Today is my Mother’s 90th birthday. Happy birthday Mummy!
She has always been a faultless person. An example of kindness, judgement and good humour. Would we could be more like her.
So those of you who read this, please raise a festive glass to Mary Calder.
She didn’t like the present I gave her.
*”To market, to market, to buy a fat pig,
Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.”
The recognized method to catch squid around here is called jigging. You cast your jig into the sea and jig it up and down as you reel it in. The squid is a ferocious animal. When it spies your jigging jig, it zooms out and wraps its tentacles around it, becoming horribly entangled in the cruel barbs of the jigging jig.
The Frost is All Over
I love to eat squid and so go out in front of the house as the sun goes down to fish. I have been encouraged by watching this guy reel them in.
The white plastic bag is full of squid.
He has given me tips but for some reason I have not caught any. But who cares?
Stand out there as the sun goes down, listen to the sea, cast out your jig, suck beer. It is pretty good.
A jig is also a dance. Listen to these jigs. Maybe I should play them as I fish.
More info:
As children, well more accurately as a child, I remember being taken by the Scottish name for Irises. We call them Flags. It seemed like a very good name for a flower rather than the usual impossible to remember flower nomenclature, such as antirrhinum.
So, on Okinawa, where I live, there are fields and fields of Flags. I spent a semi mystical afternoon amongst them surrounded by gently smoking green jungly hills.
Who wants flowers when youre dead? Nobody.
Since Iris is the Greek goddess for the Messenger of Love, her sacred flower is considered the symbol of communication and messages. Greek men would often plant an iris on the graves of their beloved women as a tribute to the goddess Iris, whose duty it was to take the souls of women to the Elysian fields. Who would have guessed?
These my sky-robes spun out of Iris woof.
Cool scarecrow made from a buoy.
It is a very beautiful place with acres of flowers. They are a little bedraggled today following the storm this morning. I buy some to put in my office, which is being transformed as I write.
Office decoration. I will probably remove the paper.
So I wake up this morning to a dramatic storm. I always sleep with my windows open because my Mummy told me to. This has a disadvantage when you live by the sea, as in storms, huge waves come crashing through and make the bed wet. Well, not quite but the rain sure does.
If you are caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron.
Anyway, it rains very hard and the wind blows and I go to make some coffee and find that the electricity is no longer there. I assume that this due to the storm and wait for it to pass, like all things. I once swallowed false tooth with a spike on it in California and it passed in Munich airport.
Same view a bit later when the sun came out. Amazing colors
Very weird light post storm
My house is very electric. I could not make coffee. I could not make tea. The toilet would not flush. The hot water did not come out of the shower. No computer, no nothing. I sat and waited. I waited for about 3 hours and it was extraordinary, I mean like I could not do anything. I was impotent.
Incidentally, I sleep with my iPad so I can listen to bedtime stories. I am currently listening to “Men at Arms” by Evelyn Waugh, which is giving me a lot of pleasure. I thought, “I may as well go back to bed and listen to the poignant tale of Guy Crouchback on my iPad.” This is when I notice that I am picking up my neighbor’s wi-fi signal. This means he has electricity. We talk, he has no electricity problem.
I finally locate my fuse box but not before Naoko phones the housing agent,which is of course open on a Sunday morning, to ask where it is because I was too stupid to find it. Thanks Naoko.
Essentially the main breaker er breaks. Even if I switch of all the other fuses. Something is not right.
My fuse box. Note that in Japan fuses that are OK are red, ones that are not are green.You will see that the maser switch is green. This has caused me some confusion in the past.
Gakiya-san, er like the neighbor in question, also comes to the rescue. He phones the electricity company. They send a technician, who works out that water has blown up an outdoor power point causing what Google translate calls an ‘electricity leak’. It is all fixed, it is Sunday, it is Japan. Thanks Gakiya-san, thanks technician.
However, for a while I felt the power of powerlessness.
