Like a little girl.....

I get ready to go to my 3rd job of the day on Tuesday around 5pm.
This typhoon was gusting up to be a real doozy, and it had already started to rain in a pretty serious manner.  Last week, I had a really bad case of Noro virus, and the nausea seems to have kept lurking around,  hiding behind  bouts of feel-good normalcy,  to jump out and ambush me with a sickly rush of spinney woe.

Just before I left for work I started to feel ill again.  Two or three blocks from the bus stop,  I was fighting with my umbrella, and having the storm come up underneath it, to  smack me around the chops.  I suddenly doubled over in pain, and dry retched right there in the pouring rain.  After a minute or so of hurling,  I decided to call my classes,  and tell them it had all gone pear-shaped, and it was all off for this evening, I was still feeling ill.  I spent an eternity searching in my bag, trying to hold onto my umbrella, and not spew in my back pack.

I discovered  two things,

1.  I had left my bloody phone at home, and I was exactly half way to the bus stop, and
2.  I felt better for the little hurl and I had enough time to still make it to the bus, because I could hear the bell ringing for 5:30.

I had no choice but to soldier on.
Worst case?  I would make it to class, they would be so freaked out by my ghost-like visage and possible projectile-vomit incidents,  that they would pay me, and still send me home to be sick at my own house.

I lurched towards the Little Rainbow shopping bus,  getting soaked,  no matter how hard  I tried to hold on to my brolly.  Rain in Japan is tricky.  It doesn't just fall down,  it comes at you sideways,  paired up with it's little mate  the wind, it seizes your umbrella, and then leaps up from underneath to splatter you in the face, and show you who is the boss.  You don't just get a bit damp.  Typhoons here are seriously about making everything in Japan soggy, and they go on for days.

I sloshed my way on to the bus,  and dripped,  miserable and sick, packed in with other soggy members of the community.
In the steamy confines of the Little Shopping Bus,  I was pressure cooked for 20 minutes until my hair was all frizzy and I had dead man's fingers.  The Little Bus disgorged me again into the pouring rain,  an I did the Umbrella Dance all the way to the community centre, a 1-2-3, 1-2-3 dip!

Inside,  I was given a nice comfy chair,  a towel, and a glass of ice water.  I started to feel better.

Two and a half hours later,  I was on the mend. My classes had gone well,  they handed the money over, there was no accidental vomit at all, and it was time to go home.

The buses finish at 7pm here ,  so it's a fair walk home for me  (but I probably need the exercise)  and I thought that the worst of the storm might have been over, with any luck.

I am not a lucky person, as such.  I got downstairs, and some one had thoughtfully dried off my umbrella for me,  and I took a look out the window.  Hmmm,  blowing a bit of a gale.

My older students came down the stairs to look fearfully out the glass doors at the front.  Just as I am about to step outside, the wind picks up a plastic lawn chair from some unfortunate persons front garden,  and smashes it at head height violently against the glass.  After a beat,  I say ,
"Well,  lucky it was only plastic, hey?"  and make my way to the front door, to the horrified stares of students and staff.

Mr.  Y.  followed me out, and said ,
"  Are you  SURE  you will be alright on the way home, Sensei?"

I assure him this is just a little soggy inconvenience,  and I am fully drip dry.  He looks unconvinced.  I go to step off the front stairs, and  look down to see a deep water fall,  of about 10 centimetres off each step.  I decide I will use the wheelchair ramp, instead.

Now, my city is full to the brim with old people.  EVERYWHERE needs a ramp.  It's not just wheelchairs, it's walkers,  walking sticks,  and quite a few blind people, who find stairs a pain.

I slosh down the ramp,  and it's pitch dark. The lights on the street are out, and the clouds are so low they are almost touching the top of the building.  My shoe touches something solid, and I look down to see a dirty great rock,  right in the middle of the wheelchair ramp.  Can't think how it got there, as it's all concrete all around.  I mumble under my breath,

"  That's a  dangerous thing to be putting here"  and I reach down  to pick it up,  when it suddenly leaps onto my sandal, and I let out a blood curdling scream,

"KIIIyyyyaaaaAAAHHH!"  like a little girl.
It's a bloody huge toad.

I have just given the entire community centre the shock of their lives, and 24 students and two staff rushed out into the wild gale and pouring rain,  just to see me dance away from a toad.  I was told the next day the centre manager was so worried I had been struck by lightening, he was just about to call the ambulance,  until he heard Mr. Y.  call out

"It's OK, she just touched a frog".

The window to your soul.....

Last Thursday I had  the whole day off.
I was considering just staying in bed, in my jammies, or getting some gift shopping done and doing the packing and mailing  (I would probably have to get dressed for that).  I considered all this from under the covers, with the pillow over my head, pretending to be asleep.
I play possum on Thursday, because it's really my only full day off, and so I have decided it's easier for The Daddy to properly feel his responsibility of getting the kids off to school, and getting himself to work on time, if I  just stay out of the way,  and ignore the pleas of "can you find my socks?'  "I need more jam on my toast"  "I can't find my music book, Daddy said to ask you".  Sometimes I fake snore, just to press my point.

