Garden, July 14th

Again, it's been such HORRIBLE weather for the past week that I have barely been into the garden. Some stuff is almost over before I had a chance to enjoy it.... Apparently Hokkaido has had less than 50% of the average sunshine this July, and I can believe it. Yuck.

Still, things are struggling on, blooming where they can before they rot.
This is the view from my front doorstep.
I planted these Asiatic Lilies last summer and I am so pleased with them. They are such a strong, deep red!
My nasturtiums are all flowering but they are sick, I think there's not enough nutrition in this soil which is odd, seeing as nasturtiums are supposed to be able to grow on anything.
One of my bush beans has ambitions to be a runner bean! There's another one about to take off, too!
I've got one baby courgette. Turns out these are yellow plants.
The rhubarb seems to like where I've put it and is putting out new healthy leaves and getting bigger. I won't be able to pull any till next year or the year after, but it's there. (If it survives the winter...)
All the tomatoes have one or two fruits on them, but hardly any new flowers.
The Swiss chard is just sitting there, so can't harvest any yet...
This is the red flowering broom that my friend gave me. Hopefully it will get nice and bushy and cover up some of the fence.
This flowering shrub is nearly over. It's so pretty, like pink snow, and it blooms for quite a long time, a good couple of weeks. Underneath are spikes of blue perennial campanula.
Yoshi and Harry's rambler rose is flowering on the wood it had last year, which wasn't much, so they are right at the bottom buried under the lilies and hollyhock. But it's really shooting up now and working its way up the fence so next year it should be pretty.
Phlox has begun to flower. I bought a lovely white one with dark pink stripes last year, but I think it died as there's no sign of it this year.
These red leaved penstemon were magnificent. They made a high, round clump with the lovely bell like flowers waving in the breeze. Then the rain came and smashed them up before I'd ever taken a picture. Grrr. Ah well, there's always next year!

The start of the chaos...

...Too much furniture in the living room.....
Heaps and heaps of music equipment in the back of the living room......

Bleh!

Six weeks to go.

Harvest! A mini one, but a harvest.

Ten strawberries, ten bush beans (found two more after I took this photo!) and a whole bunch of lettuce leaves. I ate the beans with a big salad and it was yum.

17 kg down

I seem to have taken a looong time to get this recent kg off. I'm not exercising enough (too busy and too much on my mind...) but at last it's gone and I'm 17 kg down since I started taking control of my lifestyle.

Empyting The Upstairs.

Reform work begins next Saturday, but this is Seiju's last weekend home. The problem is that we want to put a lot of stuff, like our beds and the kids futons, into the classroom for the duration but I am using it to teach for the whole of next week. Till 8:30pm Friday night, to be exact!

The building company said they would move the beds for us, as there is no way that I will be able to cope with them myself. The rest has to be gone over the next week and weekend.

Yoshi was great, shifting furniture with Seiju. They are evenly matched in height now, if not in strength and Yoshi did a man's job today. Harry started packing up books and toys in their room but was overcome with the dust that was billowing up from behind furniture, so had to give up and have a shower to recover. We were all sneezing our heads off - embarassing!!

We took a break in the middle of the day to go to the reform company, where they showed us the planning permission papers which will be submitted this week. I am amazed that work starting a week later can be applied for, but it seems to be normal here! We will have to have a few things added to the downstairs, such as electric fans in two outside walls, and handrails on the stairs, as they are now law since our house was built, and the whole house must conform to the new laws if new planning permission for anything is sought. That's OK with me. The man said they can do it all within the budget so the price won't go up.

We are storing most of the stuff in Seiju's parents' garage, but his music stuff is in the back of the living room, plus we have an extra sofa and two extra chairs in here so it's a bit crowded. I'm not really going to enjoy living like this for the next month. Bleh.

There are still A LOT of boxes for me to pack up and get over there but I can do that over the course of the week. All the really heavy stuff is out now except for the kids desks, which will go tomorrow. (Not that heavy but I can't get them down the stairs by myself.)

I'll take some pictures of the chaos at some point and post them so you can have a good laugh at our living situation!

Super progress in the garden!

Yesterday was a busy day, so even though the weather was good, there was no time to get into the garden. In the morning, we went into Sapporo to pick up Seiju's motorbike that had been fixed during the week. Then we came home, had a quick lunch, and got right into cleaning up the pig heap. It was HORRIBLE, so it took four of us a good couple of hours to get it under control.Yoshi then rushed out to meet some kids from school to make some CDs for the school trip - they ended up coming back to the house to do it, which was nice. I had to go out to an English teachers' meeting that was OK but went on late and meant two trips to Sapporo in one day. A bit much!