So taking pictures underwater is difficult. I have a tiny, cheap camera that is hard to maintain in an er like not jerking around state. If you are on the surface snorkeling then the stuff is happening too far away. If you are scuba-ing then you tend to go deeper and thus the lack of light washes out all the colors and the photos are gloomy. Today I try an experiment by going out in front of the house but with a tank. The idea is to sink down to the bottom and stay there for a long time as motionless as possible, reassuring the fish that everything is hunky dory and hopefully establishing a reasonably solid platform so as to take photos that are in focus. I am in about 5 feet of water.
I am lying motionless thinking about Montana Wildhack
It is a lovely day and the water is warming.
Tralfamadore
Red Tralfamadore
“All this happened, more or less.”
“People would be surprised if they knew how much in this world was due to prayers.”
Happy Birthday Mummy
On account of recent mouth surgery I feel justified in not going back to work this afternoon. In a pain-killeresque environment, I notice that there is a very low tide. This must have something to do with the spring and the full moon but I admit that I do not really understand tides. Being perfectly placed to do so I feel a little ashamed and determine to learn more.
I go for a ramble.
There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.
Is there anything better than wandering around warm rock pools?
A sea slug. UCSC
“With fronds like these, who needs anemones?”
I ate your Father. Sorry.
Tigh na Mara from the sea
Don’t step on my…..
At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said,
“It made a difference for that one.”
This is a living creature.
On the rocks
There is something very special about doing this sort of thing on a Thursday afternoon. Even if you have to have surgery to justify it.
It being in the springtime, I have excruciating toothache. I go to the dentist who says;
” Y’all got a huge decay thing in your wisdom tooth below the gum.”
I say, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on, I had all my wisdom teeth removed in my twenties.”
Ah yes I remember it well.
“H: We met at nine
M: We met at eight
H: I was on time
M: No, you were late
H: Ah, yes, I remember it well We dined with friends
M: We dined alone
H: A tenor sang
M: A baritone
H: Ah, yes, I remember it well.”
So with my wisdom teeth. The first was exhumed in Oran, Algeria with flies buzzing around and a drill that had a length of string to connect the drive pulleys. The second was in Merstham in the South of England at my girlfriend’s dentist. This resulted in infection and misery. The third and fourth, or so I thought, were removed at a dental teaching hospital in Sheffield.
” Jones, administer the injection.
Yes, Professor.
You idiot, you stuck it in his lip.
Sorry, Professor.”
Anyway, it turns out, to my great surprise, that I still have a wisdom tooth and what’s more Mori-sensei says, ” Extract!”
God say “You can do what you want Abe but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
So, at the age of nearly 61, like Highway 61, I crave new experience. Having a wisdom tooth exhumed in Okinawa qualifies.
The dental clinic to which I go, er frequently, is open plan, like much of the workplace in Japan. There are about 12 of us being drilled, bored, extruded and stuff, all in the same room. This was initially weird, as I was used to the closeted intimacy of the western dentistry leitmotif. Here dentistry is communal.
Mori sensei is a great guy and has a Mohawk
We have a lot of fun
To anesthetize the tooth Mori-sensei gives me longest series of injections. It takes about 10 minutes and I feel zero pain. There is then a comedy break whereby the nurse asks me to go to the waiting room for 4 minutes, whereas in actual fact she was asking me to change chairs to chair number 4. Much fluster as they rescue me from the waiting room.
Anyway, we get down to business and having removed some gum and interfering bone, Mori-sensei lift my tooth from my jaw with the ease of squeezing toothpaste from the tube.
Down on Highway 61
After some stitching, the joyful nurse places the ex-wisdom tooth into a special magic box.
And he said, “Yes I think it can be easily done
Just take everything down to Highway 61″
Check out the little labbits on her badge.
So, thanks Mori-sensei and all the staff at Furigen dentists.
Who makes special little plastic boxes to put extracted teeth in? A niche market. There is also something wrong with the maths
So Kevin is here to make the world’s best web site even better. He craves goat and so we prepare a goat stew.