My Mr. normally won't let anyone stay home from school or work, unless they have lost a limb that morning, or have barfed up a lung.  Thursday, he decided  to let The Boy stay home because he apparently has a headache (didn't do all his homework, was going  be late for school, and of course Mummee is home to look after him) it's now 10:30,  The Daddy has a late start, and both Boy and Daddy have been salting my day-off holiday-type vibe by Bogarting the TV playing Mario, and generally getting under foot. 

There's  no room in the lounge, I have to eat my breaky sitting on a stack of dirty laundry in the kitchen.  My cup of tea balanced on my knee, I am mumbling obscenities under my breath as I am perched on the washing.  I am not a happy camper.


11am, and The Daddy has finally toddled off to work, leaving the lounge, kitchen, bathroom and balcony totally destroyed. The washing up has overflowed, and he has used every cup, plate and bowl in the place.
The Boy (his headache miraculously gone) is already complaining that he is bored. He keeps asking when lunch is (@.@)  About half an hour later,  his magically restored health is really getting on my nerves.  I say it's too early for lunch, you just had breakfast.  He says Mario makes him hungry, and he flounces off to make his own lunch (using the only clean pot,  and he had to put himself inside the cupboards bodily to retrieve it).


While he bangs around in the kitchen, exclaiming over the mess, and trying his very best to make it worse, I am waiting for something I ordered  through the post. Thought I heard the Bastard Extra Postman (not the regular one, but the stupid guy who is afraid of anything written in English, so he jams it in our tiny post box, because he is too scared to come and knock on the frikken door).


It's raining ( it usually is on my day off.  Boy swears I have magical rain making abilities) and I don't want my packages to get wet.  I make the choice to leave the house.  I go downstairs in pyjama pants and a T-shirt, no bra. Note to self: do not do this again. Even though my packages were saved a horrible soggy fate, Extra Postman believes that your boobs are the window to your soul.

The LIttle People

This always happens.
My house is not at all like those you would see in 'Better Homes and Gardens'.  Not even slightly.
Think more along the lines of 'Pygmy wars, where books, underwear and toy trains were the main projectiles'

The fact we both work,  have little boys,  and are a bit lax with any kind of really serious cleaning, means that  the peanut butter DELIBERATELY hides from me when I need it.

Two nights ago,  dragged myself home form work late, and  made dinner for everyone. I served Boy and Duck first, left mine in the pan,  The Daddy was at work.

Then, I  went to do some other stuff before it got too late  (read "before I got too tired to be arsed to do it), got in from bringing in the washing, pan is empty. Boy and Duck have served themselves seconds, and also eaten my ice-cream.

 I was now tired, hungry and without the prospect of dessert.  The Ice Cream Wars have continued here for some time.  I say it's an after dinner food, if everyone has been good, and both homework and dinner are finished.  The Daddy and The Boys seem to think Ice cream is a casual snack, and sometimes breakfast.  I am outnumbered.

 I hide it under the broccoli in the freezer.  I have secreted it in a boxed marked 'Spinach Pies' and I even hid it surrounded by frozen carrots and corn.  It still gets found.  I am fond of Green Tea Haagen Daaz.  It comes in teeny tiny little tubs.  Costs a bomb.  Any time  you take your eyes either off The Boys or off the freezer,  the crime of ice cream theft may have already been committed.  They have been known to serve themselves ice cream  in the middle of dinner, like a second course. 

 I said fuckit, I am having a banana and peanut butter sandwich for dinner then  (and I would have put some chips on it, if there were any around as well). We have THREE peanut butters. The small smooth (bought because I had no money to go to Costco, but no peanut butter) the 3 kilo tub of smooth (because I got paid, we went to Costco) and the small  crunchy, because Boy is aberrant  (if I wanted crunchy peanut butter, I would just eat the peanuts.  It's just wrong). ALL the peanut butters are lost to me  in this tiny bloody apartment.  It's essentially two rooms.  One must contain a black hole, or the lost Kodaira corner of the Bermuda Triangle


 I went berserk in the kitchen, and started ranting that it hides from me (I was REALLY hungry by this point) tearing the place apart, looking under my desk and bed (Duck sometimes goes under there with a jar and spoon).

Duck has been sent scurrying into the lounge to hide under the Kotatsu,  Mummee is stomping, shouting and flinging her arms about in hunger and despair.


 Boy has a head ache and a fever, and suddenly a stomach ache (too much dinner, fatty?? Hmmm?) but from his sick bed, he whispers "The little people took it. They went 'washoi washoi' because they haaaate you"