Something for Everyone

This post has something for everyone - people who read to see life in Japan, people who read to see Mona, and people who read to see me and Tomoe. Perhaps too many photos, but it has been an unusually busy few weeks.

For one thing, the Volunteer Fire Department practice has begun again, luckily only a few nights a week now, but in a month or two I will have to go every night. I am happy though to have been moved to cymbals, which is much more fun than the bugle. Apparently my patient plan to suck at bugle playing for two years paid off.

The house is slowly getting into order, but it needs to get into order much faster. I have a customer coming in three days, and a week after that we have two volunteers coming to stay for four days to help with the rice field preparations. Tomoe is stressed because everything is such a mess, but taking it wonderfully. I assumed she would say no, but Today she said she wants to try, so she can get used to having people stay here again. It helps that they are a couple of college kids probably used to eating instant ramen every day and living in small Tokyo apartments. How much worse could the four giant rats living in our ceiling be?

Mona is growing and growing and growing. She is working on her roll (I give her two more days) and frothing at the mouth like mad. She rarely cries - usually only when she wakes up to find herself alone in the room, but once one of us walks in she is all smiley. She never cries at night (no Shannon I am not just saying this make you Jealous). She lets out a wimper when she is hungry, and it is enough to wake us (often times just Tomoe) up so I guess she has no reason to cry because the boob is always on call.

Spring is here (or at least near) and we took a nice long walk the other day. Some of the shots from that walk are here. It was nice to get out, and I can't wait until we can get started on the fields and gardens. So far, the only farm work we have done is to build a new compost bin, and yesterday I turned the compost pile that we left in the rice field since last fall. Unfortunately, there is nothing "composty" about it, and we can't just leave it there, so one of the jobs for the volunteers over golden week is to help us carry it 800+ meters up the mountain to our other field where we can give it another year to rot.