A positive turn

I just survived a crazy busy couple of weeks! I guess my week isn't really over, but I know my schedule lightens up a bit from this point, so I'll enjoy it.
I continued with a tough week of commuting to my classes, the hospital and the Midwife clinic and last week reached an end with me having to travel out to Shizuoka city early in the morning last Sunday to take my Japanese proficiency test (level 3). With the hectic pace of the previous week and the buildup in the week before that, my studying dropped off pretty steeply. I am not confident that I did well in the test, but I guess I earned valuable experience for when I have to retake the test next year! On the bright side, the color of the leaves on the ginkgo trees were quite beautiful in their autumnal richness!
Of course, following the the test I was able to make it back to town in time to visit both Ritsy and Ken.
Ritsy was feeling much better as she had opted for a transfusion the day before. I understand her original skepticism to do so with the controversy about people contracting Hepatitis C recently, but the doctor assured her the risk is small, and in the end it was definitely just what she needed. On Monday she was able to leave the hospital and join him at the midwife clinic for a couple of days. She was pretty happy!
Finally last night the family was united at home. Though Ritsy slept downstairs with Ken, and I upstairs with the cats, it sure feels nice to all be back together again!

The three corners

Even though the family has expanded over the last few days, it doesn't really feel that way right now. The three of us right now are in three separate corners of town- each of us going through our own issues.

For Ken the ordeal is pretty straightforward. He has spent 9 months in a nice, warm, safe womb and now he has been dumped out into this bright, cold and mind bogglingly complex world. He can barely see and doesn't even know why he feels compelled to suck down as much milk as his little stomach can handle. Even just burping looks like a lot of work- he's got a lot to learn.

I am most concerned about Ritsy. I mentioned that she had to go to the hospital after the birthing and was pumped full of fluids at the hospital. When I visited her yesterday, she seemed healthy and I thought that for sure she would be released from the hospital and be able to return to the Midwife clinic to reunite with Ken. Last night though she had a fever and today, her blood tests showed her to be quite anemic, she is really low on iron. When I saw her she was again looking healthy and had no fever, just frustrated that she can't see her son.

Luckily the doctor offered a great suggestion- Myself, her sister and the woman from the clinic went to the hospital carting along little Ken to finally see his mom. Unfortunately Ritsy once again had a fever and only could hang with him for a few minutes. I feel real bad for Ritsuko- she just wants to connect with the little guy- and feed him her milk and be happy. But she is stuck recovering and now I worry that because he is getting used to the bottle, it'll be tough for him to switch to breast milk later. Well, I'll try not to get wound up in a little knot over something I can't fix.
As for me, my ordeal is about my leg. I had my cast taken off on Monday but I am meant to only walk with about 30% weight bearing pressure. God, I'm a horrible judge of how much weight that means, especially if you consider you can potentially take thousands of step in a day. It's much easier just to think that I should try to walk 'lightly' and I think I will be okay. I'm actually back to using my crutches more than I did in the last 3 weeks before it came off. I am confident that my leg will improve a lot and quickly, I just need to keep patient with it.

Separate the 3 of us will have to fight our battles and get to the next level- I really look forward to when we can all sit down together quietly (well as quietly as it gets with a baby) and enjoy the true feeling that we are a big family.

Here is a little video of the guy doing nothing, but as a parent, I feel it is cute anyway. Please pardon me for using the I'm talking to a baby voice- I am trying to avoid doing that too much...

A funny thing happened the other day...

Wow, fall is here. The trees around the area are starting to sprout Mikans (also known as Mandarine oranges) and Persimmons and the weather is actually bearable now. Yep life couldn't get any better.

Except for the October curse.

Those who know me- know the story of when I was young (maybe 6 years old) on Halloween I ran into the side of a car and broke my leg. The part that still always cracks Ritsy up is that I was too scared to use crutches for whatever reason, so I walked around in the beginning with an old person's walker. Near the end though, I was on crutches. {Mother- if you read this can you scan the old picture of me with Santa clause in my cast?}

Some 29 years later, the October curse strikes again. I will have to document somewhere to beware in October of my 64rd year...

