As usual, the end of the year was a pretty busy season for us. Last night we had our last holiday dinner party with Kuniko’s family, and even Tomoko and Atsushi made it out to visit. We gave them a bottle of sparkling wine and two champagne flutes to fill, but just before we gave them their gift Tomoko mentioned that she is four months pregnant. That was good news – we were happy to hear it and we’re looking forward to our new niece or nephew.

On Friday last week I finished up negotiations with my company, and I’ll be continuing at KHI next year. Things went smoothly in the negotiations despite my relative weakness in speaking Japanese (especially negotiation Japanese can be a little delicate). Luckily the people I am dealing with are patient and very positive.

I have a party tonight after work with the entire HR department. It is a strange thing to have an after work party on Monday, but the dates remaining before the holidays are getting fewer and fewer. I’ll work tomorrow (during the national holiday) and then I’ll be done for the year. Kuniko is working the regular schedule (that means every day) until we leave for the Philippines on Saturday night. We have our own little holiday party on Christmas night, but until then there are a huge amount of leftovers in the fridge again. Nobody is going to starve to death here.

It is officially cold around here. The last two weeks have been generally cool, but not especially cold until the other day. Suddenly gust of cold wind are blowing, and we’ve been using the high setting on our electric blankets at night. Kuniko hates the winter, but I do not mind it so much. The lack of sweat everywhere is one of my favorite parts of the season, actually.

Anyway, we’re in long underwear mode, and I think we’ll be like this for the next three months. Luckily we’ll get a break at the end of next week and head to the beaches in the Philippines.

Last weekend we hosted a mini-Christmas party with the Yamaji’s and also Ms. Fukumi and her son Hiroka. Unfortunately her husband couldn’t make it because he had a business trip to Okinawa, but we had a great time exchanging presents and eating a Christmas ham. The next day Chieko was flying to the USA to meet Yuki and also stay with my parents for a couple of days, so it was a good chance for her to get ready to spend some time overseas.

This coming weekend we are hosting another party for Kuniko’s parents, and also Tomoko and Atsushi will be joining us. We have to do a little shopping for some small presents – just when I thought my Christmas shopping was complete. We’re thinking about doing shish-kebabs since they were a hit last time I cooked them, but if the weather turns bad we’ll do some Mexican food instead. Thanks to all these parties our refrigerator is well-stocked, and the pantry is nearly overflowing with snacks. Luckily I’m getting lots of time on the exercise bike every day to burn off all these holiday calories.

So based on a unique combination of busy and lazy I have been neglecting the blogging, and I thought today was a good day to get back into it.

It is the end of the work week, and we’re closing in on the end of the year. As usual, the end of the year is full of events and things to do, but I think we’ve been able to keep our heads generally above water.

We finished off shipping all our Christmas presents to various locations in the United States, and that is a relief. We’re hosting a small Christmas party with the neighbors this tomorrow, and we even did a little bit of shopping for them. We are going to serve a big ham that we bought at Costco, and I’m going to serve my brother’s “heart attack mac and cheese” to really butter everyone up for the holidays. I’ve already blocked out several hours this weekend for the exercise bike.

I’ve got seven more work days left this year, and then we’ll be off to the Philippines for some warm beach time. Interestingly, I still haven’t heard about a contract for next year, so it may be unemployed beach time we spend. I seem to recall a similar situation last year, so I’m not too concerned about it (yet).

In other signs of the confidence in my continued employment, I spent a bit of my winter bonus on a PS4 video game machine, since I figure I’ll have a lot of time available in the evenings when I’m waiting for Kuniko to come home from her job. Tonight Kuniko has a party to attend, so I’ll be holding down the fort – playing games and precooking some ingredients for tomorrow.

Weather-wise things are getting cold around here, and this weekend is supposed to be extremely cold. I don’t think we’ll see any snow, but it seems like it won’t be too far off.

I’ll try to write more next week, provided I survive the high calorie Christmas feast on Saturday.

From last night it became cold. I guess winter is pretty much here now. Usually I gradually slide into the cold weather taking steps one at a time. Wearing long underwear, using the floor heater in the living room, using an electric blanket at night. Today I started all of those at once.

This past Wednesday we had a VIP guest at our factory, the crown prince of Japan. He was attending a nearby conference on agriculture in the Hyogo prefecture, but they arranged in advance a stop to look at the factory floor and get a very brief tour of the car body assembly area.

