Amphibians.... Beware!

I was talking about gifts from farmers the other day...

One of my farmer friends handed me a box of beautiful leafy lettuce. Actually I let the box sit in the entrance for a day but I got around to bringing it into the kitchen the next night. I had to rescue my quickly wilting lettuce and dumped all the bunches into a pan of cold water in the sink for a couple of hours.

In the evening I decided to make a salad and started ripping apart lettuce leaves.

YIKES!! I medium size frog jumped out from where he'd been cowering in the lettuce leaves and landed in my sink!

Well! Thanks for the shot of adrenaline!

I'm surprised the frog lasted two days in my house with six cats on the prowl, but the cats spend most of their time sleeping... In honor of the frog's survival skills I gently removed him from the sink (after taking a picture), opened the window and placed him on the window sill.

I am not afraid of frogs. This one that got waylaid to my kitchen was bigger than the usual ones that sit on leaves and are no larger than a horsefly but still, I'd rather they not come in my house.

Now this guy is kind of cute...

There are two tiny frogs on the leaves... I noticed them when we took our morning walk at 5:45 and at 9:30 when I went looking for frogs to photograph, they were STILL in the same position. I guess frogs don't move around any more than my cats do.

Pictures of Thursday patchwork day

Yesterday was a patchwork day with lots of activity going on. I don't think I once sat down and just chatted with people.

The morning started out with showing some of our latest projects.

Mrs. Furui finished another donation quilt for the Ronald McDonald House. She had friends make up the stars and she did all the hand quilting. HANDQUILTING!!! Just beautiful!

This is the Crazy Goose Chase quilt ready to take to Ronald McDonald too. I could never spread out the quilt at my house so I wanted to get a last picture of it all in one piece.

And here is the collaborative quilt Mrs. Furui and I did together. As you can see, the binding needs to be put on but again, Mrs. Furui's wide room lends itself to photographing quilts so we've taken another photo. I was so pleased that everyone praised my quilting attempt.

Mrs. Harada put her circle quilt together... I don't know how long she's been working on this but it has been awhile. She asked for all of us to donate pink fabrics and then she started cutting and piecing. Most of those RED fabrics seem to be mine. I guess I didn't know the difference between RED and PINK. Mrs. Harada has this at the flimsy stage and she will baste it and hand quilt it. This is going to go to her new daughter-in-law.

Mrs. Ochiai thought you should see what I look like when I'm playing with my camera....

Now... Onto the main event.

The purpose of our gathering together is to work on the kindergarten bazaar quilt and so we put away our own things and got down to work. And this is the way we work.

Here is Mrs. Furui and me down on the floor deciding about block placement. (You can see that my knees have recovered.)

And slowly, the quilt grows. Mrs. Yamaguchi and Mrs. Harada making block adjustments.

Mrs. Okutomi ironing, Mrs. Takagishi hand sewing and Mrs. Ochiai putting blocks together.

Mariko-sensei, the kindergarten principal, came to give us support and nourishment (she brought cakes for everybody AND their families!)

"Now what do you think about THIS block placement?"

Interestingly, though THIS was the original plan, Mrs. Okutomi observed that the "river" cut the quilt in two and the whole thing needed more movement.

We decided on THIS layout, meaning that Mrs. Okutomi will make us another "river" this month (she made the first one too. They are her bright fabrics) and we will stagger the layout.

"Whoops, that means you'll have to leave the quilt laid out on your floor this whole month Mrs. Furui."

I think she will put it away and rely on the photographs we have taken.

I'm putting an awful lot of pictures in this post but here is last one of the original patchwork group with Mariko-sensei, the kindergarten principal. Mrs. Okutomi, Mrs. Furui and I put together the first bazaar quilt 20 years ago.

Fuki

My farm neighbors give me the fruits of their labors. And I AM grateful. But sometimes I do feel at a loss.

Yesterday a friend handed me a huge bundle of fuki. Dear me... What is fuki? It looks like a type of rhubarb and like rhubarb, only the stalk is edible. It has a bitter flavor and is very stringy, but it can be peeled and then boiled a couple of times to remove the bitterness. In other words, there is a lot of work involved with fuki! And I had a whole bundle plopped into my arms!

The other thing about fuki is that it needs to stay out of the sun after being picked and it needs to be cooked up quickly to retain its tenderness. So I was on a time factor. On a Wednesday!

I put my bundle of fuki in the kitchen sink full of water and left it for the day. It was the best I could do on a Wednesday morning.

At 6:30 I came home and sighed when I saw my kitchen sink. Before I began dinner I had to do something with the fuki.

