I’m back!

What a summer! It was mostly relaxing and stress-free, this my first summer in my new house. And it wasn’t quite as hot in my bedroom underneath the roof as I had feared. The temperatures stayed mostly in the low to mid 30s during the days and dropped just enough in the evening to make sleeping possible most nights. I’m not sure if this is because of the “cool mountain air” “up here” where I live now, or if summer was generally a little cooler this year.

Pumpkin did suffer from the heat too and visibly perked up the few times I used the air condition. He spent most of July and August inside the oshi-ire in my office, and during the nights he slept on the cooler wooden floors, trying to catch even the tiniest breeze coming through the house. Now he’s back on his zabuton cushion next to my futon at night, a sure sign that autumn is coming.

As was to be expected, summer wasn’t super busy, but a few things did happen, and I will write about some of them in more details in future posts. Here a few titbits:

I am getting older… I’m back at the physio therapy for my hip pain, which took a while but was relatively easy to do. And I now have glasses for reading, which was quick but more complicated to achieve. At first, the doctor gave me the wrong prescription; the second one isn’t 100% correct either. By now I think that the first prescription was correct, just had the left/right eye swapped…

Thanks to the new glasses, I can now read furigana again, which is absolutely necessary in my Japanese studies I have picked up again. I am planning to take the next JLPT in December, starting small at the lowest level.

I learnt other new skills that will help me keep the house in order in the future.

Thanks to those skills, one more room is finished/furnished.

And then, there is Project 50 x 50…

But more of all this at another time. Nice to be back!