I heard about it in advance, and it was interesting to see the preparations. The day before the visit the police must have come through and checked all the manholes and service hatches in the sidewalk outside our factory, because they were all sealed with metallic tape. The prince was only here an hour, but they had the most police and security I have ever seen anywhere at one time escorting. While a helicopter circled above most of the employees were in a security lockdown in our offices – not allowed to leave for an hour. They also told us not to stand at the windows and try to watch. I guess some sniper might get an itchy finger or something.

Anyway, I guess the visit went smoothly, and it made the local papers the next day. It was kind of a cool thing to have happen, and it made me realize again just how big a company I work for.

Tonight Kuniko and I will meet in Akashi and do a little Christmas shopping, and maybe grab dinner out. Tomorrow we’ll meet in Osaka and go to dinner with some friends to celebrate Ai-chan’s pregnancy. It’ll be my first time to meet her husband – apparently he is extremely shy and skipped last year’s party because of it. I hope he is loosened up enough to deal with us.

Sunday a pair of professional cleaners will come and work their magic on our kitchen and bath room. Instead of us scrubbing away during the annual major cleaning, we’ve decided to outsource this year. It is pretty reasonable to have it done by these guys, who come recommended by a friend of Kuniko’s. My job on Saturday is to clean up for the cleaners, and then my job on Sunday is to sit and read while they work their asses off, and then pay them when they finish. Maybe I’ll make them a cup of coffee while they’re at it.

We’ve been pretty busy these days, and I haven’t had the time to blog at work or at home. These next few months will be about the busiest that I ever get at my job, and right now Kuniko is going through some big decisions in her career. Unfortunately, that means that the blogging gets relegated to the back burner temporarily.

Currently Kuniko is on a long run of work with no holidays, and she won’t have any free time until at least early December. We do have some plans to meet up with friends in the evenings on some weekends here and there. It’ll be good to break the work routine, but it is tough when Kuniko is so exhausted already.

We’re coming up on our anniversary, too. This year we’ll do the usual trip to Anonyme, and have a nice dinner and a bottle of wine. The chef there is always creative and makes interesting dishes. This will be our ninth anniversary, and so we’ll have to figure out something even more exciting for next year.

Also my parents said that they want to come visit us, so we arranged for them to come in May next year during the Golden Week holidays. We’ve got plenty of time to start figuring out what activities we can arrange to keep them busy. It has been a few years since they’ve been in Japan and I’m sure they have a long list of things they’d like to do.

Tomorrow there is a big event at my workplace, but I won’t be able to post about it until later. Hopefully I’ll have more information to write this Thursday…

Last weekend we had a nice dinner with Mr. and Ms. Minamimoto in Sannomiya. Mr. Minamimoto was one of the first students that I ever taught at Kawasaki, and I was lucky enough to be invited to their wedding several years ago. Ms. Minamimoto is really intelligent – she is already licensed to be a pharmacist, and she is now going for her medical doctor’s degree. We decided to meet and catch up, and it was the first time for her to meet Kuniko.

It was a fun night. Rather than have one big meal we had two small ones at two different restaurants in Kobe. We talked about what they have been up to, and it seems like they’d like to hang out together more in the future. We’re trying to arrange a time to have them come over in December.

Today at work I have my annual health check up. That means no food or drink since 9 pm last night, and a big barium milkshake waiting for me in a few hours. I’m hoping I get a good result from my bloodwork this time. Last year they were worried that my cholesterol was creeping towards the top of the “safe” zone and approaching the “warning” zone. I’ve been exercising a lot more the past year, so hopefully that will help turn things around.

Things are starting to calm down a little with my new students, and we’ll probably settle into a rhythm starting next month. Day by day it is getting colder, so it won’t be long before I’m drinking hot tea and coffee and trying to stay warm on the way to work.

One nice thing that Kuniko suggested was a small 500mL thermos. She has been taking a thermos to work full of hot soup, and so I’ve been doing the same thing too. It is nice to open up the thermos at work and have the soup all hot and ready to eat. I see a lot more soups and stews in our future, and I’m wondering whether to get a slow cooker to help with preparation during the week. Hmm…

I had a very nice three day birthday weekend, with a little bit of excitement at the end as typhoon #19 passed through. As it turned out it had lost a lot of power by the time it got to us, and it was pretty anti climatic.

But the birthday celebration was all I was hoping for and more. On Saturday afternoon I met up with Kuniko in Sannomiya and together we rode the train into Osaka to have dinner. We used the train to get to a different part of town to check out Abe no Harukas, the tallest building in Japan (for now). There was a long line of people waiting to go to the top, and they were charging about 1500 yen a head to ride up the elevators, but we decided our time was worth more and we just did some shopping.

