Lights Out

My apartment is pretty small, dark and airless so I have to leave the lights on in nearly every room to keep them lit sufficiently to work in them. It's not that there are no windows, but rather that the surrounding buildings block out a lot of the light most of the time. The only time they don't block out the light is around 4:30-5:30 am when the sun shines brightly just behind my husband's and my sleeping heads. Anyone who doesn't believe in daylight savings time should have to put up with all that candle power shining on them at an ungodly hour. It'll change your mind.

Because my apartment is so dark, my habit up until a month ago had been to leave the lights on in both the living room in which I actually teach and the kitchen which is directly behind me. The students walk through the kitchen to get in and out (floor plan here to clarify) and I felt it might make them uncomfortable if they looked out onto the yawning dark behind me as we spoke. Well, it's not a big space so it's more of a tiny yawn, but you may see my point.

There was also a bit of a logistical problem in terms of smoothly welcoming the student in (with the light on, of course), pouring tea or coffee as the student is seated in the adjacent room, and then having to break eye contact and interrupt preliminary chatting with the student to walk over to the entrance and turn off the light before carrying the tea into the room. Also, when the lesson was over, I'd have to again break eye contact and go turn the light back on before the student entered the kitchen. In order to avoid the feeling of being in a dark apartment and this awkward set-up, I just left the light on all the time and figured this was a sacrifice I'd have to make for doing business in my apartment just like I have to be sure to use heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer to be sure students are comfortable.

About a month ago, I decided that the environmental impact of running a light in my kitchen when no one was in there for between 40-50 hours a month was not worth the dubious benefits and I started to turn it off just after students sat down and on before they left. The situation is still a bit awkward for me, but the need to turn it on actually helps give me and excuse to get up at the end of the lesson time and head for the kitchen (to get the light) ASAP so the student can put her shoes on. This tends to have the highly desirable effect of getting them to pack up and hit the road a bit sooner and not steal quite as many extra minutes from me at the end of the lesson.

This month marked the first contiguous block of time where I could see the measure of my efforts in regards to the lights. Though my kitchen lights are fluorescent and I only use half of the strip (one tube instead of two), my electric bill went down by between 500-600 yen ($4.60-$5.50). This is a relatively insignificant amount of money saved, but it does show rather clearly that there was an appreciable amount of energy wasted in the use of just one fluorescent tube (albeit for quite a lot of total hours). Every time I forget to turn off a light after going to another room, I'll be keeping this little example in mind to motivate myself to go back out and turn it off.

Coping With the Cold

At this time of year, every kind-hearted Japanese person who I speak with (which is pretty much every one that I actually speak with), tells me to be careful now that it's colder outside so I don't catch cold. While I always appreciate the concern, I have to suppress the urge to say that cold weather isn't what makes you catch a cold. It's actually rapid changes in temperature, stress, lack of sleep, and poor nutrition that tend to cause people to get sick coupled with, of course, exposure to viruses. The onset of cold weather makes people believe cold weather makes them catch colds because so many problems develop at the changing point, but it's the extreme fluctuations between over-heated interiors and frigid exteriors which increase the frequency of adjustments our bodies have to make that are the main culprit.

When I was studying physiological psychology, I was taught the term "homeostasis". This term has several applications, both human and otherwise, but in my studies it was used to indicate that our bodies and minds like things to stay the same and the introduction of change, particularly a rapid and extreme one, stresses a person. When your body is stressed, your immune system has more difficulty coping with the bombardment of nasty things it encounters and is more likely to fail in its mission of keeping you healthy.

A very good way to avoid catching a cold is to minimize powerful fluctuations in temperature. Given that there is no central heating in most Japanese domiciles, this would seem to be pretty easy, but the truth is that the use of space heaters and kotatsu tend to increase the chances a person will overheat himself or herself by sitting close to the source of heat in a cold room rather than sit in a spot distant from the heating source in a lightly heated room which is being warmed by central heating.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea and believes that I'm suggesting that central heating is somehow superior in any way (because there are some people who love nothing more than inferring something so they can take me to task for what I didn't say), that's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is that most people who live in cold weather set the thermostat low (65-68 degrees F./19-20 degrees C) and wear a sweater so the rooms they are sitting in aren't really hot. When your room is really cold, there's nothing more satisfying than practically sitting on top of the only heat source (space heater/kotatsu) and getting nice and toasty. Unfortunately, this is usually followed by getting up and walking into a much cooler area of the apartment or going outside into the frigid air. This is forcing your body to adjust pretty frequently to rapid changes and increases the chances you'll get sick.

