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by Hugh Cook |
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Section 127 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 November 18 Thursday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Over the last few days, it has become convincingly cold. Winter has really come, and I've once again started putting petroleum jelly up my nose. Why? Because my dry skin suffers in the winter, and in previous winters I occasionally got nose bleeds when the dry membranes cracked. I find that the occasional application of petroleum jelly put an end to the problem. Japan's winters get so seriously dry, in fact, that at times the weather forecast features not just warnings about high winds and heavy rain but warnings about severe dryness. And other news? Well, the arrival of winter is the really big news, because it has us dressing the baby in warm clothes, digging out our own warm clothes and getting the kerosene heater going. Baby Corncuopia is doing very well, and over the past week she has finally learnt to crawl forwards. So she can now roll, pivot, crawl backwards and crawl forwards. She can't (yet) climb stairs. Let's be thankful for small mercies. While they last. Blogging randomly on another subject: Had a tiny little linguistic surprise today when I took shelter from the rain in a McDonald's (in Japanese, Makudonarudo), and ordered a hot apple pie, a hot coffee, and fries, small. The guy serving me had no trouble with the first two items, but "fries S" seemed to puzzled him, though I could have sworn this used to be the standard Japanese for this item. I pointed at the menu, putting my finger on a picture of some fries. "Fries," I said. "S." "Potato," he said, smiling. So it seems that, in Japan, in McDonald's "fries" are now "potato," which somehow doesn't seem right to me. My concept of "potato" just isn't elastic enough to extend to embrace "French fries" (or "chips," as we used to call them when I was a kid.) But I'm a foreigner here, so I guess I'm in no position to tell the Japanese how to speak their language. Section 127 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 November 20 Saturday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) One of the tenets of our Unified Domestic Theory is that the stereo stack is not for climbing on, and, indeed, that any attempt to scale those heights (the stack stands perhaps as much as twenty centimeters high) would inevitably end in disaster. Being pure theoreticians, we have hitherto had no experimental evidence to support our belief. On Thursday, however, baby Cornucopia, an ardent experimenter if ever there was one, decided to put theory to the test. And slipped and fell before getting anywhere near the height of twenty centimeters, and bonked her head, and did lip-swelling damage to her beauty. Or so I was told, though I, after coming home from work late on Thursday night, which was a very cold and rainy night, observed no lip damage as I (as always) gave her her bath. Friday morning it was still raining. I went out early to put the garbage out. And, outside, discovered the missing receipt for the purchase of sashimi, the receipt I had lost in the confusion of the night before, when I had come struggling to our front door burdened by my luggage, my umbrella and the latest haul of junk mail from our letter box. Friday lunchtime, I discovered why the supermarket had been half-pricing all its unsold sashimi when I dropped by after nine o'clock at night. It really is no fun to eat raw fish for lunch on a raw cold rainy day. Even if you have plain boiled rice to go with it. In the evening, I cheered myself up (it was the kind of day that called for cheering up) by dining at an Indian restaurant in Tokyo before going to an office to do three hours of Friday evening work. Very reasonable, I thought. Precisely five hundred yen (which, if we say 110 yen is an American dollar, is about US $4.55. For which I got a bowl of buttom curry, an extremely large piece of nan, a salad and a glass of water. The water bottomless, apparently. Compares favorably with McDonald's, which on Thursday night cost me 503 yen for a hot coffee, a hot apple pie and a small packet of fries (or, if you like, "potato".) I don't usually eat out. I usually take sandwiches or a boxed lunch cooked at home. Plus a vacuum flask containing either tea or coffee. And sometimes I leave home with two meals and a flask. But sometimes a little mood elevation is called for. And there's nothing like a hot meal to elevate your mood on a cold wet rainy day. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) |
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