Rose

We are having a cold snap. Just before this cold snap (which started on Tuesday) we still had one frog left in the garden, but now it's gone. I called it Rose. (Because it was the Last Frog of Summer.)


It has probably underground now. Did you know that these little guys bury themselves and hibernate during the winter? I didn't, until one year I decided to put in some spring bulbs, and accidentally dug one up. I held the limp, clammy little body in my hand, and said, "Oh, poor wee thing, it's dead..." and then its leg twitched, and it went from deep hibernation to the discovery of flight in a split second.

It probably was a fairly traumatic experience for the frog, but it was for me, too. I have never planted bulbs again.

Typhoon Melor

All our shutters are up, and I'm feeling a little claustrophobic. There is a typhoon on the way. We have been told to expect 250mm of rain, and in fact it has been raining hard and steadily for the last few hours. I am hoping that I will have at least a morning off, if the typhoon doesn't move TOO fast overnight and all be over by 6am. If the storm warnings are still in place at 6am morning classes are cancelled, and if they're still in effect at 11am afternoon classes are cancelled, too.

It seems to me that there is something wrong with this arrangement. When a storm has been raging all night and keeping me awake, and the warnings are lifted by 6am, then the last thing I want to do is go to work. I'm too tired to teach well, and those students who bother to turn up are too tired to study well.

Why can't we just have the day off?

Fair dinkum

Today as I was just about to leave work, one of the Japanese English teachers stopped me to ask a question I found myself completely unable to answer. I hate it when they do that. Sometimes I wonder if they're doing it on purpose.

Today's awkward question was this:

"What is a dinkum, and why is it fair?"

To which my answer was, intelligently,

"Er. Um."

I felt less stupid after coming home and looking it up. Apparently I am not the only one without a clue.

In other news, the weather has become cooler, and the leaves have started to turn.

Grumble

Here is a story on why daylight saving time doesn't work in Japan. I remember someone telling me years ago that Japan had tried daylight saving and it hadn't worked, and why, and it sounded absurd.

It is still absurd. And it still won't work, especially if only some people do it.

I have not been posting much recently, and that is mostly because it is too hot. I do not mean that it is too hot to write (I do have air conditioning in here) but because whenever I sit down to write anything, all I want to do is complain about the weather. I suppose I need to get it off my chest. So here comes my official summer grumble, and after this I will shut up about it.

It is UNREASONABLY HOT. I am sure it did not used to be this hot at night. The Man and I used to have air conditioner wars all summer. We used to argue over whether to have the air conditioner on at night. He didn't want it; I did. We had this fight all the time.

In the last few years we haven't been fighting about this, because it has become rare for the night time temperature to fall below 26C during the summer. The last week or two it has only gone below 28C once or twice. At night the humidity shoots up as well, so it feels even hotter. AND THAT IS NOT REASONABLE.

It is so ridiculously hot, in fact, that people have been dying of it. So, you see, I am not just being fussy.

Actually, while I am about it, I have another little grumble, and this time it is possible that I am being a little unreasonable. The Man's recent illness (which he has not quite recovered from but he is much better than before, thank you for asking, and no thanks to the weather) has had an unexpected and wholly mysterious side-effect: he has stopped snoring. I do not mean he is snoring less than before, I mean he no longer snores AT ALL. While this has, of course, made our nights rather more peaceful, it has also given me another thing to worry about. Every time I wake up in the night and find myself basking in unexpected silence I start to wonder whether I am lying next to a corpse.

And that is not a nice thought AT ALL. So far it has not turned out to be true, of course (I would have told you), and I feel somewhat irrational complaining about his newly quiet sleeping habits. I used to complain about his snoring. Why can't I just enjoy the silence? But I am finding the whole thing rather disconcerting.

Why can't he at least snort now and again, to reassure me?

Misc

I wonder why the English Yahoo weather site and the Japanese Yahoo weather site give different temperatures for the same place?

I wish the English site was the correct one, especially for the nighttime temperatures. It isn't, though. The thermometer in this room reads 30 degrees Celsius (86F) right now, at almost two in the morning, and that's with the air conditioner on. Outside is a LOT warmer. I know, because I just went out there to check.

We are well into two or three shower a day weather, and tomorrow I am planning to go to a flea market. Outside. Where there is no air conditioning. This probably makes me some kind of idiot.

The heat is tiring enough without being ill as well, and this weather is not helping The Man, who has been unwell with a nasty throat infection. Poor Man. He needs to get a badly impacted wisdom tooth seen to, too (possibly the source of all his problems), but it will mean surgery, and he wants to be well enough to cope with that. Whether or not we will be able to travel anywhere this summer is still up in the air. We will just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, he is on a fattening diet, to try to regain some of the weight he has lost, which has left him looking like a famine victim. You could play the xylophone on his ribs. To encourage him, I have been sampling some of the fattening goodies he has been indulging in, and so far the person who has gained the most weight around here is me.