And so I peeled, and peeled and peeled! It is an easy job, repetitious. Just pull away the outer layer with a thumbnail. But I had a lot of fuki! I boiled up two large pots of water and put the fuki in to boil. (TWO BATCHES!) and then dumped out the water and boiled the fuki again. (And I was still peeling.) Finally, at 7:30 at night I was ready to make a dish with the fuki. Some of it.

I consulted the Internet and found a fuki recipe that I could make with things I had around the house. (Besides just the fuki.) Leiya was on chat and caught me while I was rejecting various fuki recipes.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm cooking fuki and I don't have time to talk with you."

"What is fuki?"

"It is a spring Japanese vegetable and you can be grateful that you will probably never have to cook it. Good-bye."

I went back to my fuki and simmered it up with some deep fried tofu. I flavored it as best I could.

When Tetsu came home (the rest of dinner was pretty sparse) I grumbled that I had been making fuki all evening and didn't even know if it was edible.

"Hey, this is great, Tanya. Your fuki is delicious! Yum, yum, look, I'm eating it all up. I like your fuki."

"It's a good thing you do because there is at least three more dinners' worth of fuki still in the kitchen sink."

This morning I spotted a different farm neighbor in her field.

"I think I'll offer Yano-san some of the fuki I prepared last night. There is so much left."

"Um... I wouldn't do that. I LOVED your fuki... but I don't think it would suit Yano-san's palate. It might taste a little bit too "foreign" for her."

It seems that Tetsu was just trying to be diplomatic about last night's fuki. It is not really of "share some with your neighbor" caliber.

What am I going to do with all the fuki still in my kitchen sink?

In the country

As promised, here are pictures of the rice fields behind my house.

Actually, a rice field with a farmer just getting ready to put in rice. The rice is started in hot houses on flats and then the flats are set into the planting tractor that pulls off a few stalks at a time and plunks them deep in the flooded field. Around the edges of the field (where the tractor can't get close to) the farmer and his family will hand plant the rice stalks, wading in the mud. It gets to be a family event with a everyone sitting around the edges of the field eating rice balls.

I thought the pick-up truck carrying the flats to the field was interesting. Like tiles of a green carpet!


And here is a newly planted rice field rice all in nice straight rows. The ducks will come soon and swim around through the rows looking for polliwogs to eat I presume. And gradually the countryside will become a huge carpet of green!

I love my countryside scenery.

Tokyo sightseeing

Today I have some leftover photos of this weekend. City pictures and maybe not exciting to most people but to Tetsu and me, the country bumpkins that we are, a completely different side of Japan that we usually never see.

After leaving the Umihotaru tunnel, Tetsu and I drove to Yokohama which is the main port of mainland Japan. Speeding along the highway, looking at all the ships and cranes and freight containers made me wonder what my grandfather would think if he stepped into Yokohama today. More than a hundred years ago he left Japan through this port and worked his way across the Pacific on a freighter...

Tetsu and I had heard of a historical brick storage complex in Yokohama (probably built to hold freight those hundred some years ago), and we took a little time to see what it was all about.


There was a music and band festival being held that day and people were out in hordes! Not exactly the historical place I imagined but certainly different from events that Tetsu and I usually attend.

Yokohama is a lovely place and I'd like to visit again (when there are less people.)

Residential areas in Tokyo sure are dense!

The image of Mt. Fuji along a highway wall.

A lot of tall buildings!

Leaving the Tokyo area to head home.

And introducing Sky Tree, the tallest TV tower in the world. It opens to the public today but you can be sure Tetsu and I aren't going to be making a visit to the observation platform for a few more years. The waiting list is horrendous and Tetsu doesn't like heights. I don't think it is going anywhere.

Tomorrow's pictures will be of the rice fields and nature behind my house. Certainly different from Tokyo!

Solar eclipse

We had an early morning start today. Our part of Japan has been readying itself for viewing the solar eclipse that was visible around 7:30 am. The stores have been selling little plastic glasses/filters, the schools requested that the children be on the grounds by 7:15 am. But was it going to be a clear day? We've been having a lot of rain and the sky has been cloudy. I didn't buy the plastic filter figuring that $5 for an uncertain three minutes of solar eclipse was extravagant. (if I had had kids at home I probably would have...)

I had to be at the crosswalk this morning by 6:45 and so there I stood in the bright morning sunlight. By 7:00 the principal joined me and he was very excited about the eclipse and kept peering through his plastic filter. He let me have a glance and... AMAZING! What I perceived as a normal morning sun, through the filter was a partially eclipsed orb! But I was on duty... no time to look at the sun and I couldn't be carrying a camera. Too bad. I was probably going to miss this eclipse. But by 7:15, everyone was at school and so I came home to NOT watch the eclipse.

