bastish.net

Good news if you are my mom. Bad news if you are a casual reader who just likes photos of wild mountain vegetables.

I have a camera with video capabilities now. Here are some clips I took today of Mona.

The first one is her after the bath. We use the onsen (hot spring) that is a five minute walk (fifteen minutes if we let Mona walk the entire way) from our house. There is a small resting room where Tomoe or I wait for the other to get out of the bath. Mona has a routine of running around the room for a bit before getting dressed and walking home. Today she was mimicking the frogs she loves (to torture and kill) from the rice field.

The other videos are of her singing. I have no idea what got into her, but today she stood up on her stool and started performing. It took a while, but we figured out she is singing “Itsy bitsy spider” which I have been singing with her at bed time recently. She can not pronounce the “s” for “spider” (or “spoon”, for that matter). So Tomoe is trying to teach her.

And for anyone wondering – Yes, we are almost forty years old and we still use $15 lawn chairs as our main furniture in the house… and dang proud of it!

Today is the start of the one-week countdown before another big bike trip. For some reason, no matter how many times I do this, I always find it difficult to sleep the week before a trip. There is always something that could go wrong – my fault or not, and no matter how many times I go over the plan, it only takes one crash on the bike, a few days of terrible weather, a break-down of the support van, customers who aren’t as fit as they let on, or perhaps my course is more difficult than I let on… so many things can spoil the “perfect” week of biking.

We took the van in a week ago to check on some troubles with the engine, but have not heard back yet as to the current status. We need that van for the bike trip next week. I have already hired what we believe will be the perfect driver/assistant guide, but if there is no van for her to drive…

To top it off, it is really crunch time at home on the farm. I just got back from digging the irrigation ditches around our rice fields – something that has to be done each year before we fill them with water. Yesterday our neighbor tilled them the first time. Now we have to flood them and till once more. I need them to be ready to plant by the 26th when a group of boy-scouts will be stopping by with their fathers to experience rice planting, and later in the week when my bike tour customers are to spend an hour or so planting as well. Before they are ready we have to fill them with water (takes a few days), till them, and find and fill in all the holes in the walls that have been created by mice and moles over the winter.

Yesterday Tomoe, Mona and I went to one of our fields up near the mountain and cleaned up, tilled, pulled out weeds by the roots (time consuming, but thankfully Tomoe’s job) and cleared the overgrown mulberry trees slowly encrouching from the edges. In the process I collected a few days’ worth of heat for next winter in the form of mulberry wood for the stove.

I have been building raised beds in the back yard for our garden – something that has been on the list for years now. We still have not planted anything, and it is already almost june. There just doesn’t seem to be time, but we know it is something that NEEDS to be done immediately or the entire year will be wasted.

Tomoe is busy baking and promoting her breads and cakes. I am trying to get the house in order so Tomoe wont be stressed when our employee arrives in a few days. She will be staying with us when not working. I could care less if the house is a mess. I mean, c’mon, its part of how we live and you can’t expect a hotel-quality accommodation when we are trying to do so many different thing WITH a two year old living here too. Logically, Tomoe knows this, but still she has some fear about letting people see the non-photoshopped version of our life. (Yes, I photoshop out all the mess and clutter)

I have library books that are a month overdue. When we got them we were certain we would be back in the city within two weeks, but we haven’t been back since.

Luckily the new bikes we ordered this year arrived on time and all are in working order. We probably could have gotten by with the old bikes, but some of them are four years on now, and having top-condition bikes takes 90% of the stress off of me, so for these next trips we just went all “F*** the environment!” and got brand new ones.

While I was F***ing the environment, I decided I might as well get a new camera. The old D70 was still working fine, but I am also working on a job where photos are part of the deliverable, and I wasn’t happy with the resolution of the D70, plus I wanted video after realizing I have missed 2.5 years of video-taping Mona’s development. I now have a D5100. I like it for the most part. Aside from the auto-focus sound being so annoyingly prevalent in the video audio, I have no major complaints. I realize I have not really looked at digital cameras for almost ten years now. Things sure have gotten fancy.

The photos here are some of my “getting to know you, Mr. D5100″ test photos.

Speaking of that job that requires some photos. I am only slightly behind on the deliverables for that, but I have missed getting important photos of the short Spring season, now I have to wait another year. Just like the planting, the open window for taking photos is also so short. While I knew I would not have time to do the editing and finsihed product until July, and set the deliverable date accordingly, just as with planting, there is no way I can ask the seasons to wait for me.

All the while I am doing this, I am postponing the updating of my Onelife website, and loosing potential business for summer and fall. So now when things finally die down mid June, they will not just slow down, they will be motionless.

Such is life?

The photos show our neighbor massaging her zenmai ferns. Another spring thing we missed this year, along with many other spring vegetables we had intended to stock up on for personal use as well as for Tomoe’s baked goods.

