He Who Pays the Piper

Posted on March 23, 2014 by spikekalashnikov

Incredible though it may seem, people give me money to pay the flute. Japan is a very strange country. Yesterday we played at a shopping mall.

Irish music at a Japanese shopping mall…… because why not. I stole this caption from Tara.

Anyway there is something very different having used bills shoved in your hands to the number you see on salary slips. It is like real money and I feel I can spend it on whatever. I get enough to buy new tires for my truck. Up early and I am the first person at the tire shop in Ishikawa. There is some confusion as the guy wants to charge me what I believe to be too much.

The right ones

Some discussion reveals that he thought my car was the swanky one with big wheels near my truck. It is rare for non-Okinawans to drive HiJets. I feel like a working class hero. Good thing that we got that sorted out before I strolled off,

New tires! I can go really fast around corners now

otherwise some poor person would have come back to their car to find all the tires had been changed.

I then practice towing the boat. This is a lot of fun.

The rig in front of the house

I really love to have a project and this one is coming close to fulfillment. I have the boat. The boat is registered. I have the truck with tires and a hook to tow the boat. I have a dream island fishing port just a kilometer up the road. I do not yet have permission to launch from there but things are looking good. This where I head with truck and boat.

I make it to the harbour

I then spend the afternoon trying to reverse my boat around bends and into parking spaces. It is very difficult. I used to drive tractors and trailers in my youth but I appear to have completely lost the ability. I hope to have got enough hours in so there will not be too much humiliation when I have to do it for real. There is a very expansive open space beside the port that is perfect for jack-knifing a boat and truck. There are also birds.

Blue Rock Thrush mocks me

Golden Plover is indifferent

Kentish Plover thinks home thoughts from abroad.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Birds, boat, Irish music, truck | 5 Comments

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

Posted on March 22, 2014 by spikekalashnikov

Yea,even so. This post is really for me so I will be able to recall the amazing blooms of my Brugmansia trees, so do not feel obliged to read on.

I have 3 Brugmansia in my secret garden, two of which have exploded into a riot of Spring. This makes me feel good.

Spurt

Looking into the house

Secret door into Secret Garden

I love my truck. I am going to change her tires tomorrow and pay with money earned from playing the flute.

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Jesus and Mary Chain

Posted on March 17, 2014 by spikekalashnikov

Yesterday was busy. We had Open Campus at the university. Over 5000 folks came to visit.

Hair-raising

Worth the wait

Music, of sorts, while you wait.

Spring- Notice the attractive tree.

I rush out to complete purchase of truck – see previous post.

Truck

Then down to Naha to celebrate an early St Patricks. We play from 8:00 through 12:00.

A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square

The Road to Kitanakagusuku

Okinawans love to have a good time.

I get to bed at 2:00.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Music, science, truck | 3 Comments

Louis Pasteur

Posted on March 16, 2014 by spikekalashnikov

The best cure for rabies is to buy a truck. I remember seeing this in a TV program in the 1960s about Louis Pasteur. Lo it is true as I took delivery of my Daihatsu HiJet this morning and I have stopped biting people. I am deeply in love with my truck. She has everything I look for in a partner.

She waits for me.

She is very reliable, she loves adventures, she is good in the garden. She does not paint her face an inch thick but relies on her robust health and sturdy frame to gain favor. She is very social, having already struck up a good relationship with Dileas.

I pay the owner.

Ready to go out with Dileas

Captain Hook

She has a hell of a hook, together with a most straightforward face.

She does not jig and amble, and lisp, nor nickname God’s creatures

She does not jig, amble, and lisp, nor nickname God’s creatures

I know we will be very happy.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged boat, lisp, pasteur, truck | 1 Comment

Rabies

Posted on March 15, 2014 by spikekalashnikov

Rabies is endemic in the Calder family. In my case, it recurs every 2 or 3 years and I have to chain myself to the radiator until it passes. I have it now and do not feel well. However I drag myself out this morning to attach the engine mount to Dileas’ bottom. Essentially this is very easy as the nice boat company sent me a template so that I knew where to drill the holes.

I am amazed by wireless drills

There is a lot of spring activity.

Never seen this before. Just passing by on the other side of the road

Butterflies are starting to re-appear

Anyway the engine mount comes with long, threaded bolts. I do not have a socket set that would allow me to do this quickly so have to use a spanner, which takes forever. Not to worry as I can do what I like to do, which is look at what is happening.

A tiny Okinawan bee

I have a mount

Fly away home

Then I go back to the radiator.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bee, boat, ladybug, rabies | Leave a comment

Sowing Tares

Posted on March 9, 2014 by spikekalashnikov

I cannot adjust to the growing cycle in Okinawa. Now is harvest time for stuff like potatoes and cabbage, also for sugar cane. There seems to be two ways of harvesting sugar cane, the easy way and the hard way. The hard way is to chop it down with a sugar cane hatchet, strip of foliage with same tool and chop it into lengths. The next fitness craze?

Choose your hatchet

The easy way is to buy a sugar cane combine harvester. It munches the cane in at the front and excretes it bagged through the posterior.

It sort of sits back when it excretes

Anyway, in my secret garden I had the most beautiful display of Busy Lizzies – huge globes of red, pink, white er, red and white and er pink and white. I have rarely seen such healthy plants. The ground display was matched by a roof of Brugsmansia trumpets. All in all very pleasing but strange because it was February.