Keeping the aforementioned and other points in mind, I've got some tips for keeping well at this time of year for those of us in Tokyo (though these can apply to other folks as well):

• Use your space heater (or kotatsu) at a lower temperature setting if you tend to sit close to the source and try not to warm up too quickly. Wear several layers of clothing to keep your body heat in rather than rely so heavily on being externally warmed. Maintaining your body temperature with clothes will minimize the frequency and intensity of temperature fluctuations.
  
• Avail yourself of the cheap and plentiful Japanese oranges (mikan) at this time of year and eat one or two every day and try to incorporate more vegetables into your diet, especially tomatoes and leafy green vegetables.
• Sleep with a knitted cap and socks on. Most of the heat leaves your body through your head and feet. Wearing a cap in particular is something people don't tend to do, but it will seriously help you stay warm in bed, especially if you tend not to use your space heater at all through the night for safety reasons.
  
• Invest in a good comforter or blanket. A down comforter is light and warm (though some people are allergic) and can serve your very well. A lot of the blankets in Japan are pretty thin or not well insulated.
  
• Make it a priority to exercise regularly. You will find that you're less likely to get sick if you are stronger overall and that your circulation will be better if you are getting some aerobic exercise.
• Drink as much water as you can to help cope with the dry winter air (and dry air from heating). This is something you have to make a priority, not just wait until you feel thirsty or dry. If you suffer from sore throats in the morning, it may also be a good idea to invest in a humidifier for your bedroom though be careful if you buy the kind which puts out hot steam. I still have a scar on my wrist from getting it too close to a hot humidifier positioned on my nightstand.
  
• Get yourself a pair of fleece-lined slippers for winter which are warmer than the average Japanese house slippers.
  
• Wash your hands every time you come inside after being outdoors and be mindful of touching your eyes, nose, or mouth while you are out so you don't transfer any germs you get on your hands to your mucous membranes. If you can't wash your hands easily, carry the sort of hand wipes which are treated with alcohol to clean your hands.
  
• While drinking hot beverages would seem to logically make you feel warmer, it actually causes your body to try and adjust to the internal heat by making your body colder. It's better not to drink very hot beverages and try for something that is warm or room temperature.
  
• If you can get your hands on them, wear high quality long underwear as part of your layers of clothing. Land's End has mail order that ships to Japan and is reasonably priced, has western sizes, and is good quality. They carry silk weave long underwear which should keep you from being too hot in heated rooms and warmer in cold weather.
  

Of course, there are some things which are nearly impossible to avoid in Tokyo in winter which make staying well hard. Mainly, there is the tendency of Japanese folks to cough with mouths wide open and spray everyone and everything with germs. There are face masks (much like those you see surgeons wearing) which are commonly sold in Japan that some people wear to protect themselves (or others) during this time of year, but they are uncomfortable and are almost impossible to use with glasses because they tend to make them fog up. I'm also not sure how useful they are compared to just breathing through your nose and not touching your eyes, nose and mouth with hands that have touched surfaces in public spaces. Keep in mind that you are most vulnerable on trains and subways. They're like traveling in a germ capsule. Be most diligent about washing your hands after traveling on one of them.

Another problem is the fact that most offices are kept at inferno-level temperatures during the winter so there is the inevitable shock to the system when going from indoors to outside. The former president of my former company used to justify roasting us to death in summer by saying it was unhealthy to be too cold then go out into the summer heat, but didn't believe there was anything wrong with setting the heat such that it was 85 degrees F. (29 degrees C.) inside in the winter when it was 40 degrees F. (4 degrees C.) outside. If at all possible, do the best you can to spare your body these types of extreme transitions.

For many foreigners, not getting sick is more important than it is for a Japanese person. Part of the reason for this is that some of us work under conditions where we are not paid for sick leave (this is the case for both my husband and I). Also, the truth is that a lot of the time a foreign person is "blamed" for being sick or disbelieved. Every time my boss or I became ill (which wasn't all that often), the president would say that it was our responsibility to take care of ourselves and that we were failing in our jobs if we allowed ourselves to take ill. While the Japanese staff took days off for sniffles and low fevers, we soldiered on with raging colds and the flu (which is when we inevitably were lectured about how getting sick was our own fault). Of course, this was the same president who used to take a half day off whenever he got a headache. :-p

While I'm not offering myself up as an authority on maintaining health, I can say that I haven't caught a cold in about a year and a half, and, at the very least, I doubt my advice will make you less healthy.

Space Efficient DVD Storage

As the end of the year approaches, ones thoughts turn to the annual cleaning binge that comes just prior to the start of the year. While I'm not sure I'll be diving in and doing the old spit and polish on everything in my apartment since I already did it several months ago when I rearranged my furniture, there are bits of tidying that need to be taken care of.