Goat in Japanese is Yagi
Goat with Okinawan vegetables.
Good though that meal was, lunch was much better. Naoko had told me that an ordinary house that can been seen from mine was now an izakaya, which is a bar, restaurant place.
Riotous publicity. The little Orion paper lanterns give it away.
In we go to warm welcome from Ishigaki san and Noha san, grinning Okinawa ladies who run the place and do all the cooking and as we learn the gardening and fishing too. We cry “sakana!” which means fish. Long one-sided discussion ensues. One sided because we say nothing and they say a lot, none of which can be understood. We say “Oichi!” which means delicious.
They bring the meal which is steamed reef fish with beni imo , carrot, mushrooms wrapped in a slice of beef, tarot, tofu, cabbage. Side dishes of miso soup, rice with ground up fish, cucumber and seafood, something else and beans in batter, and something else.
Ishigaki san is very attentive and laughs uproariously at our attempts to speak Japanese. She helps Kevin deal with his fish with chopsticks. She then brings us sashimi of little fish that she had caught that morning. We sit by the window with view over the East China Sea and she points to where she caught them. Next she brings out a dish of steaming shell-fish and feeds them to me .
Have we been introduced?
What fun
Anyone know what these are?
Then we had fruit and a deep-fried Okinawan doughnut thing. We drank green tea throughout. Everything served on hand-made Okinawa pottery. Anyway, this was an astonishing meal and totally unexpected. Everything we ate was either grown in the garden in front of the house or scooped out of the sea in front of the house. I can walk here from my house in 4 mins 33 secs and they serve pitchers of beer. This makes me face the future with renewed enthusiasm.
Thanks Ishigakai san and Noha san.
Eat here
Eat here now
We then go snorkel.
Kevin watches fish
So yesterday was a public holiday, of which there are many in Japan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_holidays_in_Japan
We do not have to go to work.
Yesterday was (春分の日 Shunbun no Hi?) a day for the admiration of nature and the love of living things. Accordingly I set out into nature to love living things. The first thing I spot is a group of photographers with mega lenses staring up into the sky. What do they know that I do not? Has a Tawny-flanked Prinia been spotted? Suddenly excitement ripples through the group and their cameras reach for the sky.
How exciting
What a let down when a miserable F-16 and a half cruises over to land at the Kadena airbase.
A year’s arts funding
Who would want to take pictures of military airplanes? Maybe they were all spies. I leave quickly.
I meander to the east coast of the island looking for rare seabirds. It is a grey day. I have rather a depressing few hours not seeing much and not being able to get close enough to those I do see to take any kind of reasonable photo.
I think Golden Pacific Plovers er big and Kentish Plovers er small
I get home in the middle of thunderstorm with lightning dramatically sizzling into the sea in front of my house. Is lightning a living thing? Probably not, but I loved it anyway.
It is Morning Glory time. It grows every where. I loved it because of the holiday.
I loved it
However to save a rather uninspiring day of loving nature, I found that my Brugmansia had done its thing.
Very Hollywood
I am somewhat bruised after a foolhardy encounter with young people but let me talk about my lunch first.The cafeteria at work is really good. It serves local produce cooked by wonderful Okinawans.
I have to eat next to my computer due to general inefficiency and having a deadline. Not
withstanding I have a marvellous meal. It is a kerry oot and costs around $5.
Chicken in Okinawan spice, bamboo shoot with seaweed, tomato salad, pickled baby pumpkin.
Delicious.
The second story. The Islanders play in Naha. It is St Patrick’s weekend. Students and young people rent a bus to go down.
“Why don’t you come with us? Then you could have a drink sure.”
This is an offer anyone brought up in Britain cannot refuse. The alternative is drinking sarsaparilla all night to maintain the clear head whilst all those around you are losing theirs.
Current line up
Tara and Mary play
This is Japan
Christian iconography is very diverse
I got back to my house at 2:45. I still feel weak.
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The Quiet Ripple Defines The Pond 