Saturday morning Kuniko and I could sleep in a little longer than usual. I still had to get up and go do community chores with everybody at eight o’clock. Kuniko offered to join me, but we thought it would be more useful for her to stay in, relax, maybe do some chores.
I put on some scrubby clothes and went downstairs to get to work. I met up with Jane, and we paired off and found a neglected, weedy corner of the facility to work on. We used the hour to catch up with each other. I found out that Jane has a boyfriend – and although she says he’s always over visiting, I’ve yet to see him. We chatted about her plans for the future – it sounds like she’s leaning towards heading home after this year is up. The more I heard from her stories, the more it sounded miserable for her – at least the teaching part.
We wrapped things up and I went back upstairs. Kuniko had to go into work for a little while, so I spent the morning and part of the afternoon doing chores around the house, and doing just a touch of studying. I got to talk to my folks on the phone, and we chatted about their upcoming trip for our wedding. It’s starting to get real, and it’s fun to talk about it and start planning things.
Kuniko got back at a reasonable hour, and we worked on different things. Kuniko was writing the names and addresses of the people she is inviting on her invitation envelopes. She wrote them in beautiful kanji, but kept saying they looked terrible. Maybe they look bad to Japanese eyes – to me they were better than I could ever dream of writing.
For dinner tonight we cooked up tempura for the first time. Lately we’ve had lots of vegetables stacked up around here, and that’s a good way to use them up. We fried up some yams, pumpkin, basil leaves, shrimp, lotus root, some green peppers from my pepper tree, and even some tiny tomatoes that I popped in as an experiment. The first few pieces were a little firm as I wasn’t sure how long to cook them, but then we seemed to find our rhythm and got some great results. We ate the lot of them with some tempura sauce that Kuniko cooked up. Wow! Fried food is just so good.
