Steep learning curve

There was a nest somewhere. I knew, because I could hear the babies yelling for food, but I couldn't see where they could possibly be. There are no trees in that direction. There are houses, but I didn't think the yelling was coming from a house. It was coming from higher up.

I thought it might be coming from here, but I couldn't see where a nest could be.


Then a sparrow flew by, suddenly, and then another, and they both vanished somewhere around the top of the power pole. The babies started yelling, and then . . .

There it was!


The babies will have a steep learning curve when it comes time to start flying. No practice for them! They won't even have space to spread their wings before their first time out. They'll have a few seconds to learn the secrets of flight . . . or not.

After I had watched for a while (and got a stiff neck from holding up the camera at an angle for so long), both parents decided to leave.

First one . . .


. . . and then the other, carrying something away.


I don't know what it was carrying away. A bit of unnecessary nest, perhaps. It doesn't look like baby poop. It looks too rigid for that. I guess it was a bit of housekeeping detritus.

Maybe today was gomi day.

Pleasant wind

Yesterday a couple of the bad guys in one of my classes asked me where I was from. I realized I had not given that information when I introduced myself at the beginning of the semester. Usually I do, but for some reason this semester I forgot.

I stared at them, and they stared at me, grinning cheekily. It was obvious they had some naughty comment prepared for me, and were waiting for my reply so they could use it. I thought of telling them to guess where I was from, but decided that would be too depressing. That conversation usually goes like this:

"America!"

"No."

"England!"

"No."

(Silence for a few seconds while the students try to remember other country names.)

"Italy!"

"No."

"Cuba!"

"Eh? Cuba? No! It's an English speaking country."

"Er . . . Greenland?"

"Huh?"

Usually the entertainment value runs out around this point, and I give up and just tell them rather than be further tormented by their appalling lack of geographical knowledge. And yesterday I was too tired to bother with any of it. I decided to tell them right away.

"New Zealand," I said.

I waited for the cheeky comment, but it didn't happen. The two boys continued to grin cheekily at me, but their grins started to look a little frozen when neither of them said anything. They glanced sideways at each other somewhat desperately. I smiled at them and waited.

Finally one of them hissed to the other, out the side of his mouth,

"New Zealand? Where's that?

"Europe," his friend muttered back.

I laughed.

"I'll give you a hint," I said. "It's not in Europe."

I continued my perambulation around the classroom to the sounds of one cheeky student beating up the other cheeky student.

---

And speaking of cheeky students, I have noticed this year the continuation of a fashion that started a few years ago but seems to have suddenly become more extreme: of boys wearing their trousers so far down you can see their underpants. It used to be that you could see the tops of their underpants, but now you can see their entire underpant-clad bottoms. You can see the LEG OPENINGS of their underpants. Their trousers are so far down the trouser waist is around their thighs. They look like they forgot to pull up their trousers after Number Twos. When they walk, they have to hobble.

I am not a fashion critic, usually. I don't normally concern myself much with what my students wear (and it's just as well, really). But whenever I see this particular fashion I get a terrible urge to take the victim aside and place him between two strategically placed mirrors, so he can see what he looks like from behind. This is a tasteless and rather unfortunate look at the best of times, but should be PARTICULARLY avoided if you are skinny, have no bottom to speak of, and have short legs. As far as I'm concerned any fashion choice that causes kind onlookers to want to offer you a wheeled trolley so you can rest your poor stumps is a Big Mistake.

This style should also be avoided if you are wearing underpants with funny Engrish on them. I am fairly sure that the 'PLEASANT WIND' emblazoned across my student's bottom was false advertising. Also, things like that make me stare and laugh. Teachers should not stare and laugh at their students' bottoms, but this particular fashion is making it very difficult for me to maintain a professional demeanor.

I wish they'd stop it.

Spot the frog

Here's a hint:


"Are you looking at me?"

Oink!

Last night I was going to try to dream up a new conspiracy theory about swine 'flu. It seems a perfect candidate for a nice, juicy conspiracy theory. I read a little, to try to figure out what the conspiracy was.

I found this, and learned that in fact 'swine 'flu' is a misnomer, and that this virus is a hybrid of bird 'flu, pig 'flu, and human 'flu.

Birds, pigs and humans, eh? I thought. How SUSPICIOUS!