Happy days

Over the last few days the Busy Lizzies have suddenly fallen sick and withered. I of course thought frost but then reminded myself not to be silly. It does however look very much like frost damage.

I think an enemy came to my garden and sowed tares

Off to the local gardening shop to get new plants. This place is one of my favorites. I love the strange tools.

The Okinawans do not have scythes but cut hay and undergrowth with tiny hand sickles.

Now is the time to plant Goya.

Goya is almost the only vegetable that can resist the Summer heat

The Peasant’s Revolt

De rigeur when gardening

I have a good clean up in the garden and do some replanting. Nothing so becomes a man as horticulture.

Geraniums, petunia, lobelia. Not very exotic.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged goya, Horticulture, Okinawa, sugar cane | 1 Comment

Crimea River

Posted on March 4, 2014 by spikekalashnikov

Monday started well when at 5:11 in the morning an earthquake er blew, arrived, happened, earthquaked about 100 km Northwest of my bed, in which I was sleeping at the time. The quake was 6.7 on the Burt Richter scale. This meant that things heaved around seriously for quite a long time.

My bed is about 5 meters above sea level and I thought that, given the bigboyedness of the quake, that here would probably be an accompanying tsunami. So I got up and looked out of the window. I couldn’t see anything so I went back to bed.

“Magnitude 6.7 earthquake strikes off Japanese island of Okinawa!” Daily Beast

Anyway I went back to sleep. Soon after, a cat jumped on my bed. He was a nice cat, ginger with a white belly, who soon started to purr. I wondered how he had got in but figured that it really did not matter as it was clear he had adopted me. He let me tickle him under the chin and he purred afresh. He laid on his back and I tickled his tummy which resulted in a moment of cat warm human purr everything cosy moment. We both went to sleep.

My cat

No cat when I woke up, no doors or windows open.

Ham bone

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Earthquake, ginger cat, Okinawa | 1 Comment

Down the Broom

Posted on March 1, 2014 by spikekalashnikov

So an interesting day.

I struggled with the rudder of my boat for most of the morning. There is a rope to raise it and a rope to lower it. I have to rig this set-up and find it beyond my intellect. However my engine mount arrives from the States, which is exciting.

The Gatehouse Maid

Then I go to pick up a remarkable man: Ohyama sensei. He is here to lead a musical dialogue at the university. A dialogue, in this usage, is a performance of a piece, followed by discussion with the audience on the structure, social context, drugs taken, which brought about the music.

http://www.heiichiro.jp/index.html

Anyway, he played the Cello suite No 1 by J S Bach and talked about it. Very good.

Ohyama sensei is a great guy and I would like to go on the batter with him around the pubs of Tiger Bay in Cardiff.

I then went to Zakimi-sho a castle near my house. They have lit it up for a reason not explained.

The Five Mile Chase

The Lilies of the Field

Sailing into Walpole’s Marsh

The Bag of Spuds

The Old Copperplate

The sap is rising

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged castle, photography, rudder, viola | Leave a comment

Rogues

Posted on March 1, 2014 by spikekalashnikov

It being the first of March and a beautiful Saturday morning I think of shoes.

I don’t know where this comes from but I have always believed that proper shoes are lace-ups with leather soles.

Real shoes

Slip-on shoes with grotesque names such as, pumps or loafers, were only worn by spivs and wide-boys.

Spivvish, I wonder if this word has Yiddish origin?
“The origin of the word is obscure. According to Eric Partridge[1] the word was originally racecourse slang,”

Anyway stationed out here in Japan, one has to take one’s shoes off very frequently and indeed put them back on again in a vaguely unbroken symmetry. This makes lace-up shoes tedious and worse, due to age, I find I have to sit or kneel to tie my laces. Whereas with slip-on shoes you just er slip them on. The result is a strong swing to the spiv in my footwear. My Father would not approve.

During the first Protestant plantations of Ulster in 1610, it was discovered that most of the families had no shoes. The Governor sent back to Glasgow asking for a thousand pairs of brogues. Brogues through the chinese-whisper effect became rogues and the jails of the west of Scotland were emptied and the produce sent to Ulster.

A hermit crab on my morning beach clean.

The dentist here is such fun!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Dentist, shoes, spiv, Ulster | Leave a comment

Think I’ll Pack it in and Buy a Pick-up part 2

Posted on February 25, 2014 by spikekalashnikov

Pack it in, er no but buy a pick-up, hell yeah! Well actually I might have to pack it in as a result of buying a pick-up.

To launch my boat I have to tow it on a trailer to the local fishing harbor, a distance of almost 2 kilometers. I then will back the trailer down a launching ramp into the water and when the boat floats off I pull the trailer back up the ramp. I have to remember to tie the boat up somehow or else it will float off whilst I am stashing the trailer, you know.

It is apparently impossible to attach a tow bar to my Nissan. So I have to buy a car to enable me to tow the boat around. I will then have to get a new house with a bigger parking lot. To do this I will have to get a better paid job.

650cc of raw power

I cut a deal, with the help of the noble Gakiya san, whereby I will buy the truck if they attach a tow bar. We, the seller and I, cut our palms and mix our blood in an energetic, pumping handshake, standing on one leg. Tradition is strong in Okinawa.

The Hijet will redefine the baby size truck

I have always wanted a pick-up.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged blood, Okinawa, pick up, truck | 1 Comment

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