In the photo below Tomoe is boiling the fuki we picked last week, she then dries it with sugar for use in fuki-miso flavored sweets. We had intended to go back and get much much more of that, but…

There is still time to gather the just-coming-out itadori (Japanese knot-weed) pictured below. This was once a treat the older people of the village remember eating a children. It tastes like rhubarb, but is a pain to process because it is so fibrous. If Tomoe can find some creative use for this it would be wonderful, as it is one of the more annoying weeds in the area.

Mona can’t get enough of the cute little critters she finds every day. Frogs, earthworms, beetle larve, centipedes, and now this.

As I was scavenging through the old house, I heard some cries from one box and found these guys. Mona could hardly contain herself when I showed her. “Cute! Cute! Eeeeeeee! Waaaaa! Cute! Teee Heeeee!”

Unfortunately, our attempt to give them milk did not go well and they didn’t drink much. If they are still alive tomorrow I will try again with a smaller straw or a spoit.

For the record, I tried to keep it a “looking only” pet, but I could not contain Mona’s enthusiasm, so I changed to “just don’t put it in your mouth” pet.

every time another wonderful old Japanese farmhouse is slaughtered.

There is a “herratige rescue group” that Tomoe works with since the earthquake. It is a university professsor his students, and a lot of out-of-town volunteers that are working to rescue and catalogue historically significant documents and tools from old farm houses and kura warehouses that are being destroyed en mass since the earthquake relief funds are paying all demolition costs.

The professor will study them and eventually write a history of the village (no good history book exists now), and Tomoe and some of the other volunteers are working to organize a small museum to showcase them, or better yet, create opportunities that the tools can be used and learned from in that way.

There is a really great house a few kilometers from us, one that we would have without-a-doubt chosen over the house we currently live in, had it been available at the time we moved here. We learned through the rescue group that it was set to be demolished this year, and the group went in and tagged some of the items in the house. This is the best old-house I have seen yet in terms of the house itself, and the amount of good antiques forgotten inside.

We learned last night that the house is to be destroyed tomorrow. It was being kept a secret for some internal family reasons so the brother who didn’t want to destroy it wouldn’t find out.

I had actually decided that I would buy it (price of the land) and worry about the demolition costs ($30,000) if it ever came to that. It would have cost at least 25-30,000 to pull the house upright (it is a bit tilted) and minimal refurbish would be about 55,000. Even demolishing it, if done right can make money because the old beams used to build these houses are in demand.

I was going to use it as my workshop – currently I have no room large enough to use a table saw other than the living room, and the other family members aren’t so happy about saws and dust and nails flying around while they eat. I was going to use it as a place for anyone we hire to help out to stay. I was going to use it to store bikes and other junk we don’t have room for in our house now. Once it was fixed up I was going to rent it out to ski-bums in the winter (right near the ski-hill) make all the money back.

Or maybe we would live there. The location was great. Closer to the “downton” and main station than we are now, yet more secluded then our house. Large areas Mona could run around without too much worry, nice neighbors, young kids next door. Large plots for fields near the house.

The house was great. Two stories plus the “loft” area in which you can stand fully upright and touch the thatch roof.

It would have been a lot of work, but totally worth it.

Today we rushed over and removed as many of the items that the rescue group wanted as possible, as well as some more goodies for ourselves (that we have no room to keep). As we were there I almost had my wallet out and Tomoe was on the phone trying to find who we can contact to do an emergency rescue buy and stop the demolition men from coming tomorrow.

It turned out to be impossible. So another perfectly wonderful house will be torn down tomorrow, and the village looses another potential family that would have moved in, because having a country house like that, in a location like that is about the only thing the village has to attract new blood.

I go back tomorrow to scavenge a few more things, and cry a bit more.

Mona’s first time to be expelled – from pre-school.

Second tuesday of every month is open school day so parents can go with the kids, and bring non-student kids to play. I took Mona there this morning and after her eyes light up seeing all the kids, she is in the door before the teacher can come over and say “Oh, today is cancelled because we had a school opening ceremony last week and things are still ‘batta batta’ (in chaos)”. I have to drag Mona out who runs from the room crying and whaling because she wants to play with the kids.

There is one babysitter there with five children today. Mona was supposed to join them for three hours. I was going to be there with her, playing together with her and the other children. There is no extra work for the babysitter who, from past experience I have observed as simply sitting there and watching the children play, but not interacting. Yet, couldn’t just let us stay in the room. Instead we went out to the playground for a bit where Mona dug holes in the sand alone, within earshot of the kids laughing inside.