From there we went on foot across town to go riverside have a beer before dinner. The part of the river we visited was the same area where we attended a beer festival with Yoshi and family a while back. I remember clearly at the time that I looked across the river and saw the tables and restaurants lining the river and thought that it looked like a nice place for a drink. Turns out that it was a very nice place. We had a couple of beers and watched the activity on the riverside. There were several squads of dancers on the other side of the river practicing their routines, and along the river there were some flat riverboats carrying sightseeing tourists. One even went by with a live jazz band playing “When the Saints Go Marching In”.

Afterwards we caught the nearest subway and went to Santa Lucia, an Italian restaurant recommended by Kuniko’s friend Chiemi, who is the resident expert on Italian restaurants.

The place had a very nice atmosphere, and our food turned out to be quite good. I really enjoyed the buffalo mozzarella that came with our appetizers, and we had one and a half pizzas as our main course. The wine turned out to be just OK, not super-duper, but all together it was a great experience. Our waiter took every opportunity to speak to me in English, which is actually pretty rare these days.

After dinner we did just a bit of shopping, and then headed home. I was experiencing one of those weird allergic reactions that happen about twice a year, so that was a little bit of bad timing. Luckily by the time I got home things were largely back to normal. I still can’t figure out the mystery of these reactions. The best guess these days is that it is something in the air – the only common factor in the reactions is that it starts when I am outside.

Kuniko had a birthday present waiting for me when we got home, a beautiful silk tie. This is a family tradition – she gets me a new tie every year, but this year she really came through with a beautiful color. It is a dark red that shimmers in the light – going from almost black to a red wine color. It’ll go perfectly for any wine dinners that might come up.

Sunday and Monday we spent in the house, waiting out the typhoon and cooking, eating and drinking. It was a nice chance for Kuniko to enjoy two days off in a row. On Sunday afternoon I got a phone call from an unknown local number, and it was the head of the neighborhood committee. He asked if he could talk with me for a bit about something, and I thought that maybe our BBQ smoke was causing problems for the neighbors. But it turned out it was a simple request. Every year they hold a human rights event at the nearby community center in November, and he was wondering if I would be willing to speak to their members this year and talk about my impressions of Japanese culture, discrimination, and any equality issues that I might have noticed. Apparently the neighborhood members watch Kuniko and I walking around hand in hand and that made them think that maybe we have a different outlook on things than the locals do. Anyway, I said yes, and hopefully it’ll go smoothly. I have a month to think about it.

Now I’m back to work and putting through this short week. I have plenty of classes to keep me busy and a party with Mr. Minamimoto and his wife on Friday to look forward to.

It is that time of year when the weather really starts to turn the corner and it gets positively cool outside. I’m happy about that because it means that I can sleep through the night without using an air conditioner. It means that I’m starting to wear long sleeve dress shirts and neckties again. And it also means that it is typhoon season again.

Last weekend we had a middle sized typhoon come through, but as it happened it turned a little to the south of us and kind of petered out. The next typhoon is due at the end of this weekend. It is supposed to be bigger than the last one, so I’ll spend some time tomorrow tying some things down to make sure they don’t fly away.

Since it is my birthday tomorrow Kuniko is taking me out to dinner in Osaka. We’re trying an Italian restaurant recommended by one of Kuniko’s foodie friends, and I’m hoping to eat lots of Napoli style pizza. Hopefully they’ll have a good wine list as well. I’m not sure what else we’ll be doing in Osaka, since we were just in town last weekend enjoying the usual amusements. It’ll be fun to explore, though.

This has been an unusual week at work. The previous term kind of died down in the beginning of the week, there was a two day pause in the schedule in the middle, and today I’m kicking off the new students. It feels weird to start a new term on a Friday, but oh well.

There are some familiar faces in my next batch of students, and I’m looking forward to getting to know the unfamiliar ones. Also, starting next week I’ll have small group lessons with the new employees, and I’ll have to see how that goes. Especially working with small groups it can sometimes be hard to plan for the class time. Hopefully I can keep everyone talking in a balanced way during class.

Tonight after work Kuniko has a beer drinking party with one of her friends, and I’m going to also drink beer somewhere else with a former student. This weekend will be pretty calm, I think. There is a chance of heading into Osaka for some shopping and a doctor’s appointment, but otherwise I’ll probably be lounging around Saturday and Sunday.

A typhoon is supposed to be headed this way early next week. That should make for an interesting start to the term.

This has been a pretty good week, for a lot of reasons. On Tuesday after work I took a train to Himeji to have a celebration dinner with Kuniko, her parents, and her sister and her husband. The reason we were celebrating was because Kuniko’s dad’s insurance policy included a lot of money to take the family out for a party once he got out of the hospital. So we arranged to meet at a nice hotel in Himeji and eat dinner in their restaurant.

