Since Thursday is Friday this week we’ll be going out to celebrate our anniversary at one of our favorite restaurants, Anonym, tonight after work.  I’m looking forward to the meal – the cook is always creative and the wine sommelier knows her stuff.  I’m also looking forward to turning off the alarm and sleeping through tomorrow morning.  Unfortunately, Kuniko will be working all three days of the holiday – tough break, kid.

These cold mornings make it somehow harder to get up and running.  My schedule means that I must catch the 5:49 am train, so that means that my “free” time is limited in the morning.  It seems like however early I get up I still have to rush around in the mornings.

Yesterday was our wedding anniversary, and by chance it fell on a Tuesday, which meant that Kuniko had a half day off.  She went shopping for materials in Kobe, then came home and made a very nice dinner.  We had prosciutto and basil wrapped meatballs smothered in a tomato sauce with freshly grated Parmesan cheese and black pepper, a salad of herbs, chicken, avocado and celery, and stuffed mushrooms as an appetizer.  This combined with a bottle of 2005 Nicolas Feuillatte Brut Chardonnay.  Delicious.

So Tuesday worked out very well for me, and now we are drawing closer to the weekend since Friday is a national holiday.  Hurray!

No time to blog this morning!  Have a cat picture instead…

Last Friday night I met up with Inoguchi sensei for some Indian food in Kobe.  The restaurant that we went to was down the street from the old Graciani restaurant, which has the distinction of being the first restaurant I ever visited in Kobe, and the first place I ate dinner with my future wife.  The Indian restaurant was just half a block away, next to a Swiss restaurant.  We had an all-you-can-eat course, along with all-you-can-drink beer, and the price was right.  It was only about 3000 yen for each of us, and we left with our stomachs full.  The Indian waiter wasn’t sure whether to use English or Japanese with us, and in the end he settled on English.  The food itself was OK – what it lacked in flavor was made up in volume.

It had been a year since I had talked with Mr. Inoguchi, and he has been doing well.  He’s off to Hong Kong for some food tourism next month, and he had been hoping that we would be free to come along.  Unfortunately we’ve got other plans, but maybe sometime in the future we could go along for the ride.  He’s got some favorite restaurants in HK he wants to introduce to us.

Saturday night I met Kuniko in Kobe after she finished work to do some Christmas shopping.  The shopping was fairly successful, and we celebrated by trying a new restaurant that specializes in pizzas.  I guess it might have been an Italian restaurant, but the atmosphere was a little on the casual side.  The food was pretty good, though.

Finally, on Sunday I stayed home and did housework and shopping while Kuniko was at a conference.  We ended up spending a little time together in the evening, eating currywurst and drinking German beer.  So it was a bit of a high calorie weekend, but we’ll get back to healthy food this week.  We’ve got an anniversary coming up, so that is something to look forward to as well.

Tonight I’ll meet up with Inoguchi sensei for the first time in a long time.  We’ve been meeting on and off for the past eight years or so.  He’s always an interesting guy to talk to, and he’s the most well-read person I know.  We’re going to meet after work and go to an Indian restaurant that he recommends in Kobe.  It has been a while since Kuniko and I have been to our beloved Swaad in town, so Indian sounds like just the right thing.

Once again this weekend we’ll head out for some shopping.  I’ll meet Kuniko after work on Saturday to shop and to have dinner in town, and then I’ll be “home alone” all day Sunday while she is on a business trip.  Sounds like another slow, quiet weekend.

We hooked up the electric blanket last night.  The heated toilet seat is set to the second-highest setting.  The heated floors are now on a timer for morning and night operation.  Damn, it’s cold.

Yes, winter is here.  I don’t know if it is officially winter, but last night might have been the last night without electric blankets.  The weather patterns have changed, and the days of just a comforter are pretty much over. We’ve had a few storms lately, and that brings up the temperature a little, but still – too cold.

It’s been quiet at work and at home lately, so not much to report.  Kuniko has had a series of business trips which means that she has been getting home at reasonable hour lately.  How unusual!  Tonight we’re hoping to keep the streak alive and have a nice dinner together before 8 pm…

For the last few weeks we’ve been wondering when we’d have time to take our new(-ish) car into the dealer for the first maintenance.  Normally I’d take it somewhere else, but the dealer had a special price on the first maintenance ($20) so we figured we get it there one of these days.  But we’ve both been so busy that it has been hard to find the time.

So we were happy to receive a phone call last night at 7 pm from the dealer, offering to come get our car, take it back to the dealer for the maintenance, and then bring it back to our home at 8 pm.  Are these guys sitting around the dealership with nothing to do? Sure, we said.  Come on over whenever you want.