Two big things almost off the spring to-do list. Sunday was the local street-cleaning work day and all the neighborhood men-folk get together to clear debris from the mountain road and make sure the water is flowing clog free. For many of the men though, it is just a chance to chill, chat and stand around. If you don’t drive a big truck or back-hoe, or own a he-man-sized chain-saw there is not really much work.

For me this is the day that all my neighbors get together and help me get fire wood. Especially this year, after the big snow, there were a lot of big trees that needed to be cut and cleared. No one uses the wood for anything, so it is all mine for the taking. Tomorrow I drive up and collect all logs which they so nicely cut to lengths that would fit in my car.

I would have gone to get them today, but it was a beautiful day for spreading compost into the rice field. It is not such a difficult job, but it takes all day simply because our field is so long and there is only one place the manure delivery-man can make the dump. The wheelbarrow can’t hold very much so I end up walking back and forth one-hundred times. We then have to spread each load out as evenly as possible.

I tried to cut down on the number of back-and-forth trips by using the rear-car I found in the garbage dump a few years ago. Using this and buckets I can carry about four times the compost each trip. Unfortunately, I found that the tires were flat after the winter, and I don’t know when the next time I will be in town to get new tubes or tires, so I had the brilliant idea of filling them with rice husks. It worked well for about ten trips before I gave up and started using the wheelbarrow. While it takes longer, I found that the lighter load allowed me to take in the amazing view from our field as I walked. Its good to be reminded that more efficient is not always better.

Mona and Tomoe joined me for part of the day and Mona was all too happy to torture frogs and this, the larve of a stag beetle -something else that, if we were to put effort into it, could be a business in itself as the adult beetles are quite expensive in Tokyo pet-stores. I already have a bucket full of thirty or so of these guys in my front entrance that the neighbor’s grandson gave me, and there were a hundred or so in the back-yard from last year that have or will hatch if I have not killed them.

Took our first trip this year up to some of the back mountain fields where the best sansai grow. We weren’t disappointed – except that we had not brought enough bags. The fukinoto were unbelievablly big and soft and they stretched for as far as the eye could see. We will have to make another trip tomorrow as the conditions change very quickly. A field full of perfect buds one day may all be opened and past their prime the next.

Since Tomoe is using them for baking, however, and not tempura, we have the luxury of being able to use fully opened flowers as well.

Seeing all these wild vegetables makes me wonder why I even bother with the bike trips or other work, and why people complain that there is no work for young people in the countryside. If we set the goal, and dedicated spring for picking and processing wild veggies only, no other distractions, we could make enough to coast through the rest of the year, and we are seriously tempted to do that next year, so if you are looking for a bike trip, better sign up this year.

Grown up versions of the gyoja ninnikiu sprouts I posted the other day.

Rainy days are welcome because they make us feel OK to stay inside and do the work that pays for the sunny days when we play in the field. Looking at my bank account makes me pray for rain.

Still, rain or shine, Mona needs her “outside!” time.

The other day she was asleep upstairs while I was enjoying the newly cleared office space in a back room with a big window opening up to the outside and cheerful lighting. It is at the end of the hall from the stairs and front door, and the office door was open and no other sounds in the house. I came out to grab something and noticed the front door open and her boots gone. Now, usually she wakes up and either stands at the top of the stairs crying for us to come get her, or she comes down and cries for bread and jam. This is the first time she has ever sneaked down and out.

I checked our garden where she might go looking for Tomoe or me. Not there. Checked the garage where her friend the stray cat sleeps sometimes. Not there. Checked by the neighbor’s garage where they keep the kids garden toys. Not there. Checked by the neighbor’s outside sink where she likes to play with water. Not there. Checked inside the neighbors’ front doors because she sometimes likes to go in looking for “kids!”. Not there.

I started checking down the street and found her walking hand in hand with an old lady from down the road. Apparently she had gone inside their house and was playing in their front entrance. They only increased the possibility that it will happen again by giving her cookies. Now every time we walk by that house Mona happily tells me that she ate the obachan’s cookies.

If I was in the city I wonder if I would have thought someone had come into the house, snuck upstairs and stole her? Should I feel bad that through it all I was more worried about what the neighbors would think than I was worried that she was kidnapped? I was worried a bit about the biggest road, but she is surprisingly aware and afraid of cars – to the point that it gets annoying that every time a car passes, we have to stop walking as she cowers on the side of the road clutching my leg.

The river is certainly another worry, but she has never ever gone anyplace where she could fall directly in (these photos by the river are quite far from the house, and we have to prod and plead with her to get her to walk up that direction), and is generally afraid of high places unless I am standing below to catch her. Maybe I should have been more worried. Maybe I am a bad parent. Maybe this is why all of our chickens were eaten by wild animals and our precious cockatiels were eaten by the cat that now lives in our basement.

Anyway, I have moved back to my tiny dark depressing little work table in the living room so she cant sneak by until we get a lock on the front door that she can’t open.