Monday I had taken the day off from work to continue cleaning and organizing. I hung out in Okubo organizing there, and was there when the NTT guy came over to hook up our phone. Still no internet – hopefully we can get that taken care of later in the week.
I spent all day unpacking at home – I had plenty to do, and to tell the truth I didn’t really make much of a dent. The biggest chore was getting the washing machine installed so we could do laundry. The washer connects to the water source in the wall, usually by screwing on a fixture that has a gasket inside. Then the other end is a quick release connector attached to a hose that runs to the machine. Every time I screwed on the little fixture and turned on the water, it would leak. I went to Saty to buy a replacement, and the guy said that I was doing it wrong and showed me the right way. It made sense, so I went home and tried that, but it still leaked. I went back to Saty and bought a new fixture, and then that was leaking, too.
Finally I gave up and went looking around town until I found a hardware store, and asked the guy there what I should do. The guy was extremely helpful and said that many people have the same problem. He had another solution involving a big wrench and a new stainless steel piece, and I gladly paid for the wrench and the new piece, because I could see that there was no way this was going to leak. I got home and with great satisfaction hooked up the machine and started doing laundry.
Kuniko came home and we went shopping for curtains, and also got a stove for the kitchen for a pretty good price. We went home and got to work hooking everything up, and we were set.
Kuniko’s folks gave us a pumpkin from their garden, and it was a fairly big one. Kuniko got to work on making some dishes out of it. She worked hard in the hot kitchen and came up with three delicious pumpkin dishes – a baked pumpkin quiche, a cold pumpkin and onion salad, and a pumpkin spaghetti carbonara. I opened up a bottle of good red wine and it made a nice complement to all the excellent food. It was way too much food for one night, so we sampled everything and then put the leftovers away for breakfast the next day.