Today Yoshi had extra dance rehearsals which ended up going on all day. Seiju took him this morning and then we went to the home centre for lovely things like ant killer and lawn mower blades.

When we got back to the house, we found Seiju's mum and dad in the garden, with the house unlocked and gone through (grrr!) and they were both busily weeding away. We got right out and joined them, mainly so that I could control what MIL yanked up and where she decided to plant things! In the end it turned out very well. They were here for four hours and between the four of us, we got a huge amount of work done.


FIL weeded a corner of the lawn and along the edges, then went behind the fence to the house behind our garden which has nobody living in it and is a forest of weeds, and did a big slash and chop along our fence line, as the fuki was threatening to overwhelm our fence.

Seiju cut the back lawn, and MIL tackled the flower beds in the front of the house while I went at the veggie patch. We all had an hour's break for lunch, then afterwards Seiju finished the grass while FIL had a little snooze (well, he is 82!) and MIL and I went back to our respective weed patches.

I went out afterwards and took pictures!MIL - "No! Don't take pictures of me all dirty!"
"Stop!"
"Oh, go on then, just one picture."
The day lilies are in full bloom now.
The oriental lilies are about to bloom.
This was the back of the veggie patch this morning...
... and this evening! Nary a weed in sight!
The baby lettuce is growing bigger, and the space in the back has been taken up with two zucchini plants.
In the first box there are four tomato plants and two Swiss chard plants, bought from our local farmer's market. Baachan says she has some cucumber and pumpkin plants that will be OK to plant out in a week or so, so I'm planning to put them in the back box. I am sure it's too late but she swears not, so.....
After I finished the veggie patch, I turned to the flower bed under the trees. This has been a weedy mess for as long as we have lived here. Today I dug it all over carefully (hard because of the tree roots) and then moved some autumn flowering anemones (shu mei giku), hostas and primulas there from other parts of the garden, plus two pinks that I bought at the farmer's market.
This is what it looks like now.
A view of the roses in the back garden, looking down the back of the house.
I also bought two thrift plants (one white, one pink) and two red geraniums at the farmer's market, so I planted them in front of the yellow rose...
...... which is still going strong.

Garden July 3rd

My yellow climbing rose is magnificent this year. I am really delighted with it.I took this photo from my bedroom as the flowers tend to face upwards, so look lovely from there.
The weedy lawn patch, and the rather colourless shed flowerbed. Yellow daylilies are about to be in full flower. That's about it...
View of the "lawn" and trees. The bright green are foot-high weeds for those of you who think my garden is so perfect!
I came downstairs for a more standard view of the yellow rose. You get a nice view of the weeds too, but I did actually weed the flowerbed (which is now seemingly empty but there are dahlia bulbs in there).
The veggie patch. My bush beans are growing nicely and have flowers. The lettuce and mizuna actually like being chopped up and grow even stronger each time I pick them over. The green peppers are being chewed alive by something. Grrrr. I have two mini eggplants.
The weeds are starting to come back. I hoed after I took this picture. My four whole runner beans (don't laugh Heather!) are not doing that great, though they have a flower or two each. The rhubarb is actually getting a few new leaves so it seems to have accepted its new home. I've got a few more lettuces from Sachiko. I put two zucchini plants in there this afternoon.
Another view of my "perfect garden". I started weeding here today and tomorrow will FINALLY plant my tomatoes out. On the 4th July!!
Not sure if I like this purple linaria, orangey rose, purple geranium combination but it's certainly bright! The rose has the most gorgeous scent which is why Yoshi chose it. It's three years old but last year half of it got smashed up by the snow, so it's back to being low to the ground again. Sigh.
A close up of the orangey rose. I forgot to save its label so I don't know what it's called.
Lavinia rose is flowering and is really lovely. Yoshi chose this rose last year but just as he brought it to show me, the flower fell off, so this is the first time I've seen it! It is supposed to be a climber but it's not doing much climbing yet.
Rose Fantin Latour and white lupins. This is a lovely combination.
The rose is a really weird shape but the flowers are so lovely and they have a very heavy, vanilla-y scent that is delicious.
It's an old fashioned French cabbage rose.
Hollyhock is suddenly growing up and has buds!
This is a white rambler rose called Wedding Day that the kids bought me for my birthday last year. Again, we didn't see the flowers but they are simple white flowering from a yellow bud. The scent is very strong. This is still very small but I have hopes for it growing all the way up my neighbour's snow fence!
My raspberry is flowering and it's a pink flower! I thought raspberry flowers were white.... There are three flowers, so I think that's three raspberries this year.