The main case in point is our burgeoning DVD collection which had a bit of a burst of fertility over the holiday and outgrew our current storage space. I knew this day would soon be upon me (living in such a small Japanese apartment makes it inevitable) and I wanted to find a way to store some of our nearly 300 disc collection more efficiently. Mainly, I wanted to do somethin about the full-size cases with a single-disc in them. I don't know who decided it'd be a good idea to store one disc in a space large enough for 4 discs, but a bit of a reduction diet was in order if I didn't want my limited shelf space to overflow.

I considered buying slim cases for all the discs but the cost would end up being 100 yen per 3 cases and it'd only save me about half the space. Neither the expense nor the space savings of this solution were particularly attractive. I researched some methods on the web and they mainly involved carefully cutting up the inserts and putting the discs into slim CD cases. While this would be quite space efficient, I didn't want to destroy the inserts in this way because they often have chapter listings on them. Also, slim cases stored on their sides are almost impossible to label such that you can read their contents from a side view and I didn't want to have to riffle through stacks of discs to find the one I wanted.

Clear pockets, CD pockets, and a 36-ring binder (100 yen each at the Daiso).

The search was on for a method that'd preserve the full contents, store in an easy to peruse fashion, and cost as little as possible. After searching the local 100 yen shop for ideas and supplies, I came up with an album method which would cost 300 yen for every 36 discs and would preserve everything. This will give me future flexibility should someone leave about a hundred or so slim cases on my doorstep for free as I'll still have all the paperwork to restore the discs to their original appearance.


I chose a 36-ring binder so there would be uniform and constant support of the weight of the pockets holding 6 DVDs each. Though I think this was the best choice, lining up pockets with the rings was a huge pain in the ass. I interspersed clear document-holding pockets between the discs with the inserts and labeled the spines by genre. I debated alphabetically arranging them, but then I might have to rearrange the entire book every time a new disc arrived. I also think that it'll reduce the amount of searching necessary to find what we want as well as making it more convenient to thumb through and album based on mood.

The garbage bags show the discarded cases from the DVDs I put in albums. You can see how the small stack of albums would be vastly preferable to the huge number of cases if one were moving or paying shipping fees!

I didn't repackage all my DVDs, mind you. Some of them are in packaging which is already space-efficient and others are in special packaging that I wouldn't want to throw away. However, this worked extremely well and cleared up all our storage problems (at least for the time being). If you're cramped for shelf space, this is definitely the way to go if you've got a lot of DVDs.

Washing Machines

This morning while I was washing dishes, I heard my washing machine start to spin an imbalanced load of wet clothes and then stop because it detected the problem. It waited for the clothes to fall into a different weight balance then proceeded to spin out the water. When I heard it stop, I had the feeling it was "pondering" what to do then initiated a different course of action. Note that I usually do not anthropomorphize my appliances and was fully cognizant of how silly it was to do so in this case.

Our washing machine is about 14 years old and was one of the earlier "fuzzy logic" models. I'm not sure exactly how the fuzzy logic is applied in this case though I do know modern models guess the amount of water, detergent, etc. which are necessary based on the weight of the load. I also know it has a lot of buttons which allow you to choose the amount of water, wash time, etc. but it doesn't have any seriously fancy capabilities. That being said, it's still head and shoulders above our first washing machine in Japan in terms of its sophistication.

A modern semi-automatic washing machine. Note the two lids over the two chambers - one for washing and one for spinning out. If you want to know what our old machine looked like, think about this model's smaller, dirtier, clunkier grandpa.

When we first arrived, most folks in apartments were using what are called "semi-automatic washing machines". These are the types of machines with two chambers, one for washing and a separate one for spinning out clothes, and had to have water added manually. Doing a load of laundry in "the old days" of our life in Tokyo meant going through this multi-step process:

• tossing in a small bunch of clothes (about 1/3 what you'd fit in a standard U.S. machine) into the first chamber
  
• turning on the spigot and watching to see that it filled to the right point (if you walked away, you could bet on a flood)
  
• twisting a timer knob which set how long it anemically swished the clothes around,
• pushing a button to drain the water from the washing chamber and waiting a half hour for it to actually drain out
  
• using the spigot again to add in rinse water
• twisting the timer again so it could listlessly swish around the rinse water
  
• draining again with a button push and another long wait
  
• transferring a sopping wet wad of freezing cold clothes to the spin chamber (note: almost no washing machines use hot water in Japan)
  
• twisting a timer knob to get the clothes to spin out
• rebalancing the imbalanced wad
• spinning again (and possibly rebalancing again and trying to spin again)
  
• pulling the wad of intricately-tangled clothes from the spinner
• detangling the wad
• hanging them outside to dry
  

The main problem with this machine was that you had to keep an eye on it and be a part of every process. The secondary problem was that the spinning chamber was so small even a leprechaun wouldn't be able to fit his weekly laundry in it (and his tights would never, ever come untangled after a spin). The size of the machine seemed to assume one did a small load of laundry every day to keep on top of it. The other bad points included the fact that the washer didn't wash clothes especially well (nor rinse out detergent well) and the spinner really didn't get enough water out.

