Happy New Year again!
I hope you had great holidays and time for some rest.
It’s been a while since I posted, so I have fully recovered from my cold/COVID by now. Unfortunately, I had to deal with other health issues. It seems that I picked up a habit of needing a doctor just before week-long holidays.
This time it wasn’t cat-induced, but instead a tooth that caused pain in half of my lower jaw – never mind that said tooth has been dead for decades… So I had to see my dentist just before he closed for the New Year to get antibiotics, painkillers and a height adjustment of said tooth’s ceramic crown. Everything was fine by New Year’s Eve, thankfully.
The other thing that happened was last Saturday, when I woke up with a shoulder so painful that I couldn’t lift my arm all day. I’m not sure if Pumpkin chose to sleep on it or if it was simply exposed to the cold room all night. It took two nights with hot patches applied to the sore spot to get better. And I’m now sleeping with a (summer) scarf, just in case.
What else happened… A group of my English students bought me a new eto, a little zodiac animal; it already lives in my genkan. It’s super cute, isn’t it?
For hatsumode this year (the first shrine visit of the year) I went to nearby Hachidai Jinja where I bought a lovely goshuin stamp with snake motif and an omikuji fortune slip. Apparently, I will have excellent luck (dai kichi) this year (I’ll need it, trust me.)
The rest of the time I spent sleeping and reading and puttering around in the house. And now real life is back: My accountant paid me a visit on Monday; on Wednesday, BATI-HOLIC had their first concert of the year (with a great crowd this time).
And today, we had hatsuyuki, the first snow of the year. No pictures because I had an early appointment, but there wasn’t much snow anyway. At noon, when my appointment was over, it had all melted away again. Obviously, the house is very cold now; when I got up today at 8:30, it was zero degrees in my bedroom.
Sadly, my plans of spending the afternoon working at some nicely heated cafe were scuppered: The ones in the city were crowded (it seems other people have cold houses too) and the one near my house was closed after it was open during New Year. Oh well. Next time.