Sunday started harmlessly enough. I taught in the morning. I was quite proud of the handout I made for my Sunday class- studying haiku. I thought it would be easy for them get since it was a Japanese style of poem, and a great way to study counting syllables. Well it turned out to be tough for them to get, but sometimes we have to push the students, right? I digress....

After teaching, Chris called me up for a spot of basketball, which is quite a common activity for us on Sundays. So I met up with Pete and Chris and we saw that the usual crowd wasn't there, and we ended up playing a few games with a big crowd of guys from the Phillipines, nice guys and they played hard. Early in the third game, I was starting the playing and found that my check was easily fooled if I would stand with my back to him, protecting the ball and spin backwards into the lane to the hoop. While I was spinning though, my foot caught in an awkward position (maybe something related to the piece of my shoe that fell off earlier in the day) and instead of stopping I kept trying to twist my foot and I was met with an odd popping sound. Yep, that pop was the fracturing of my fibula. How lame to break your own leg without any contact or anything.
I planned on going back to work right away, but I realized that with a 4 week healing time, and my baby due in about 4 weeks, it's better to cut my financial losses a bit and try to get a head start recovering, so I asked for a couple of days off. Time/Life went ahead and got me the whole week off from the company classes, which will really help, once I start taking the trains to work it's going to be tough! Well, I saved the pictures for the end of the post to preserve the integrity of the story...

This is my leg, try not to look at the toes too closely...

And here is me resting on the couch, trying to heal quickly....

The state of the union

This sunset looked better live, but still kind of neat looking clouds.

Wow time is moving fast! It has been such an incredibly busy time the last 4 weeks, that I barely had time to be social or get enough 'me' time. But I am not complaining- all the extra work was exactly what I needed! Thanks a lot to Time Life, they really came through with a lot of work, and because of that I feel a little more comfortable heading into the next year!

And what a next year it will be- we're looking at (hopefully) less than 2 months away from the little one arriving! Ritsy will finish work at the end of this month and go on maternity leave. We finally found out about Sankyu (Maternity Pay). It looks like for the first 3 months, we won't see a dime of the mat pay, but after the initial 90 day period from when the baby arrives she will get a pretty good cheque. But after that her monthly pay will be pretty minimal- just enough so that she can still help me with the mortgage and she can make the payments on her car. Taking on the monthly bills will be tight for me, but I can breathe a little safer with some money in the bank (thanks to all the extra work recently!),especially during the leaner months. We also will get back about 350,000 yen for having the baby, but that will also take 3 months to come. I think we are ready for it, and if we survive with most of our savings in tact, we can still take our planned trip to Canada next year in April.

What else is happening? We had the Sports Day events last weekend for ESL College and it was pretty successful. I fed off the kids a little too much though and worked up quite a sweat! It was a long exhausting day, but I didn't care I had a good time!

This week has actually been quite restful for me. Thanks to one of my students calling in sick a couple of times over the last week, I have been able to enjoy a surprise day off and get a lot of rest today (even update my blog...). This month most of my regular class' contracts come to an end so I have to endure the usual anxiety of hoping that they all renew. Usually it all works out, but there are no certainties in life!

We might get a visit from Makoto next week- I hope he comes out, that could be fun!

Time for me to head off to work now! Here is another picture from last week of Ritsy and the 2 cats sleeping, those crazy sleepy kids.

Yard work

Yep, life is pretty exciting these days, I am blogging about yard work.

While I rather dreaded the task- I knew there was some yard work looming for me to do. You can see the above picture ( I may have posted on this blog before) is my lovely home in Hamakita ward, Hamamatsu city. This picture was taken soon after our house was finished and we had our initial land work done on the place. You can see on the left side is big hunk of dirt and, though it is tough to tell in this picture, a parking spot for me. On the left is Ritsy's now departed Suzuki Wagon R. A little while after this above picture, we had received a number of bushy- tree things from the city of Hamamatsu as a gift (well we had to apply for it and photo-document that we used them...). Ritsy took great pleasure in planting the trees at that time much to my pleasant surprise.