But wait! The news had mentioned the interesting shadows that would be made filtered through tree leaves. We certainly have the trees around here! Tetsu brought out a piece of white paper and lo and behold! Eclipse patterns! How exciting!

I do not understand why the sun shining through the leaves reflects the eclipse. Just looking through the leaves we saw nothing.

You DO see all the crescent shapes through the leaves don't you?

A beautiful piece of art right there.

And these millions of orbs (getting close to the complete eclipse) were the eclipse filtered through the fir tree branches.

Why, Tetsu! Your white t-shirt has crescents all over it!

A fascinating morning. I didn't miss not having a plastic filter at all!

Firefly of the Sea

Yesterday, Tetsu took me on another adventure. Our drives all turn out to be adventures because we never seem to know where we are going...

Tetsu announced last week that he had Saturday off and thought we should make good use of it by going somewhere. He mumbled about making an early morning start by leaving at 4:00 am. but the night before we were still watching TV at 10:00.

"Are we or are we not going to do something tomorrow? In which case I want to clean up the house tonight."

Tetsu was still hemming and hawing so I went to bed. (House untidy.)

The next morning at 5:00 Tetsu was raring to start the day (I'd glanced at the clock at 4:00, noticed he was still asleep and figured the day's plans had been put on hold.) Tetsu cleaned up the house while I took Choco for a walk and by 6:00 we were off and away.

But to where?

"Oh, south. Have you ever been to Harajuku? How about Sky Tree? Or Yokohama? There's a bridge that is interesting. We could go to Kamakura. Where do you want to go?"

All these names and I don't really know much about any of them so I don't know where I want to go and Tetsu knows perfectly well that if he hasn't taken me to any of these places then I've never been to them.

So we drove south... On back roads. After 5 hours of driving we still didn't seem to be getting to our destination (wherever that was) and my mood was spiraling. The streets were crowded, Tetsu kept throwing out new suggestions as to where we could go (he has that GPS now so he feels almighty and can go anywhere... if he could only remember the names of some of the places he's heard about.) I contented myself with reading the photography book I'd brought along. A sure formula for a headache... Reading while riding in a car, Japanese language, and the unfathomable digital workings of a camera....

But at lunchtime we stumbled upon the new outlet mall somewhere near Tokyo. Oh good. A chance to stretch our legs! The mall was beautiful but too much like Rodeo Drive with all the brand shops. A blouse on half price off for $200? No thank you. We got back on the road without any purchases.

BUT!!!!!! Look where we ended up!!!!!

This is called Umihotaru... Literally translated as "Firefly of the Sea." It is a man-made island in the center of the Tokyo Bay and is connected to land by a bridge on one side and a tunnel on the other. The distance across the bay is 14 kilometers, the bridge being about 5 kilometers and the tunnel being about 9.

The amazing thing about this bridge/island/tunnel is that the highway suddenly disappears in the middle of the bay... How is that possible? Why doesn't the sea water just lap into the tunnel? What happens when there is a typhoon? Isn't this the country of tidal waves? How could any architect conceive of a mid-sea tunnel?

Here we are driving over the last of the bridge and heading into the island. It actually looks like a large ship resting at the end of a long pier.


And this is the view from the top looking back towards the shore and over the bridge that we'd just crossed.

And this interesting object is part of the drill that was used to drill under the bay the last 9 kilometers. It was a bit of a thrill to stand next to this huge piece of machinery and think of how it had been put to work.

The bits are worn down in places and slightly rusting... Making it easier to imagine the massive job the drill performed.

Really a beautiful piece of machinery!


I'm getting carried away here.


I should have worn red or bright yellow or something. That is me down there on the left in the black.

And the hazy dot on the horizon I think is the end of the tunnel... Or maybe a special ventilation island for the tunnel.  In which case the tunnel end is further on.  The island just slips down into the sea and the highway comes up again at some far away point.

Even the island surface is artistic.


Umihotaru itself is 4 stories high and besides two floors for parking it has a lot of shops and restaurants. The nice thing about it is that once the parking is filled, that's all the people that are going to be on the island so the crowds weren't overwhelming. Of course to cross the bridge, visit the island and go through the tunnel to the other side of the bay runs about $35 a car but it was nice to sit on the deck with a cup of coffee and watch ships passing by and enjoy a short but very different vacation.

And here we go around the loop and back onto the highway heading under the island and under the depths of the sea...


It took about 15 minutes to make the rest of the trip through the tunnel.


I've lifted this picture off the Internet so that you can actually see how the road and island disappear into the sea. Not a picture I could have taken myself!


Our car took us other places in the late afternoon. I'll post those pictures later. We arrived back home around 9:00 at night (using the tollway) making it a long day of driving for Tetsu but he was ever so pleased with himself for discovering a place that excited me so much!