plate from pottery shop

I got this plate form a small pottery shop in Hayama. I should say the shop itself was small, but it was packed with shelves of unique and interesting pottery. This one is sort of cool and beachy. The youngish guy who worked there said that his family owned the shop, and there was a studio and larger fancier shop in Kamakura. He was just recovering from taking a surfing vacation in Hawaii and having his surfboard break in half. :( Poor fellow.

the quilt

Here is the quilt I have been working on for the past couple of weeks. The pattern is called Lotus Brick Path, by Amy Butler. Getting the back on correctly is the hard part. There is a wrinkle in the back and several in the sides, which are just going to bug me forevermore, so I am going to pull out the stitches and do everything a little slow and careful.

Lots of food for everyone...

Well, we got a big delivery of food from the Japanese pet store, and a nice letter apologizing for all of the trouble we have had with our new baby girl. There are 17 bags of Science Diet in this box, 1 kg each! The letter also promised two more deliveries like this. Wheew! As you can see, the pups are very very interested in what is in the box. They have both been sticking to me like glue. I guess I'm the pied piper of pups. I'm not going to say I'm the dog whisperer; nothing could be further from the truth. I have one little prince who thinks he runs the place, and one who chews everything and pees everywhere.

Anyway, it is true I have become the new mother who talks about nothing but her baby.

The other day Pam, Yuri and I went to lunch at the Zushi Marina. At 3150 Yen a plate, roughly $31.50, it was the best Italian buffet I have ever been too. My Gott! I did not have the cold octopus salad, tempting as those reddish-purple tentacles looked. But they had tiny squares on polenta with a tiny piece of bacon on top of each, and a cream sauce. Crab pasta and sea urchin pasta and eggplant Parmesan, linguine and fettuccine and penne, slivers of the yummiest melt-in-your mouth raw salmon. Don't get me started on the desserts. My diet is pretty much shot for the week, in fact.

Frankie is enjoying 8th grade. The are reading Charlotte Doyle and getting ready to learn how to saute, broil, stew and make soups. They are doing algebra and learning history. Because he is in that gifted program, his same buddies are in class with him again except for the ones who have PCS'd over the summer.

Nate lives to go to lunch and recess. He and his friends are hooked on Club Penguin, an on-line game from Walt Disney that looks very cute and fun. He has been able to chat with his old friend who moved to Washington this summer. At this age, old friend would qualify as someone he met this past year after we moved to Ikego. Here is a new whine: "But Mooooom, I need to get on line at 5 o'clock, because I promised some friends I'd meet them after school."

Here is a little note I found penciled in, in Frankie's handwriting: "Meet at The Faithful Bride pub, 4:00."

Times sure have changed since I was a kid.

Awww, Brad, you dirty boy!

Brad, you're such a dirty, dirty boy.

You filthy, filthy boy.

Soooo diiirty!

puppy tug of war

The dogs are doing better and becoming best frenemies. Natsumi seems to win at tug of war most often. She is doing well and this is her last day of the three pills she has to take BID. Whew! She still has a bit of a wheeze and this week, is going to the Vet for a nebulizer treatment every other day. At roughly $45 a day, I am hoping for a faster recovery. Apparently she is much improved but part of her lung has been damaged probably permanently, and she still has fluid there in addition to the dark area that doesn't work. I may have already said this but I am sooo tired from getting up at night with her...Jose says her lungs will grow bigger anyway and that small part won't make a difference. He sees a big healthy rascal in our future.

The pet shop in Tokyo has decided to send us 6 months of Science Diet Puppy food as a bit of an apology. She will surely eat every bit. She is now officially taller than Cricket.

Anyway, to avoid sounding like a new Mom who talks only about her baby, let me wax poetic for a moment about the carpet tiles in the picture. They stink. Literally and figuratively. They really bite. They migrate all over the white linoleum and annoy us all, but our neighbors all have them and when one of them PCS'd this summer, they insisted that we take over their old carpet squares, for a small fee of course, rather than see them go into the nonburnable trash. We inherited enough to carpet much of the living room, the hallway and up the stairway. The number of tiles have been shrinking, as they end up in the trash anyway, for reasons I wouldn't want to bore the loyal reader with.

Cute puppy pictures

Awww, it's Daddy's shirt! And yes, it most certainly does smell like Daddy!

The undefeated snake wrassler!

bigger tea box

This weekend Yuri's friend the tea box teacher showed us how to make large tea boxes covered in fabric and padding. Since I used to do the minor upholstery work, this was somewhat second nature. We whipped this one out in a couple of hours: sewed part by machine, part by hand and part by staples. The teacher could resist taking over a bit and it was fun to watch her. She has been doing it for over 15 years and is very, very good at it. Earlier we went to her house and saw the beautiful boxes she made displayed around her home in Hayama: rich Japanese fabrics, one made from a Buddhist priest's robe gotten somewhere in Tokyo, one an antique fabric she had gotten years ago.

She cracked us all up with her enthusiasm for her two pet beetles that she had been raising for about a year (it is popular in Japan to buy a huge stag beetle and keep it for a pet in the summer, but hers have lived a long time). Her lovebirds laid some eggs which hatched and she kept those in a separate jar. "Aren't they cute?" "Aren't they sweet?" I tried to stifle a scream when she held up a beetle for me to pet. Then she asked if my boys wouldn't enjoy raising one of the babies once they get a little older. I artfully dodged that bullet. Ummm, hey, look at that huge butterfly out there!

Across from her house was a pottery shop having a sale, so we couldn't resist having a look, and we all left with some new treasures. My lovely square plate with a light blue wave on it, looking very Japanese, is still in the trunk of Yuri's car.

Lunch at the Cantina rocked. As always, the food was excellent. I had a summer vegetable pasta and got to try bites of sardine pizza and also fish egg and potato pizza (not my favorite).

Meanwhile, Frankie was home earning babysitting money and Nate was playing video games with his friend William, eating regular frozen pizza. I did bake it though, that was nice of me. Poor babies.