In other news, today I have been amused by Fail Blog.

That time of year again

The weather is warming up, and it's coming up to that time of year again when I will be checking the kousa (yellow sand) site as often as I check the weather site. Lovely spring days plus yellow sand and anthropogenic aerosols from China equals face mask weather. There has already been a couple of days of it, just before I got back from holiday. I was happy to miss it. It started rather early this spring, and I think it's getting worse every year. Last spring I wasn't able to get a single picture of cherry blossoms against a blue sky. Clear skies did not happen, at least on the days when I was out with my camera.

How boring. How inconvenient.

How bloody annoying.

Actually the sand/aerosols site will be an interesting one to watch when the Olympics are on. I've never particularly noticed the weather patterns in summer in China, but I've heard from friends visiting Beijing in summer that it is very hot and the air is not clean at all. How much of that sort of rubbish in the air can the athletes tolerate, I wonder?

Birthdays

Another hot day in Auckland. The heat here is nothing like the heat in Japan, where shade doesn't seem to make much difference to anything. When the sun goes behind a cloud here, suddendly it's COLD, but then the sun comes out and oh, how lovely, you think, and two minutes later what an attractive red nose you have, my dear!

Or red neck, which is the bit I neglected to protect yesterday. Last night I lay in bed feeling unaccountably warm and thinking ugly thoughts until I figured out what was wrong. I had turned into a redneck.

Today I braved the Auckland bus system again. Yesterday was fairly painless, aside from one initial hitch. This hitch occured when I interpreted 'the A street bus stop' as being 'the bus stop on A street,' instead of 'the bus stop on B street which is nearest to A street.' I had found this information on the Internet, and later called the number to tell them of their mistake, only to find out that the mistake was apparently mine. I then told them that if they wanted to call the bus stop on B street the A street bus stop, then they should call it the 'A street bus stop on B street,' to avoid confusion, since there is a bus stop on A street as well. (And what is that called, I wonder?) They agreed with me, but in retrospect I wonder whether I made things worse.

Anyway, today I took a different bus, and all went swimmingly until I got the bus started off and I realized I had left my folder with my passport AND BANK CARD in it back at the house. The bank card was the most important thing, because I had intended to have a bit of a shopping spree. I had only a little cash with me, and it was too time-consuming to get off the bus and wait for a bus back and then a bus there again, so I carried on, resolving to buy only the most important thing on my list: a birthday present for a nephew, who is having a birthday on Saturday.

Fortunately I had enough for what I got him - a book called Children's Encyclopedia of Earth. He is only eight, but it seemed to me that this is the kind of book he will grow into. He can enjoy the pictures now, and later he will enjoy the words.

At least it has dinosaurs in it. You can't go wrong with eight-year-olds and dinosaurs.

I have discovered that in a couple of weeks the eight-year-old's little brother will ALSO have a birthday. How inconvenient! I will have to go shopping again (this time with my bank card) and get ANOTHER book. There was one I saw today that might interest a six-year-old: a pop-up book of the jungle, with sound effects. I particularly liked the sound effects. At the very least they will drive his parents up the wall.

Giving noisy presents to children is a perogative of bad auntliness. The kids think you're wonderful, and you don't have to deal with the results. Who cares if the parents never want to see you again?

So I will be going out to my brother's tomorrow and staying overnight. He does not have a computer so you will not hear from me for a couple of days. I will be attending a birthday party.

I do not expect it to be a relaxing occasion. Please forgive any crankiness that ensues. I'm not used to this kind of thing.

Aftermath

This morning I was woken by the sound of dripping water. Drip, drip, drip. I thought it might be raining, but the sound was coming only from the little roof above the window of our bedroom. Apparently it was raining only on one place, which was odd.

I got up and went outside to investigate. There I discovered that it was a sunny day and the entire neighbourhood was dripping with melting snow. In fact, when I stepped outside the first thing to happen was that I got dripped on.

I guess that means the snow excitement is over. By afternoon it was pretty much all gone.

But not quite. While I was out on my bicycle I noticed a snowdog, grimly hanging on to existence in a shadowed spot.


I also spotted a few other snow creatures, a little difficult to identify.


One of these guys is doing a dive into the concrete. I think he has given up.



Poor little creatures. I don't expect any of them will last long.

Snow

Usually I like to complain about the weather, but recently I've been restraining myself. That's because the weather has been unusually boring. It has been cold and grey with occasional drizzle.

"How come we never get snow anymore?" I moan fretfully. "If it's going to be cold, at least it could be pretty as well!"