Almost all major Japanese hotels have a restaurant inside, and for many Japanese people a hotel restaurant is going to be the nicest (and most expensive) restaurant that they will ever visit. This means that hotel restaurants have a license to be expensive, and I’ve rarely had a meal that was worth the price they charge. In addition, the staff are usually not friendly – just stiff and formal. In other words, it is hard to have a good time at these places for me.

However, despite all of this we had a great time, and most of that was due to Kuniko’s dad’s recovery. The last time we saw him we were more than a little worried – he was having trouble speaking, we were having trouble understanding him, and he had trouble with coordination and eating. This time he was almost completely back to normal. With time and effort he has been getting better and we were so glad to see it firsthand. He was obviously very happy to have the whole family together, and it was a great night. And there was a big sigh of relief from all of us.

Wednesday I finished up my school term, and the rest of the week is just some classes here and there to balance out the numbers for students that were on business trips or absent for one reason or another. I have started thinking about the curriculum for the next term’s new employee classes, and since they are a different format there is some more work to be done. The good news is that I have quite a bit of time to get organized over the next few days.

Also I have a new business English conversation course starting on October 1st, and I was a little concerned because the previous course didn’t have many sign ups. In fact, they had to actively recruit (cajole?) some students into joining the class to fill out the roster. Hard to believe that people wouldn’t want to join a free English course being held at your place of work, but it was true. Luckily this time around there were many more applicants than spots, and it won’t be a problem to give me a full set of new students. Every year around this time I wonder if the company will keep me around, and apparently the answer (for next year) is yes.

Kuniko has some big events this weekend, one of which is the culture festival at her school. Preparations are proceeding and students are getting ready. I think I’m going to take a rain check this year and skip the event. Instead I’ll stay home and try to get some exercise, read some books and watch Survivor. It should be a good weekend!

So for the first time in a long time, Kuniko had both days of the weekend off. We tried to make them count, and fit in the maximum amount of relaxation into those two days.

Friday night we went out to Mikaen, our old standby Chinese restaurant. They have moved their original shop into a new location, and now it is more centrally located and easier to find. The food was great as usual, and we tried a couple of new dishes that were unusual. Didn’t try the dog this time, though. Maybe next time.

We were pretty tired after dinner, so instead of staying out late in Sannomiya we did a tiny bit of shopping and then went on home.

Saturday we had the chance to sleep in and really enjoy it. We didn’t really get up until 9 am, which is a good 4-5 hours past when we normally wake up on the weekdays. The temperature and the season is perfect right now for laying in bed, and I think we took advantage of it.

We did some regular grocery shopping in the morning, and then came back home, rolled up our sleeves, and went outside to weed the garden. We’ve been calling it the “black forest” out there, and finally we made some progress in clearing it out. Next we cleaned the house inside, the place was looking perfect by the afternoon. We had some truffle salt omelettes for lunch with sparkling wine for lunch, and then settled in to watch a couple of movies. Very relaxing.

For dinner we tried our hand at making a Francesinha sandwich. We had several in Portugal, and they were really good. We did a pretty good job with the re-creation. We only had two kinds of meat inside – steak and sliced garlic sausage – but the flavor was quite good. I’m not sure if we got the sauce exactly right, but it was delicious nonetheless. Together with a bottle of Spanish red – yum.

Sunday we slept in again, and then we took a walk out to the beach. I’m always up for a trip to the ocean, and it doesn’t take long to walk there. I slipped off my flipflops and walked in the waves and they were surprisingly warm. Lots of good shells and stones on the beach, too. We had blue sky all day on Sunday, which was a surprise – the weather forecast had predicted rain.

On our way back from the beach we stopped at the local furniture store and bought some replacement pillows. Since we had been sweating all summer our old pillows needed a refresh. Then we did some last minute snack shopping and went home.

In the afternoon I received my new mobile phone, replacing my three year old iphone. While I spent time setting it up and getting it operational, Kuniko was busy in the kitchen baking all sorts of goodies. She made maple cookies, chocolate scones, and cheese, bacon and onion bread. All of them were great, and I had the privilege of being able to sample the results.

For dinner we experimented again, this time with tiny little wraps of goat cheese, mint and honey that we baked in the oven. We had extra wraps, so we made a pizza version with a red basilico sauce with Edam cheese. They turned out quite nicely. Since they were baked and not fried they were marginally healthier than what we had first tasted in France, but I liked them a lot.

After dinner we watched one more movie, “Captain America Winter Soldier”, but it was way over the top in terms of action, explosions, and bombastic stories. Maybe something a little more subtle would have served better for the evening.