Finished that Ticker at last!!

Well, I did it! I think this ticker got started in November but I didn't note it, and there seems to be no way of checking at the ticker site. Anyway, it means that I have exercised roughly once every three days since I began. Not good enough!!

I shall start another ticker and see how long this one takes to reach 100 times!

Harry's Models

Harry's mushi (bug) characters have ruled his life for three years now and are still going strong. He requested modelling clay for his birthday so we got him Fimo, the oven hardening polymer clay and he's hooked. This is what he has made so far. I have put the Japanese names and an English attempt to explain them but as they are mostly puns, it's really hard!This first photo is with a (short!) pencil for scale.
目つむり Metsumuri. "Metsuburi" means to shut your eyes, and a Katatsumuri is a snail. So this is a snail shutting his eyes!
舐めくじ Namekuji. A Namekuji is a slug. But to Nameru means to lick something. So this slug has a big tongue for licking.
冷やし虫か Hiyashichuka. Hiyashichuka is cold Chinese noodles. But Harry has changed the Chu character for Chinese into the Chu character for insect. So he's a cold worm in a bowl of soup! ミックス虫　Mikkusuchu. A mixed up bug!
竜虫 Ryumushi. A dragon bug. Behind is the main character of the series, おじゃま虫 Ojamamushi. Ojamamushi is someone (in this case a bug!) who gets in the way.
At the back is ソフトクリー虫 Softcreamushi. He's a softcream bug! At the front is アイスクリー虫 Icecreamushi. An icecream bug!
The black one is いじけ虫 Ijikemushi, who is a Bully Bug, and the purple one is ガス虫どくん Gaschudokun. Gaschudoku is poisoning by gas. This is a poison gas bug - again, Harry has taken the chu out of chudoku (poisoning) and replaced it with the character for bug.
Here are ヤマブドウ虫 Yamabudomushi or wild grape bug (no pun, just a cute shape) and 実の虫 Minomushi or Fruit Bug. A Mino mushi is a little bug who makes a coat around himself with sticks and twigs. But Harry has broken the word into Mi No Mushi, which he has then interpreted to be a bug made of fruit! In this case, an orange, a persimmon, two cherries, and apple and a banana for a tail.
These are 泣き虫 Nakimushi (a crybaby - literally a cry bug!) and ベビー虫 Babymushi, or Baby Bug. He's got a dummy in his mouth which is hard to see with the flash.
The red bug is 怒り虫　Ikarimushi or an angry bug. He's got the angry mark used in manga on his head. The green bug is 豆虫の赤ちゃん Mamemushi no Akachan or a bean bug's baby. He's just popping out of his bean!
And this is my absolute FAVOURITE. This is ムチ　Muchi. He's a cross between a ハチ, a bee, and a 虫、a mushi (bug). But in Japanese "muchi 無知" means brainless or dopey, so isn't he just a brainless lumpy little bee bug??? So cute!

Harry's Drawings.

Harry is currently drawing a series to go with the "Convenience Store" song that is going the rounds on You Tube. He's decided to redo it with his mushi (caterpillar) characters!
"The convenience store."
"It's the middle of the night. My parents are asleep and I can sneak away and get up to no good." (I love this drawing of the futons, and the furtive caterpillar as he sneaks away!)
"Right, what can I do??"
"I can't meet up with friends as they are all asleep. And there's no TV on."

...to be continued!

Happy Birthday Harry!

Harry was nine on Monday! Wow - no little ones left in our family at all....
"I'm NINE!" He's been waiting for his birthday for a long time, counting down the days. Seiju of course wasn't here but we had a nice dinner. (Saturday was Harry's treat day, when we went into Sapporo for him to buy the modelling clay that he's been wanting.)
Harry requested a lemon iced cake, somen noodles and salady bits to put on top. I added vietnamese rice paper wrappers and hot chili sauce for me and Yoshi to make nama harumaki. Same ingredients to go inside!
The lemon iced birthday cake with gold and silver sprinkles. Both boys said it was delicious and they ended up finishing it on Tuesday morning for breakfast. It was LOADED with sugar so I bet they buzzed through their day!