Today I got my wish. Here is what Yahoo weather told us to expect today, and what they are still telling us: sleet until midday, rain until six, and cloudy thereafter:


And here are some pictures I took at a little park near here, which I took on my way back from the doctor this afternoon. My pictures are all cliches. That is what happens when you are trying to take pictures of snow while it is still snowing, and you don't really know what you're doing.




It has been snowing heavily since morning, and is still snowing, great big fluffy flakes. I have never seen it snow so much around here in all the years I have been here. When it snows, which is rarely, usually it snows overnight and melts away by midmorning, but today it has been snowing ALL DAY.

The Man is complaining. He hates cold weather. He is refusing to even go out, the boring old fart. "The road's all mushy!" he grizzles. "My feet will get wet!"

But I think it's lovely. Who cares about wet feet? In any case, on a bicycle your feet don't get wet. Not very wet, anyway.

I'm going out again soon, by myself. I think it's lovely out there.

Sorry. On Fridays I'm too tired to angry

Yesterday morning on my way to work my first train was delayed. It was only for ten minutes or so, but this meant that I missed all my connections, and arrived at work ten minutes before the beginning of class instead of forty minutes early. I spent the day feeling as though I would never catch up. Plus my students kept getting lost, but that is a story I'll save for tomorrow. My typing fingers are too tired to deal with it right now.

Also yesterday, on my way home, a train was delayed again, only for longer, so that I ended up getting home at about ten o'clock instead of at least an hour earlier. Since I had to be up at five today this was especially not welcome. It was so not welcome, in fact, that really the only reason I did not try this little trick today is that I didn't think of it first.

A JAPANESE navy officer who was found tied and gagged on the side of a road admitted he faked the assault to avoid going to work, police said.

If I had thought of it first, I'm sure I would have been much better at it. I would have chosen a comfy spot in the bushes and made sure it was well hidden, so I would not be discovered for a while. I know I could have achieved a state of perfect and convincing unconsciousness and maintained it for so long they would have HAD to believe me.

In other news, it was another last day today, and in the surveys I did for one particularly rowdy and exuberant (but enormously fun) class I got this useful bit of advice from several students:

• You had better get angry.
• You should angry to us.
• Be more angry! We love you!
• Sorry! I was very noisy. More angry please! But this class is very excellent and teacher is fanny and cute. Class was very fanny!
• You should scolded your student for being lazy.
• You should angry talking people.

And from one of the students I probably should have been angry at:

• Because I am very wonderful, there please be the teacher as it is forever.

And in yet OTHER other news, there is a typhoon on the way, just in time for the long weekend.

Forecast

Just now I looked at Yahoo Japan's one-week weather forecast and discovered that there will be no weather next Sunday. This is a relief, in a way. Living in Japan it is very easy to get tired of weather.


It is possible, of course, that the reason there will be no weather is that the world is going to end on Saturday. If so, I wish they'd be more specific about it. I want to know, so that I can plan accordingly. If the world is going to end on Saturday then I won't bother marking that stack of homework.

KaBOOOOOM! (Whoop! whoop! whoop!)

We just had a great big thunderstorm. Three times the thunder was so shatteringly loud that the alarm went off in the car parked next door. It is an interesting sound effect.

KaBOOOOOM! (Whoop! whoop! whoop!)

When I hadn't heard the thunder for a while I turned the computer on again. While the computer was still starting up, there was another KaBOOOOOM! (Whoop! whoop! whoop!).

I just about jumped out of my skin.

But you can't turn off a computer that is in the middle of starting up, except by pulling the plug. I wasn't willing to do that, so I let it continue. That was twenty minutes ago and there hasn't been another KaBOOOOOM! (Whoop! whoop! whoop!) yet, so it's probably safe now. At least I hope so.

After the first thunderclap of this storm, which wasn't so loud, the rain started, and just after that I heard my first frog of the season. I guess spring has really arrived. We're having wild and windy weather, and the frogs are singing.

Well, the frogs WERE singing. They seem to have stopped again. Perhaps those really big KaBOOOOOM! (Whoop! whoop! whoop!)s were too scary for them, and they decided to hibernate a little longer.

Did you know that tree frogs hibernate by burying themselves in earth? Did I mention that before? That was something I didn't know until I dug one up in the garden one year. It was a sad and somewhat revolting discovery, and I held the little dead frog in my hand and wondered how on earth it had ended up buried in my garden. As I was peering at it closely, one of its legs twitched.

That wasn't a very nice experience, for me or for the frog. It can't be pleasant to go straight from hibernation to the discovery of flight. Things should be arranged a little better than that, I think. When frogs bury themselves in your garden they should leave little markers, so you can know where not to dig.

But since they don't, I have no spring bulbs. It's too risky.

(Oooh, the thunder is coming back. Time to unplug.)