The Quiet Ripple Defines The Pond

Today, I set off for the reef behind Tigh na Mara. It is a pretty good swim from the house across the lagoon to the deep water.

You can see the waves breaking on the reef behind these folks.

However the lagoon is only about 4 metres deep and so there is no trepidation. Although not big-fish-whoa-what-is-that snorkeling, there is lots to see. The water is still warm and I am out for 2 hours.

Little blue fish

Big weirdo starfish. It is about 12 inches across

I finally make it to the reef. The drop-off goes down about 60 ft and there is this feeling that nobody ever comes out here. This is difficult to quantify but at the popular dive spots you just know that lots of people have been there. Not at reefo del Tigh na Mara.

There is lots of damage to the coral from the recent mega typhoons. There are big fish and best of all,  a cuddly turtle who comes by with Okinawan courtesy to say “Konicihwa.” There are large Remora attached to its shell. I hope they get on with one another. Anyway I was unable to photograph this glory as my camera knew that it would be a great shot and so went on strike.

On the swim back I pick up some snapped-off coral and some shells.

Loot – the coral smells obnoxious

This really is a great place to live.

Tigh Na Mara comes with a sealed garden. It is actually a fully enclosed courtyard open to the skies. I intend to turn it into a home for fallen Hibisci. I see the poor things hanging around in garden shops willing to sell themselves to the first comer for a measly 480 yen. I will rescue them and give them a good home.

The huerto sellado had  a shrine in it when I looked around the house.

Religious period

It then filled up with all kinds of junk during the move. Anything that we did not know where to put, er, we put in the huerto sellado.

Today I cleaned it out. The biggest challenge was the exercise machine, which you may remember from previous post. https://quietripple.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/industrial-revolution/

Anyway,  you could increase or decrease the resistance with a toggle button connected to complex electronics. These failed such that you could only increase the resistance and so in testing, I incrementally made it more difficult to use. So I decided to chuck it. I should add that I was also too idle to use it.

It is a big, heavy piece of kit. I was very anxious about how I would move it out of the huerto sellado onto the roadside. I dismantled it as much as I could but it still seemed unfeasible. Friends pass by. They offer to help. I tell them the very complex plan I have worked out but one of them says”Why don’t we try this?” Wherupon he lifts up the machine, carries it out of the huerto sellado and dumps it on the roadside.

This was an unpleasant demonstration that I posses a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams.

The guy at the back whose name is Skye did the lifting.

Anyway, I hosed, brushed and re-organized.

Aerial view

I then moved in my fallen women. I love Hibisci. They are very space age. I intend to fill the courtyard with many, many Hibisci plants. I think they will do well as they are protected from the wind, which is the main plant killer in Okinawa.

Big Red and the start of my home for fallen Hibisci

My first Hibiscus

I am very excited by this project as I have not mentioned that you look into the huerto sellado from the kitchen and one of its sides is entirely glass, making the huerto serrado part of the interior.  So, once crammed with Hibisci it will be, er, nice.

I have one of these in Tigh na Mara. It is amazing!

Induction cooking uses induction heating to directly heat a cooking vessel, as opposed to using heat transfer from electrical coils or burning gas as with a traditional cooking stove. For nearly all models of induction cooktop, a cooking vessel must be made of a ferromagnetic metal, or placed on an interface disk which enables non-induction cookware to be used on induction cooking surfaces.

In an induction cooker, a coil of copper wire is placed underneath the cooking pot. An alternating electric current flows through the coil, which produces an oscillating magnetic field. This field induces an electric currentin the pot. Current flowing in the metal pot produces resistive heating which heats the food. While the current is large, it is produced by a low voltage.

An induction cooker is faster and more energy-efficient than a traditional electric cooking surface. It allows instant control of cooking energy similar to gas burners. Other cooking methods use flames or red-hot heating elements; induction heating only heats the pot. Because the surface of the cook top is only heated from contact with the vessel, the possibility of burn injury is significantly less than with other methods. The induction effect does not heat the air around the vessel, resulting in further energy efficiencies. Cooling air is blown through the electronics but emerges only a little warmer than ambient temperature.

Works just fine with old Le Creuset, which is more or less the only thing I cook in. I refer to the pot not the clothing.

Have not worked out the pane on the left but I think it is timer. The kettle is for extremely fast kettle boiling. It switches itself off as soon as the kettle boils. Hai!!

I have always been very suspicious of electric cookers but this thing is wild. Very fast to very high heat, turndownable to the slightest fremissement on soups, not hot to the touch, very clean, er, sweet and kind. Brand new, of course.

No oven, but my brother Ian has a very admirable clay oven. One of which I am thinking of building.

You will remember about this time last year I posted about a film that two French people made for the university. Maybe not – so here is the link.

https://quietripple.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/french-cinema/

Well, they came back to make an update. All filmed on Canon er cameras and edited on a creaky Macbook. The whole project only took a few days, no fuss, no tantrums, just fast, good filming. I like working with these guys so here is an outrageous plug. If you need a movie, hire them, areactionfilms@gmail.com.

Here is the movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAlwPcUCqVE&feature=player_detailpage

People I work with, in the back yard

A Grey Heron in Kyoto

My friend Satoru sent this to me.

I am a world famous photographer from Kochi, Japan. : )
This from the A・La・Uno S, which is the make of my toilet see previous post, catalog and translated by Google translation, the center and middle button with some subtle; 

A・La・Uno S has buttocks cleaning function (common to all types)

1. buttocks wash (wash bubble)
Firmly, gently washed in water that is strength.