I tried to think why it was suspicious, and my eyelids drooped.

Er... flying pigs? asked my sleepy brain, and I dropped off to sleep.

Today I was too busy to develop this insight any further. Sorry. But you may be interested to know that I have now caught a cold, thus proving that I am on the right track. 'They' are trying to get rid of me.

Oink!

A happening time in the garden

Remember the peony? It started dropping petals, messily, and now it doesn't look nearly as beautiful.


But somehow, close up, it still has a certain charm.


Meanwhile, the roses, which a week ago looked like this –


Now look like this:


And outside in the stormwater drain, a poppy is blooming. I was not the only one interested in the poppy.

Bang bang bang

I had a long day on Thursday. So far my Thursday classes have been easy, or at least not unmanageable, and generally everything has been going well. But on Thursday things got complicated by the university's clever decision to demolish some old bicycle sheds. Since these sheds ran the length of the building I was working in, right past the classrooms, we had large machinery practically coming in the windows all morning, along with the cheerful sounds of ripping corrugated iron and a lot of accompanying bangs and crashes and swearing, and in the afternoon the workmen used chainsaws to make the bits small enough to fit on the large trucks which then arrived with their noise. Being only one floor up meant that we got the brunt of all this.

When I had to give a test that included some dictation I was under strict instructions to read each line only twice, but I decided NEVER MIND THE INSTRUCTIONS. I read everything about fifteen times at high volume, hoping the students would be able to fill in the gaps over the roar of machinery and screeches of ripping metal, and between the crashes, bangs, and shouts coming from about three metres outside the window. It was all very silly, and probably not educationally very sound.

There was an upside, though. (There is always an upside.) My students had really unusual lessons. They were focussed. They learned to listen very, very carefully while watching my lips. They learned to shout very loudly, in English. "PARDON? I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" I taught them to shout. They got a lot of practice with that, and seemed to enjoy it.

Also, a feeling of camaraderie was fostered in the classroom. We stared hopefully at each other when the machines fell silent, and rolled our eyes collectively when they started up again after ten seconds. We shouted uselessly and shook our fists at the window. It wasn't just me getting frustrated and annoyed. We were all in it together. When things went quiet at one point, and then suddenly a workman sneezed loudly right outside the window, we all jumped, and some of us shrieked slightly. We had become a cohesive group by that time, and it was a cohesive group jump and shriek. Then we had a cohesive group laugh about it.

So it was a tiring and frustrating sort of day, but at the same time it was a fun and unexpected sort of day. In fact on balance, despite all my complaining, I suppose it wasn't really all that bad.


Absurd, but not all that bad.

Bug

This morning I sat on our front step enjoying a cup of tea and the unexpected sunshine. The forecast was for rain, and it is raining now, but for about half an hour this morning it was lovely.

While I was sitting there, half asleep still, I saw a bug moving across the ground in front of me. It was red and black, and I leaped up. A couple of years ago we had an invasion of Australian redbacked spiders in the area, and were warned about it. I had never seen one, but maybe this was it! I hovered for moment, knowing I should step on it. But instead, I dashed inside to get my camera.

By the time I came back I was more awake. In fact I was awake enough to see that although the bug was red and black, it in no way even remotely resembled a spider. I should not attempt bug identification when I am half asleep.

I took a photo anyway, confident that The Man would be able to identify it for me.

He couldn't. He thought at first it was a stink bug, but it is the wrong shape entirely. Trying to Google it did not help. It also doesn't help that these are not great pictures. The size of the bug is a bit over one centimeter, I guess. (That stone is a little less than 3 cm top to bottom, which gives some idea of scale.)

Does anybody know what it is?

Garden, up close

Yesterday I decided it was time to experiment with the camera lens I was talked into buying last year in Malaysia. It was expensive, but not as expensive as most macro lenses, and the guy in the shop managed to convince me it was the best thing since sliced bread. He had one himself, he said, and it was fantastic.

I had tried using it a bit once or twice, without very good results, and told The Man I thought I'd made a mistake buying it. His response was that I just hadn't learned how to use it properly, and it was probably fine. Yesterday I experimented in our garden, which is pretty scruffy, but with good spots. It seemed to me that a macro lens was the best thing to use – I could show the good bits, close up, and miss the scruffy bits.

I think I might be getting the hang of my new lens.