Now maintenance is done and they’ve saved us some trouble.  Maybe this is part of their strategy to keep us on a busy maintenance schedule with them in the future, but I’ve got to admit, the convenience factor is pretty nice.

Yesterday we had a rainy day, all day long.  We stayed inside and watched movies, which was a nice way to relax on Kuniko’s first day in several weeks.  Last night the weather forecast said that it would start being cold after the storm passed, and they were right – it was much colder this morning when we got up.  Not only that, but there is a seriously strong wind blowing outside, too.  I think it will be a chilly trip to work this morning.

I’m going out with some of my students after work to Mikaen, my current favorite Chinese restaurant. Shu suggested it as a good way to get to know some of my students better, and since they all are working in the same department, it made sense. The only bad point is that if one of them is stuck with a lot of work, that means that the rest of them probably will be too. So I may be eating Chinese food alone tonight.

This weekend I’ll stay in while Kuniko is working on Saturday, and we’ll both have all day off on Sunday. The current plan for the day off is to veg out in front of the TV and watch movies after sleeping in the whole morning. I can’t wait.

…is how I feel without my phone.  For the first time in years I left it at work and only discovered that I had forgotten it while on the train back.  Oops.  It is hard to describe the strange sense of loss while not carrying it.  I couldn’t get in touch with Kuniko and so we just met back at home – she was worried that something happened to me.  I missed out on the chance to read some articles on the way home, but that’s about it.  I used a different method to wake up this morning, and right now in my office my alarms is going off again and again…  hopefully nobody is there at 4;30 am to be disturbed by it.

I better figure out a way to avoid having this happen again in the future.

Luckily here in Japan there is not much fanfare about the US presidential election, so I can go about my day normally.  I voted a long time ago by mail, so today I can just watch the online media wonder who will win, and then look forward to the licking of wounds and a return to normalcy.  Politics is definitely not one of my favorite topics.  The political situation in Japan is a big mess – so not much to admire there, either.

I imagine that it is a little harder to avoid all of that media in the USA – here’s to hoping things calm down soon.  There’s so much real life out there that is waiting to be enjoyed.

Yesterday I once again taught my monthly class to the new employees in the production group.  These guys (and one girl) are hired right out of high school, have elected not to go to college, and will be factory workers building trains at our factory in Hyogo.  They are being taught English by the HR department once a week, and then once a month I go in and teach a class.  Each month someone gives me a topic, and then I give it a go and try to get them to learn it in class, using only English. Sometimes it is a hit, and sometimes it is a miss.

Yesterday was a miss.  The students had trouble paying attention, even basic English phrases like “I don’t understand” were forgotten (probably since they have no opportunity to use them in the months between my classes), and overall I wasn’t satisfied with the results of the course.  If it were up to me, I’d say that there are some major changes to the format of the class that should be made.

My last class with them is next month, so maybe after the beginning of next year I’ll take it up with the powers that be, and try to make some changes.  Making changes to something like this, especially in a one hundred year old Japanese company, is like trying to change the change the course of a river – something best done gradually over a long time period.

And in the end, what else can you ask for from a weekend?  Friday night we went out after work to have dinner at a new restaurant for us.  The place was dark, and the seats had no backs, and they were playing traditional French music in the background.  There were a few red flags, but despite that, it was a pretty good restaurant.  Some of the food (like the ratatouille) had been pre-prepared, but we a delicious cut of duck that had been pan seared and served rare – and that was really good.

One complaint that I could make – not specifically about this restaurant – is the procedure for ordering a bottle of wine.  In many restaurants they open the wine somewhere else, the proprietor tastes it themselves, and then they just pour the wine directly into both of our glasses.  In this restaurant he poured it in and said, “A very delicious wine”, as if daring us to argue.  As it happened it was a very delicious wine, but I’d prefer to make that determination.  Not all restaurants do this, but it seems like it often happens when we order a bottle of vino.  So no Michelin star for this guy.

The rest of the weekend was pretty low key.  I stayed home and did some hiking, and Kuniko worked both day.  Luckily next Sunday she’ll get a day off.

Our quest for the perfect French restaurant continues.  We’ve already found a restaurant that serves great Japanese-style French food in Kobe (Anonym).  That is relatively easy to find – the tough part is to find a “real” French restaurant.  We’ve had plenty of misses while we’ve looked, and even the misses are fun for us to try.  Tonight we’ll try again.  Hit or miss, it’ll be a nice way to celebrate the end of the week and the start of the weekend.  At least for me – Kuniko is busy Saturday and Sunday.