Well, I started having some classes at our home last year, and unlike Canada- not having parking spaces can be a bit of a problem. There is really no community parking or street-side parking here. And we had my students borrow a neighboring business' parking or Ritsy would go to her family's house while I had class. Needless to say it needed to be addressed. I really hated the idea of spending the money so close to having the baby, but we had some money parked in our house account we were going to make an extra payment with ( in 3 years when the contract expires) so we hired Cainz home to come again and make some more parking spots.
You can see the visible addition of more parking on the left side here. Well, we paid them for everything except replanting the trees. So, for 3 weeks the trees were all planted in a big clump together in our yard. So that was my duty today, beautifully arranging the trees around the yard area. Also the worker had left us a little extra dirt at Ritsy's request, a lovely light brown colored dirt that looks a little nicer (at least now).
The truth of the matter is that I actually enjoyed doing the work in the end. It really creates a tighter bond with the house and the land putting a little work into it. Though sore, and unhappy to sacrifice my first day off in 2 weeks to house work, I actually do feel a bit invigorated by the job, especially now that it is done.
We also added some solar powered garden lights, that are pretty powerless, but should make parking at night a little easier.

Stella!

The great search.... Last year my wife bought a Stella, which is produced by Subaru and is considered to be a 'K- class' car or Konpakuto car (yep that's compact car). The advantage of owning a compact class car is that they are better on gas mileage (though my lovely Vitz gives it a run for it's money) and they fall under a lower taxation bracket so they overall are economically sound. You can usually really quickly tell that a car is a k-car by it's yellow licence plates (regular sized engine cars have white licence plates). Well last month my wife pointed out to me that she has never seen another Stella when driving around. Since then the search has been on, every time I see a yellow licence plate, I quickly look at the car maker and almost always it is either the Honda 'H' emblem or the 'D' announcing that it is a Diahatsu (Toyota does not make kompact class cars- The third most popular k-class car is probably Suzuki). I have yet to see another Stella. To me this is great- in a country where there are so many cars and a tendency to place higher value on what is a popular seller rather than being unique, it's great to be driving a unique car! The other thing is that it is actually a pretty good car, our previous car was a Suzuki Wagon R which I thought was just slightly better than a go-kart, but this car has some pep and is very easy to drive.

My wife attended a funeral for one of her co-workers' son today. He was only 20 years old and passed away in a car accident. What movie was that line from - "no father should ever have to bury their son"...? I think it was a Lord of the Rings movie- but it always held to me as a great quote, there would be nothing sadder than burying your own child.

On a lighter but also sad note, this Saturday marks my last class teaching at Arai's NL Farm. It's been a fantastic year and a quarter teaching there and I am really going to miss teaching the children there, but the hour long travel time really wore me out last year, so I have to take my chances finding work closer to home.

The ballad of Ritsuko

The sky was an interesting shade of pink at sunset tonight, but it has nothing to do with the story below!

My poor wife! Yesterday she had to work the graveyard shift at her hospital (hmm I don't like the term graveyard when talking about a hospital...Okay overnight shift). I learned that when she got to her work, the blood van was there so she decided to give some blood. I think she said she only gave 200 mg, so it wasn't so draining (hmm I don't like the term draining when talking about giving blood). After her 14 hour shift, she came home and I was up and getting ready to go as we had pre-arranged to run some errands today.

The beginning of the errands went pretty well (go to the bank, pay some bills, pickup some paper work, pay the mortgage for the month) but even then it was already 1 pm by the time we finished them. We then headed over to the South tax office to fill out the paperwork required to get a refund on the tax paid on our home. To make a long story short, we spent about 2 hours in the office going through the right paperwork and trying to figure out why we could only get a credit for half of the money we should be able get (basically it is my fault, I am a gaijin and I own half of the home, but the loan is in Ritsy's name). That is a good chunk of money we lost out on. Ritsy called the bank( to fix it so that I can maybe get that money next year) and the bank promised to get back to her. We got home and scarfed down some lunch and by then it was 3:45 pm. I headed off to my Japanese lesson and business lesson and Ritsy tried to get a nap. But less than an hour later the bank called her back. After the call the cats decided they were hungry even though it was an hour and a half early for their dinner. Basically she had no sleep at all through the day! Finally she got to bed around 12:30 because I made her stay up and watch 24 with me!

Well sleep well Ritsuko! You earned it!