pm on Sunday at home, which means that currently the internet is dead. No one posts new things on Sunday evening, which leaves me nothing to read. So I will post something for you to read instead. Aren’t I nice?

It is 63 degrees out, and overcast. I have the windows open and there is a breeze coming through. This is the view out my window.

The girls, up until a minute ago, were playing happily together in their room. They are currently still happy, but now trying to decode mystery words in a Geronimo Stilton book. We are 98% sure that Tiny has the chicken pox (yes, really) so we are staying inside and quarantined for another couple days. She only has spots, no itching, and we think it’s because she’s had the vaccine. Luckily the girls are enjoying each other, and having a good time in their enforced play time. We’ll do school later today- no sick day for Z- and she starts multi-digit subtraction with borrowing. It will either be a cinch or an utter crazy mess. Let’s hope for a cinch, yes? She also gets to do a pre-test of her spelling words for the week, and if she already knows all of them she gets to pick her own spelling words for the week. This is her idea, because she thinks her spelling words are boring, and wants words like giraffe and hokey pokey. We’ll see how it goes.

This is Mimi. He is Z’s most precious possession and has gotten her though many an adventure. I just realized that I’d never taken a picture of him, so I decided to.

I am drinking gorgeous tea right now- lemon and ginger. I was never a fan of ginger before we came here the last time, but the ginger ale here actually has a bite to it, and the ginger cough drops were spicy and delicious and a lifesaver. So now I am a ginger fan, and this tea is delicious. The spoonfuls of sugar in it might be helping with that too.

Since we have to stay in today, it will be a relaxed, laid back day.

The girls watched the Disney version of Robin Hood for the first time yesterday and LOVED it, so we may watch it again today, because, why not? Z says she likes it even more than Nightmare Before Christmas, which is kind of stunning. She does not, however, like it more than Cars, so there is still some order in the universe.  But they’ve also started watching a show called Tinga Tinga Tales (thank you Netflix!) that has animal myths from Africa, and they are becoming obsessed with that too, so maybe we will partake in some of those.

I am finishing up editing a book a friend of mine wrote, and realizing that I need to write down more of my own life story. (This book is for her children, about their father’s life.)  I’m currently taking a class on Skillshare.com about map making, and the project that I’m working on is a map of all of the houses I lived in while I lived in Santa Cruz. In trying to compile the list (there were 11) and trying to sort out the timeline, I’m realizing that there are things I don’t remember and things that I remember differently than other people do.  It’s fascinating to try to tease out the truth. It’s so interesting to hear different people’s perspectives on the same events. BUT, all that to say that I will probably be editing today, and probably working on my class. It’s a great class, with video lectures and tons of inspiring ideas. You work at your own pace and post work as you do it, and class members can comment. The classroom community has been really supportive, and I think the whole thing is going to be a lot of fun.   (If you’re interested, go here to check out the class. If you sign up through that link, and you’ve never taken a skillshare class before,  you’ll get a discount.)

I was talking to a friend the other day who is working on getting her bachelors degree remotely. She’s trying to decide what her emphasis will be, and I wouldn’t be lying to say that I’m a little jealous. I wouldn’t trade my college experience for anything, but I do think I’d get more out of the classes now than I did then. Not that I want to write papers any more now than I did then. But I do think I’m going to start collecting online classes to take. Any suggestions?

I’m reading a book called Better than Fiction: True Travel Tales from Great Fiction Writers, which is full of interesting and sometimes compelling stories of travel around the world. Two things stand out most right now (I’m half way through), 1. Malaria medicines used to be totally janky and cause hallucinations and I wonder how many people had crazy experiences because of them (more than a couple of the stories have to do with medicinally caused mental wrongness), 2. travelling the world can be a risky business. The rules that apply at home don’t always apply everywhere else, and you can’t assume you’ll be safe just because you always have been at home. I’ve been following the news story of the woman who was wrongfully accused of smuggling drugs in Mexico (she was there for a funeral). As the story progressed, she was transferred to a different jail and her husband had no idea where she was and didn’t speak the language- could you imagine?  Similarly, in one of the stories in this book, the author and his travel companions are on a train traveling across a dangerous section of Africa when they are informed they have to pay a massive bribe or they will be beaten and thrown off the train. And there’s no consulate, no privilege that can help them but to sneak off the train and run for their lives and hide and hope they won’t be found and killed. It’s just so interesting to think about.