Here is the tree peony, blooming extravagantly outside our front door. Our tree peony is a few twigs in a pot most of the year, but then at this time of year it suddenly produces enormous pink flowers. It used to produce one. Then it became two. This year it was three, but in this picture you can only see two. This photo was taken with my ordinary lens.

And this is one of the flowers close up, taken with my new lens:


I spotted a ladybird on the bridal veil (thank you Kenju, for the name!), so decided to photograph that next. I didn't notice the aphids when I was taking this picture. It was only when I got the picture on the computer that I saw what the ladybird was up to:


Yummy!

(This is why gardeners like ladybirds.)


When I was about to go inside I spotted my first frog of the season, well-disguised on the wall next to some dead ivy. (Dead because I'd chopped it to stop it from strangling the rose, which is not blooming yet.)


I do not regret buying the new lens, now, and you can expect a few more close-up pictures from me in the future.

Bee

I do love these white flowers.


And I'm not the only one.

Sour kiwifruit

Last night I went to bed very early for me – ten o'clock – so that I would be well-rested for the early start I had today.

At eleven o'clock the phone rang. The Man rushed to get it, but it was too late. I was awake. I stared at my clock blearily, panicked, and leaped out of bed.

"IS IT REALLY ELEVEN O'CLOCK?" I screeched. Then I looked at the window, which was dark.

"... at NIGHT?" I tailed off, confused. "What was that?"

"Yes, it's eleven" said The Man as he came back into the room, slightly puzzled by my extreme reaction. "That was a fax."

I fell back into bed gratefully.

"Thank god for that," I said. "I thought it was eleven o'clock in the morning, and that I'd missed my first two classes, and that was the university calling to ask where I was, and I would get a really, really bad reputation, and ... "

It took a long time to fall asleep again. Paranoia is a hard thing to get rid of, especially first-day-of-classes paranoia. Today was my last first day. Nothing had gone terribly wrong yet, so I guess I was getting a bit nervous.

This morning The Man woke me at ten past six.

"I thought you set the alarm for six?" he said.

"I did!" I answered. I checked the clock, and gaped. The alarm was set to 'off'.

Then I remembered the previous night. "I guess I must have turned it off when the phone rang," I said. "That's always what I do when I get up."

"Aho," said The Man, and he was right. I was aho.

But the day went well after the unpromising beginning.

I must apologize to my regular readers for the dearth of postings about the new semester, which started last Thursday. I have been more than usually wiped out. But I will write about it soon.

In the meantime, allow me to blow you a kiss. I may as well. My mouth is still puckered up from eating a not-very-ripe kiwifruit after dinner tonight.

Soaked but unhurt

I thought for a moment I was reading The Onion.

But I wasn't.

Two men who allegedly dumped water on pedestrians from the 11th floor of an apartment building have been arrested and their bucket confiscated, police said.

Tall hedge

They had some very, very tall monks hidden away at the inn where we stayed. It is a part of their esoteric Buddhist training, to grow very tall so that they can trim the hedge, and by getting the edges perfectly straight, gain enlightenment. There are two of these monks, who work either side of the hedge, growing taller, and trimming.


The enlightenment bit happens when their heads finally pop over the top of the hedge and they get to see the person they have been working with for all these years.







(Suggestions in comments about very tall ladders will be frowned upon. Very tall ladders are no fun at all.)

Zori

At the inn at Koyasan, they provided zori for walking in the garden. They're a bit tricky with socks, but I managed.


I did not walk on the raked sand, but I did walk on the gravel.

Tasty

The cherry blossoms are in full bloom.


It is a lovely spring day, and a little windy, so some of the petals are falling.


Apparently they are delicious.

Unenlightened

The evening my friend and I arrived at the temple inn at Koyasan, we were sitting at the window of our lovely room.

This is the room.


And this is the view of the inn's karesansui garden, from our window.


We were tired after all the walking we'd done, and gazed at the garden contemplatively. After a while I said to my friend,

"Whenever I look at this kind of garden I get the same kind of feeling."

"Yes?" said my friend, looking a little apprehensive. I think she was worried that I was going to say something deep and spiritual in a clunkily gaijin way, and as she trained as a Buddhist priest she would feel she had to be understanding and empathetic.

She needn't have worried.

"I get an almost irresistible urge to make footprints in the sand," I said. "Don't you?"

