Definitely the biggest topic around our household lately has been the building of our new house, the preparations for moving in, and doing what we can to ensure the whole process goes smoothly. We’ve got a lot of things up in the air, and keeping all these things straight and moving in the right direction can be stressful, on top of all the other things we’re doing at work and at home.<\/p>\n
The closer we get to completion, the more urgent the decisions become. It is not uncommon to have a message machine full of messages when you get home, and that might be the most stressful thing for us. One kind of cultural point that is a little different in Japan is the idea that if you can’t get a hold of a customer, you leave and message and call back later. If we’re gone for the evening, sometimes we have the same person leaving 5-6 messages, all saying the same thing – we’ll call back later. Usually they have a very simple message or something small to confirm, but to me calling six times is reserved for deaths in the family or winning the lottery notifications.<\/p>\n
The latest urgent issues are finding a dining set, getting the lighting right, and getting the right color curtains and blinds. We’ll be working on these issues some this weekend, but I think Kuniko and I are both looking forward to wrapping up all this stuff and taking our mind off things. That’s why the trip to the USA is looking better and better the closer we get to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Definitely the biggest topic around our household lately has been the building of our new house, the preparations for moving in, and doing what we can to ensure the whole process goes smoothly. We’ve got a lot of things up in the air, and keeping all these things straight and moving in the right direction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-pb","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1561\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}