Sitting on fruit

It's raining again. This is the result of a typhoon, although it isn't actually a typhoon any more. The typhoon has petered out into a tropical storm after hitting the Philippines very hard, doing a u-turn, passing over Taiwan, and fading into a tropical storm. There is a lot of rain and not much else. According to the typhoon sites I usually visit it isn't even anywhere near Japan. It's still down south, just above Taiwan. But it has pushed up a mass of cloud and the rain is bucketing down outside¹. I'm inside, happy that I don't have to go to work in this, and a sudden increase in the intensity of the rain a few minutes ago caused me to sit on a mikan.

This happened because after finishing dinner I came upstairs with a cup of tea and a mikan (mandarin orange), and couldn't find a clear spot on my desk to put both. So I put the cup of tea on the desk and the mikan on the chair, meaning to move something to make space for the mikan. Then the rain got heavier suddenly, and it occurred to me that the window in the bedroom might be open and letting the rain in. So I went to check. Then I came back, and moving automatically the way you do when you're doing something you do 20 times a day, swivelled the chair around and sat on the mikan. (I don't mean that I sit on a mikan 20 times a day, but I expect you guessed that.)

I have decided that this incident is significant. Sitting on mikan is not an entirely pleasant experience. It feels funny, like sitting on something alive. It signifies that I should clear the surface of my desk so it doesn't happen again. I thought I just did that recently, but perhaps it wasn't as recently as I'd thought. In fact I'd say it can't have been very recently, judging by the way things look around here. This housework stuff is neverending, and I don't seem to get any better at it.



^{1 The Man wants to know why we say this. "It's raining hard outside," he repeats after me, and wonders where else you would expect it to be raining. Also, he wants to know why we look for a 'book to read'. "What else would you use a book for?" he asks. I tell him that sometimes books are good for a table with a short leg but he isn't convinced.}