My friend laughed and laughed and laughed.

"But really, don't you?" I asked. "It's like freshly fallen snow. It looks so beautiful and perfect, and after admiring it for about two minutes the next thing you want to do is to mess it up. It's the HUMAN thing to want to do."

After a pause I added,

"It's not just me, is it? "

"Well ... no," admitted my friend. "But I will never take you to our main temple. We have gardens like this."

"Don't worry," I said. "I have learned to restrain myself, over the years. I won't embarrass you by behaving like the unenlightened oaf I really am."

And it's true. I won't. But I will still THINK about doing it. And perhaps I'll actually do it when I am an old lady and can pretend (if necessary) to be slightly batty.

I'll give the gardeners a Zen moment.

Another Jizo, keeping warm

Wall

When we were walking along beside this wall I started to feel a little dizzy. When I realized what was causing it, I took a photograph.

More trees

Spooky

I went to Koyasan yesterday and today, with a friend, and we took a lot of photos. Yesterday the weather was quite good (although cold), and today it rained, and was misty (and cold). This is my favourite photo so far.

It's that time again...

Jizo

Jizo statues in the garden at Sanzenin Temple

Mini-cardigan

I completely forgot I'd put that cardigan into the washing basket. I usually handwash wool knits, and I certainly don't put them in a tumble-dryer, at least not on purpose.

Hmm

A few days ago I was buying a bottle of wine when the woman in the wine shop asked me if I drank beer. She then rushed out to the back room of the shop, not stopping to hear my answer ("Not often. I don't like it much ...") and came back with a free sample of some new Asahi brew. Rather than argue about it, I thanked her. She was so pleased with her little gift it would have been churlish to refuse.

I very rarely drink beer. I very rarely want to. The Man does not drink, and I decided to leave the can in my bicycle basket until I met someone who would actually drink it. I did not want to take it inside the house. I am currently trying to get rid of things I do not want, not add to them.

Yes, I have been trying to do some spring cleaning before classes start again. Yesterday I did some ruthless chucking out. Usually my housekeeping skills are abysmal, which is why now and again I have to get ruthless. If I didn't, our house would fill up until we were jammed in.

As a part of my ruthlessness, I decided to get rid of some little USB speakers that were perfectly functional and had hardly ever been used. They were not bad speakers, but shortly after getting them I was given some other ones that were slightly better.

The rubbish collection system here has become intensely complicated in recent years. We have collection days for burnable rubbish, cans, bottles, smaller items of unburnable rubbish, newspapers, books and magazines, clothing and so on. For the largest unburnable rubbish ("big gomi") we have to call to get it collected, and pay a fee. I lose track of when to put out what, and I was wondering when to put out the speakers. Which category did they fit into? Wasn't there a small appliance category? I wasn't sure.

In the old days, when you had something like the speakers which you did not need but which worked, you had the option of putting it out on big gomi day. This was three times a year around here (monthly in richer areas). Big gomi included everything from old refrigerators to old futons to books. Everybody knew when big gomi day was, and certain people (foreigners, recycle shop people, other dregs of society) would trawl the big gomi piles, picking out the good stuff. This had the double benefit of recycling perfectly serviceable goods, and getting rid of stuff you didn't want but which could still be used by someone else.

These days, you have to pay to get this stuff taken away. An individual pickup time is arranged, and the recycle people (and other dregs) don't even get a look-in.

I decided it was time to bring back elements of the big gomi system. The speakers had hardly been used. I would not have to pay to get them taken away – they were not that big – but it was a shame to just throw them away in the rubbish. Instead, I put them outside our gate on a non-rubbish day, yesterday, in a clear plastic bag to protect them from the elements and display them to passers-by.

They were still there at eight this morning.

By nine they had gone.

When I went out to my bicycle, and noticed, I grinned to myself. The old recycle system still worked! I like it when things are not wasted.

As I put my bag into my bicycle basket, I noticed that the can of beer had also gone.

I tried to figure out what I thought about this. The bicycle was inside the gate, not outside, and you had to open the plastic cover on the basket to even see the beer. I am not particularly happy about a stranger coming in our gate and checking out the contents of my bicycle basket.