Now we are back to work, but Kuniko has Tuesday off of work. On Tuesday evening we’ll probably get together with Kuniko’s family and have dinner in Himeji. It all depends on Kuniko’s father’s doctor appointment today – if he gets the OK we’ll be ready to celebrate with him tomorrow.

I just wrapped up three days off, and it was very refreshing. Saturday was cool, clear weather, and I had just some light cleaning duties at home, so it was a prefect day to relax. I took a nap in the afternoon, and with the windows open and a soft cool breeze flowing through the house it is the very definition of relaxation. It is pretty rare when all the conditions are met – and there are a lot of conditions. It is too hot in summer and too cold in winter, and being limited to the weekends makes it even more difficult to find the time. But when things work out, like last weekend, it brings back memories of Greek islands and beaches in Maui.

On Sunday I went into Kobe and got my driver’s license renewed. This time I was eligible for a “gold” license, because I have been a safe driver for the past three years. In actuality, I don’t drive so much, so it is easy to be a safe driver. One of the benefits of a gold license is that you can get it during the weekends, while drivers with a standard license must take a day off of work and go in during the weekdays. It is an interesting point of motivation in Japan where working time seems to be a precious resource.

Also on Sunday we went to visit Yoshi and family for dinner at their place. We had a nice yakitori dinner in their yard, and it was really delicious. They have a source of fresh local chicken on skewers, and Yoshi and I took turns rotating the meat on the little mini-grill that he set up. We had a good time talking with them about their adventures, but we were pretty tired and called it an early night. We are thinking about taking a trip with them to Hong Kong in the future, but nothing is set in stone yet. They are really easy to travel with and like us are pretty food-focused when they visit other countries.

On Monday it was a holiday, and Kuniko finally got a day off, after 16 straight work days. We tried to use it wisely. We mainly stayed at home, snacking and catching up on movies. We went to bed last night very early, at 8:30 am, so the extra sleep should help. Kuniko has an easy week this week, and then two days off next weekend, so things are looking up!

This weekend wasn’t the most exciting one that we’ve had, but it was relaxing for me. Kuniko had to work both days this weekend, so mostly she was on the road. I was at home taking it easy and doing chores, but it was a little lonely around here.

On Saturday night I went over to Paddy, which is the new name for Red Spanky and a place I hadn’t visited in a long time. There are two reasons I don’t go very often – one is that there are a lot of smokers there and I don’t like coming home with that smell in my clothes. The second is that I often make cocktails at home so it isn’t a big deal to order cocktails out.

Despite this, it was good to go over there and see the owner and his staff. We caught up with the latest gossip about the neighborhood, our trips, and the new teacher at the local kids’ English school. I had a martini and a margarita, along with a blue cheese frittata and some Asian fried chicken. Yum!

Tomorrow I’m going to attend a work party in the evening at a beer garden in Kobe. Summer is wrapping up, but we are going to try to squeeze in the beer garden event just before things close up for the season. I haven’t been out with the HR department since the end of last year, so I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again. I work pretty independently in a completely different location than most of them, so it will be a good opportunity. But I’m sure Wednesday morning will be rough…

Now that I’m back in my normal routine at work things are going pretty well. The weather seems to have turned a corner and we can finally see signs of the approach of autumn. The last few evenings we could sleep without the air conditioner running, and that is a great sign.

September is the last month for my current term of students. From October it looks like I’ll be teaching the new employees that joined the company in April of this year, and I’m looking forward to working with them. They are pretty comfortable using English, so I’m going to need to design a curriculum that will challenge them but also not frustrate others that don’t have the same skill level. In the next few weeks we should get the details ironed out and I’ll shift into a completely new style of teaching. Of course I’ll still be teaching about 15 students on a one-on-one basis, which is always my preferred teaching style.

In my spare time I’ve been reading a lot more than usual. I’ve been using a Kindle to read, since I thought a bigger screen and lighter device would be best. I am really liking it, and I’m reading a lot more than I usually do.

Last weekend we received a big bag of unpolished rice from Kuniko’s parents, so we took the bag out to a special shed that houses a machine that polishes rice for you. It cost about 300 yen to polish 30 kg of rice, and that should keep us going well into next year. Hopefully we can finish the rice before any bugs get in there. I don’t mind bugs, actually. Once you boil the rice they are just more protein for the mix, right?

We are back home safely from our trip to Europe.  I spent most of today winnowing down the nearly 1500 pictures down to a more manageable size, and posted them online.  After a few days I’ll start to blog the trip as I go through the journal that I kept.

You can find the pictures here.