2. Move cleaning buttocks
Nozzle moves back and forth, I washed a wide range.

3. Soft cleaning
In soft water, it can be used when feeling hemorrhoids and diarrhea.

4. Washing massage
Repeat the dynamics, we encourage defecation.

My new house, which here on in will be called Tigh na Mara, which is Gaelic for House by The Sea so my learned correspondents state, is full of really cool electronic 21st Century schizoid equipment. Let’s have a look at my toilet. Its shape is non-remarkable and its color is white, however it is distinguished by not having a flush handle, a chain, a pedal and anything to make water comes scooting in to evacuate the er waste. It is very smooth, rounded and has no obvious water tank. There is a tiny green light glowing on its  top.

Crapper

I am your obedient servant

The seat is heated, which I find soppy after a youth of freezing toilet seats and a societal structure  constructed around the core concept that once you became a Prefect you could order a younger boy to warm up your toilet seat for you.

There is a control panel on the wall.

I have a 2 day relationship with this thing and now understand it better.  At first I just stabbed the control panel and hoped.

15 buttons

I now have 4 buttons completely under control and 11 to discover. The top two are the flush buttons – one short, one long. The centre and right buttons in the middle row spray water at your fundament with some subtle difference that I have not yet figured out. It is such fun. However I am still a beginner and I know that there is a wide spectrum of finesse of pleasure ahead of me.

So that’s it. I now live in the best house in the visible universe. It is called “The House by the Sea.” I would like to have a Gaelic name but Google translate doesn’t do Gaelic. Must be “Tir na something.” If there are any Gaelic speakers out there – er you know.

Typhoon resistant and it has a palm tree

It is brand new and packed with gizmos as only the Japanese could think up. I will do a series of blogs on the aforementioned. The essential quality is its proximity to the East China Sea, which nearly comes into the front room.

It has huge door window things so that when open you are living outside when you are inside.

I spend the weekend unpacking. This I enjoy, fitting old stuff into new setting.

Unpack

I have been sleeping on the floor with a futon and  a tatami mat between  me and the cold, cold ground for the last 2 years. This I have very much enjoyed. However, due to size of bedrooms, proximity to bathroom, heaving beds upstairs and other pragmatics, I will now try sleeping in a bed.

Could be worse – nice view

I take a break from the set up and stroll along my backyard.

The backyard

I pick up  shells.

Local Hero

I could stumble along beaches picking up shells for the rest of my life. How can I go back to work?

Ladies wear them.

Shucks

Jeepers

Oh flip

Gosh

Golly gee

They asked, not me!

Holy Moley!

 

When I asked if I could take their picture, not one replied, “Beat it, you fat perve.”

They all grinned and said “Sure, life is great and we are beautiful.” er in Japanese.

When I was a student I worked in the steel factories in Sheffield, now defunct, er the steel factories not the city, in the two-week shutdown in the Summer when the workers went on vacations and bands of students came in to clean the place up. These weeks were called Stop Weeks. The money was fantastic. We worked 12 hour shifts and some years I worked very hard shoveling sludge from pits underneath huge rolling mills. Other times I did nothing at all, such as the year that I was  a welder’s mate. He, the welder, would lead me to some lost corner of the massive steel plant where we would sleep all day. Once we slept beyond the knocking off time, whereupon we claimed and were paid overtime. The steel factory we worked in was Steel,Peech and Tozer, affectionately known as Steelos. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel,_Peech_and_Tozer

Anyway in Kyoto at a big deal meeting called STS Forum http://www.stsforum.org/ I am on a panel with a chap who mentions he was at Sheffield University.  He was sitting on my left. I mentioned Steelos and he had also worked on the Stop Weeks as a student! We spent an intense 5 minutes of nostalgia for the bad old days of pollution, soot and yellow and blue No 60 buses. He introduced me to the man on my right who had also been at Sheffield University!

We exchanged Sheffield shibboleths such as: “D’areet chuck?” – “Are you feeling well my dear?” and “Tint tin tin.” – “It is not in the tin.”  Very good time was had by all. The man of the left was Rich Roberts:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_J._Roberts

On the right was Jeremy Grantham:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Grantham

Go Sheffield.

Anyway it was a great meeting with lots of old and current friends.

Mighty Cashmore

Jerry Friedman with another gentleman.

Jerry is one of the best. Check his interview with Ali G.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UU0vOThFXGA

Jonathan writ large

Yay! Carlo looking good

Cashmore gets ready

Good couple of days.

So after  a week of great intensity I get up very early to go get my truck, which has been graciously lent to me. I am moving my furniture to my new house that from henceforth will be known as the house by the sea.  I have to move my stuff today as tomorrow I set off to Kyoto for some days and I have to give the keys back on Friday and there is the inspection and so there has to be a final mega clean and so do you get it?   A happy band of people have agreed to help. It is a beautiful day and they stand in the back of the truck as I drive along the azure sea road.

They descend on my apartment like the wolf on the fold and the truck is loaded and dispatched to the new house 4 times in two shakes of a lambs tail.

Beatrice is one fine woman. She could rogue an acre of potatoes and milk the cows before the rest of us had filled even one creel. If you see what I mean.

We throw all the stuff into the amazing new place.

View of the house by the sea

Some of the crew on the deck

More crew in the back yard

Moving, of which I have done a lot.

On the boardwalk. Notice typhoon burnt trees.

I move in for good next Friday but in between I am in Kyoto and the inspection has to be done and the air conditioners er conditioned and the like and so I had to move the furniture today. Do you see what I mean? I am writing this on a laptop sitting on an upended garbage bin in a totally empty flat.

Further on down the road