On the other hand, I did not want the beer and was going to give it away anyway. And maybe it disappeared yesterday, when I was parked outside the supermarket and I just didn't notice. But still, that means someone unzipped the plastic cover. What did they do that for?

Hmm.

And then there were none

Memory

A couple of days ago The Man told me he had been watching some video we took in Malaysia, a long time ago. This was news to me. I didn't remember taking any video in Malaysia at all, but if he had been watching it then I supposed it must be true. He asked,

"Did we meet your friend Anne, from New Zealand, there, in nineteen ninety-something?"

"I don't think so," I said. "Why?"

"There's a couple drinking tea at Johnny's tea stall, with you," he said. "I'm not sure who they are, but I thought it was Anne and her husband, you know, that fuzzy guy."

"You mean John? With a beard?"

"Yes," he said.

I thought about it.

"I don't THINK we ever met them there," I said.

He thought about it, too. We stared at each other, frowning and trying to remember.

"I met Anne in Thailand, but that was a long time ago, before we ever went to Malaysia," I said. "I'm fairly sure you've only ever met Anne and John once, in New Zealand."

"That's what I thought, too," said The Man. "But we wouldn't video strangers, would we? I thought they looked like friends of yours. So who were they?"

We thought some more.

"I should look at the video," I said.

"Not now," said The Man. "I'm going to bed."

I sat, trying to remember a trip to Malaysia on which we met a couple, friends of mine, the man with a fuzzy face. I couldn't. Surely that couple in the video must be strangers we just happened to meet.

I'm afraid to look at the video now, in case I discover we did meet my friends and I have absolutely no recollection of it.

I wonder if this is what our old age will be like? We'll sit around looking at the evidence of a fascinating and exotic life but won't be able to remember any of it.

It's a good thing I keep a blog these days.

Most baffling toilet sign EVER

Sanzenin Temple

I went to Sanzenin Temple today. This is not a picture of the temple. It is a picture of somewhere in the temple grounds.



It is a lovely place.

Fat face

Last night I was thinking about dentists (a friend had a wisdom tooth out) and that got me thinking about the local anesthetic dentists use, and I started to wonder about something odd. Well, I think it's odd, anyway. Maybe you don't. Maybe you can answer this question for me.

You know how, when the dentist gives you an injection and half your face is numb, it feels like the numb half of your face has swelled to gigantic proportions? And when you look in the mirror it's quite surprising to see that actually your face is a normal size?

Well, that's what I started to wonder about. I think it's odd, and illogical. How does I can't feel my right cheek translate in our brains to therefore my right cheek is enormous?

I could understand it if the part of your face you couldn't feel seemed smaller than usual. But ... bigger? That doesn't make sense, at least to me.

WHY?

Famous, nearly

Yesterday The Man and I came out of the supermarket, and when we started to walk to our (illegally parked) bicycles we noticed a man in a suit was standing in front of them. He was just standing there on the road, looking unnatural. Nobody else was wearing a suit. Also, he was foreign.

Then I noticed the camera crew. The Man and I both hesitated. We wanted our bicycles, but the man in the suit was standing so close to them it seemed rude to just take them away. Our bicycles were providing local colour. (Orange, with great big baskets.)

He saw us hesitating, and gestured that it was all right for us to walk past.

"Er, no, we want our bicycles," said The Man, and pointed.

The man in the suit laughed. "These?" he asked. Was that an incredulous laugh? I wasn't sure. Our bicycles are ordinary. I couldn't see any reason for incredulity.

It turned out that he was from the BBC. The BBC! Filming at our local station! Why?

We didn't ask what kind of program it was, but the suited man told us we could see it if we watched BBC cable at 8am on Friday and Saturday.

Or did he say Friday OR Saturday? I'm not sure. Nor is The Man, so we'll have to watch both days, to find out what has been happening in our neighborhood. SOMETHING exciting must have happened, surely, to attract the attention of the BBC. We can't imagine what it could be, though.

And no, it's not our bicycles. We rode off on them, and they missed their chance to be famous.

Economic stimulus

Today I met some friends for breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton. It was expensive, but lovely. One of my friends in NZ emailed, when I told him where I was going,

"Don't you know there's a recession on?"

I did not dignify him with an answer. Yes, I know there is a recession on. Does he think I can't read the newspapers? My friends and I are trying to kick-start the economy. I don't know how Japan would manage without us.