Only 9 days until we head back to the States! 14 days until Z’s birthday!

What is going with you at this moment?

Since I’ve been catching up on blog posts, everything that I’m posting is actually stuff that we did weeks ago. So I thought I’d do a quick post on what’s going on RIGHT. NOW.

A Japan edition of “At this moment”, if you will.

At this moment, it is 12:55 pm on Saturday. (7:55 on Friday  back home) The sun is out, and while my yahoo app will not tell me the temperature outside (it’s snotty like that some times) Google tells me that it is 52 F, 11 Celsius. Humidity is 50% (not humility, like I just mistyped. Though if we’re being honest, humility is probably right around there too.)

Bruce and Zoe are out on an adventure- they went to see the shine of the 47 Ronin (go here to read about them- fascinating stuff.) in Shinagawa and for B to sign up to take Aikido classes. He’s taken Aikido before, but the chance to take it in Japan doesn’t come around very often!

Tiny and I are at home at the apartment- she decided she didn’t want to go anywhere today and just wanted to color all day. So she is lounging around in her hot pink thermals and coloring. I’m listening to Bing Crosby and David Bowie sing “Little Drummer Boy/Peace On Earth”.  Bless Pandora holiday stations. Except that they keep trying to make me listen to Sarah McLachlan. Not gonna happen, Pandora.

I put up our Christmas banner today, which makes it feel more Christmas-y. There are Christmas decorations up around Tokyo, lots of Christmas trees and lights.  It’s known to snow in Tokyo in December, so we may see some, which would be awesome.

Later today we’ll go up the street to the grocery store. Luckily, a lot of the food is recognizable, and when it’s not, Google translate does a great job of helping me find what I’m looking for. For example, corn flakes are corn flakes no matter what language is on the package- the rooster and flakes on the box are a give away. Yogurt is figured out by finding the right sort of container in the dairy section, then looking for the white flower that is the universal sign for vanilla. Meat is more of a guess, a number of times I’ve picked out what I thought was bacon or hamburger and realized later that it was something else. (As I said the other day, “In Japan, sometimes you don’t know what you bought until you cook it.”) Things like flour and brown sugar you have to go by the writing on the package or ask, which is where google translate comes in handy.  Peanut butter is expensive, so is cereal. They don’t have Cheerios or Eggos, and bread comes in packages of 3, 4, or 6 slices unless you go to a bakery.  We go to the store every other day or so, to get vegetables, fruit, and meat.  The apples here are gargantuan, as are the carrots. The eggs are a thing of beauty, honestly.  I can’t get too adventurous because Tiny is allergic to soy, so I can’t just grab pre-packaged things to try, but that’s ok. We went out to lunch the other day and Tiny chowed down on my tempura octopus, so she’s doing fine in that regard I guess.

We go out on adventures probably 3 days out of the week. Sundays we go to church, which is two trains and a short walk past a gorgeous lake and shrine. The other days we stay  around the apartment and the girls play and I read. We’d go out more but the girls’ legs get tired. The trains are amazing, and go pretty much anywhere we want to go, but then there’s walking once we get off the train, and walking wherever we’re going. Z does pretty well, but Tiny gets carried quite a lot.

Since I don’t have my sewing machine here (which is killing me since I’m finding out about more and more babies on the way!), I’m reading a ton. The other day was a home day and I read two novels from start to end. I stayed up till midnight to finish the second one, but whatever, I’ve done more extreme things to finish a book.

Since I last posted about books I’ve read:

When Did I Get Like This by Amy Wilson
The Templeton Twins Have an Idea by Ellis Weiner
Dead Writers by  P.K. Rossetti
The Land of Later On by Anthony Weller
Not Quite Nirvana by Rachel Neumann
Dead Until Dark by  Charlaine Harris
Life Among Giants by Bill Roorbach

We’ve been here 24 days and I’ve read 16 books. I should be writing for NaNoWriMo, but – oh! look! a squirrel!

Right now I’m, reading The Stockholm Octavo. It’s set in Sweden in a time period I’m not familiar with, so it’s an interesting read.

Yesterday we went to Thanksgiving dinner at the home of some friends from church, the food was delicious, the girls got to play, it was wonderful. We miss our friends, and are blessed to be making some here.

And that’s what’s going on around here. What’s going on with you at this moment?