Later in the morning, feeling rather full after our strenuous efforts at economic stimulus, the group broke up and three of us went to the Hilton Plaza, where there is a branch of the Junkudo bookstore. This branch has been holding an English book sale for a couple of months now. We had all been to it before and were fairly sure they wouldn't have any new books in the sale, but felt compelled to check. We thought the books they had were all from their main Osaka branch – old and remaindered books they were getting rid of – or books they'd somehow acquired from bookstores that had gone out of business. There was a bit of a shakeup in the English book world in Japan last year, when Yohan went bankrupt. We didn't really think there would be anything new.

We were wrong. They had some new books in, and we all spent some money. More stimulus for the Japanese economy! (Not much, though, as the books were all 70% off.)

It was warm in there, and we were wearing coats, so after that we decided to have a rest and a drink in the coffee shop down in the lobby. It is an expensive coffee shop, but we hadn't finished stimulating the Japanese economy yet.

As it turned out, we were about to receive a little stimulus ourselves. When we approached the coffee shop the waitress came to meet us, and addressed me in impeccable English. She said, politely,

"Good afternoon. May I smoke?"

To which I hesitated, then replied, "Um, er ... yes?" because what DO you say when a waitress asks you if she can smoke?

I don't think she noticed that she had her question ever so slightly wrong, and I probably should have corrected her, but I was too taken aback by her unexpected question. Besides, I rather enjoy the idea of visitors to Japan having an equally confusing time. Depriving them of the opportunity to have a moment like that one would be cruel.

With the economic climate the way it is, we all need a little stimulating.

Little Miss Muffett

Dinner tonight was a near thing. Nearly not a dinner, I mean. I was planning to make tarragon cream chicken. In fact, I spent quite a lot of time dithering about what to have for dinner, and so when I decided I wanted tarragon chicken I REALLY wanted it. I went to the supermarket and bought the chicken, and also some veges. I bought some white wine. Then I went to the other supermarket where they have cream (the only one that does) ... and they didn't have any cream left. I stared at the empty shelf space and grumbled to myself a bit, and wondered what to do. I had all the other ingredients. I wanted tarragon chicken. I WANTED TARRAGON CHICKEN. I could almost taste it. But there was no cream.

I had a brainwave. (Not a very good one, it turned out.) They did have tiny bottles of Jersey milk, with a high fat content. Maybe that would do, I thought, if I used a lot of butter. I bought the milk.

At home I fried the chicken, added the water (not stock, because I forgot to get some AGAIN), and the milk and tarragon. I cooked it for a while, and tasted. Yum! But something was missing. I added the required dash of wine ... and watched in horror as my sauce curdled.

It was amazing. I've never actually seen something curdle before. I have seen the results, afterwards, but to actually watch it separate out like that was kind of magical, in a bad kind of magical way. It just parted. Clear(ish) liquid stayed underneath, and cottage-cheesy-like gunk floated to the top. I tasted the two bits. The white gunk tasted like cottage cheese, only more boring. The clear liquid was rather good.

I sieved out the gunk and kept the clear liquid. I added more wine, more tarragon, and put the chicken back in and cooked it for a while longer. 

The end result was pretty tasty (and a lot less fattening than I'd been planning), but might have worked better as a soup. I imagine that if I had chicken stock it would make a rather good soup, actually, and I might try it sometime. Chicken tarragon soup, flavoured with wine.

Curd, curdle ... if something curdles, I suppose the white stuff must be curds. I hadn't noticed that before. Nobody ever talks about curds unless they're reciting a nursery rhyme. Is cottage cheese actually curds? Was the first cottage cheese the result of someone else's cooking disaster?

I'll look it up in the morning.

Spring back!

I am always confused by daylight saving. Or, rather, I am confused by talk about daylight saving. Daylight saving itself is not a problem. I know that in spring you put the clock forward an hour (and lose an hour of sleep), and in autumn you do it the other way. This is not a problem. It is perfectly logical, until someone uses the mnemonic* 'spring forward, fall back,' and confuses me. Hearing this makes me think I must have it wrong, because in my head I always change it to 'spring back, fall forward.'

I don't know why I change it, but I suppose it is because I am not a springing forward sort of person. I am more likely to spring back. Also, I am fairly sure I have fallen forward more often than I have fallen back. Apparently I have been living my life all wrong. I have been falling forward and springing back on a regular basis, while all over the world other people have been springing forward and falling back.

It is probably just as well there is no daylight saving time in Japan.





*Why is it so difficult to remember how to spell a word that means 'memory aid'?

More gulls

Gull

Whiskers

Joke

Today I made up a joke. It is probably not a politically correct joke, but never mind. I was so pleased with myself that I decided to send it to a friend, at his workplace in New Zealand.

As I was typing my joke, however, I remembered that his workplace has email filtering software that automatically blocks email containing any naughty words. I thought about waiting until he got home from work and sending it there instead, but I am not the sort of person who likes to wait. When I make up a joke I want instant feedback.

So I sent the joke anyway. I am fairly sure he can make up his own punchline. My joke goes like this;

Q. How many Tourettes sufferers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. (censored)

My friend's cat is mental

I REST MY CASE.




(Also, I wish I'd had my good camera with me. The phone camera did not capture that cross-eyed, befuddled glare in all its glory.)

Notes (and notes about notes)

Today as I was waiting for a friend I made a mental note of some things I wanted to remember, for writing about here. Then I decided that a mental note was not enough. When I make mental notes I often can't locate them later, when I need them.

I wrote actual notes, instead. The problem is that now I can't be bothered writing out the stories behind the notes. I am becoming lazier and lazier as my spring vacation progresses.

Rather than not write anything, I have decided to give you just the notes. I am sure my long-time readers will be able to fill in the gaps themselves.

---

NOTES

1. There should be a comedy category for ice skating. The pratfall possibilities are ENDLESS. It would be brilliant!

2. Why does my bra keep coming unhooked? Am I so deflated my bra no longer fits?

3. My zit is ALIVE?

4.

---

Hmm. It seems some clarification might be necessary after all.

---

NOTES ABOUT THE NOTES

1. Inspired by a little bit of TV I saw this morning in a coffee shop.

2. I did it! Last week, actually. It hurt, but not too much. And I didn't pass out. I didn't even wobble. (It probably helped that I was lying down.) I am now feeling MUCH more comfortable (except when my bra unhooks itself).

3. The Man's reassurance that it was just a zit was enough. He did not need to add this comment, which gave me a perfectly horrible mental picture of a pus-filled blob waving tiny fists in the air and shouting, "THIS BUTTOCK IS MINE! I'M TAKING OVER!"

I'm a bit worried every time I sit down, now. ('Zitocide'?)

4. Inspired by the fact that my friend arrived just as I was going to write #4, so I made a mental note instead. (See first paragraph.)

Cormorant on bicycle

Today as I was cycling along the small river where I often see the tufted ducks, I was surprised to see a cormorant on a bicycle.



When I went around the other side to see more clearly, I saw he was riding tandem.

Google sometimes lies

The other day my friend, Mrs Malaprop, told me that she had been reading a really interesting article about the problem of tintinitis. She told me some more about the article, which was interesting, and then she used the word again.

"Tintinitis," she said.

I stopped her.

"Don't you mean tinnitis?" I asked.

"What did I say?" she asked.

"You said tintinitis," I said.

"Did I?" she laughed. "Maybe that's the problem where your hair goes into a little curl..."

A couple of days later I met another two friends, and I told them about this.

"Mrs Malaprop told me she'd been reading an article about tintinitis," I said.

They stared at me, waiting for the rest of the story.

"Um ... TINTINITIS," I said.

"Yes?" they said.

"It's TINNITUS," I said. "Tintin is that little guy with the hair."

"But isn't it either?" said one of my friends. "I'm sure I've heard tintinitis, too."

"No," I said, suddenly feeling a little uncertain. "It's tinnitus."

When I got home I looked it up, just to make sure. In all the dictionaries I checked, there was no tintinitus, tinntinitus or tintinitis, but there was tinnitus. Whew!

When I Googled it, however, I discovered that half the world seems to be calling it tintinitus - until I went to the last page of results, where I discovered that it was actually only a few hundred people.

Yes, that's right. Google LIES! Try it and you'll see. A search on tintinitus tells you there are 5,190,000 results (and suggests the correct spelling of tinnitus), but if you click through to the last page of the search (page 34), suddenly you are told that this is the last of 331 results.

So ... what were the other 5,189,669 results, then?

How strange.