While this contraption may sound old-fashioned, the truth is that these things are still sold today. I'm not even talking about third-world countries or just in Japan where women still do many chores the labor-intensive way, but in many countries. To be fair, I've read that newer models include a drying function as part of the spinning portion of the current crop of semi-automatic washing machines. I'm also guessing they don't require all of the fiddling to add water and have sensors to add to the right water level without the user having to turn on a spigot or watch the levels. They also carry with them some green benefits like reducing water and power consumption.

The ecological issues regarding use of a semi-automatic washing machine are pretty compelling and, when our current machine goes off for its eternal rest, I'd have to at least consider the possibility of a semi-automatic for this reason alone. However, it's going to be really hard to shake the memory of that old machine and the vastly increased effort and attention it required to simply get something done which no one really enjoys doing.

Maintenance Fees

"Wet paint" signs near the newly-painted step up to our entryway.

If you sign a rent contract in Japan, there's a good chance that a small amount of money will be added to your monthly rent as a "maintenance" fee. Often this fee is around 2000 yen ($17.43) per month. That means that you're forking over a little over $200 a year for this added service.

This fee is supposed to represent shared costs of maintaining the property by all tenants. It doesn't have anything to do with what happens inside your apartment as that is covered by your cleaning deposit. If anything needs to be repaired inside, it'll be deducted from your deposit when you leave.

The entryway to our apartment. The "ceiling" above was freshly painted as was the pipe you see slightly further back than the fire extinguisher. The closest door is our single female neighbor's. The furthest is our single male neighbor's. Our door is obscured by the pipe.

Since our apartment building is small (only 6 units - 3 on the first floor and 3 on the second), there isn't much in the way of maintenance on a regular basis. Mainly, the landlady sweeps up in front of and behind the building about once every 2-4 weeks. Since these are very narrow spaces, it takes her about 10 minutes tops to do both. Other than that, there are two fluorescent lights in the entryway which our maintenance fees are supposed to cover the electricity for and the cost of replacement bulbs. I should note, however, that the one just outside our door flickered for over a year before it was replaced.

Our landlords are nice and helpful people and I couldn't ask for any better but this fee is a complete crock for the most part. There is no way that it costs anywhere near the 12,000 yen a month our landlord's collect from the entire building for them to care for the exterior of the building. The only time when you can see a serious investment in the exterior is on the type of occasion we experienced recently.

The entryway of both the first and second floors as well as the stair railing to the second floor were painted over the last few days. I believe that this is the second full-scale repainting of these areas in the 18 years we've been in this apartment. While I'm sure it takes a bit of money for this sort of remodeling, I'm also sure it doesn't cost as much as 9 years worth of maintenance fees for 6 apartments. I guess the money may also cover certain other types of major repairs such as fixing the roof or replacing the crappy plastic floors on the verandas (they're very thin and not safe to stand on) but I've not noticed anyone making such repairs since we moved in.

The paint in the "ceiling" above the entryway had been peeling horribly over the last 5 years or so. I'm talking about huge flaking curls, not some tiny little cracks so it definitely could have used a freshening up. I'm guessing that one of the apartments above us must be due for a vacating though because I can't see why they'd choose to spiff up the place now after letting it go for so long unless another potential tenant was going to look the place over.

To be honest, I didn't really care much about the peeling paint and I don't think most people looked up and saw it. In fact, the two days of painting were by far more annoying than the peeling paint. The entrance to our place is incredibly narrow and painting the "roof" over the walkway required it to be entirely blocked off as a man had to prop up and stand on a scaffold to reach it. There were also paint fumes wafting in our front window for about 48 hours and they still haven't dissipated entirely. I'm pretty sure I'm a little dumber from brain cell death due to inhalation of these fumes so excuse any typos that get through from this point forward.


Not everything that could have used a touch up got the once over though. The glass and fence pictured above separate our apartments from the landlord's garden and the glass is cracked and the frame disintegrating but it hasn't been repaired. It gives the place a little bit of an "abandoned building" look on that side.

Despite how it may sound, I'm not really complaining about my rent or even having to pay a shared up-keep expense. I just find it slightly annoying that this "fee" is actually just a way to increase your rent by tacking on a few extra thousand yen each month but calling it something other than what it is. I guess it's a little bit like those "postage and handling" fees you pay for items you order through the mail which are a great deal more expensive than the shipping price you see on the label and would only be justified if the person doing the packing was making $50 an hour and the box cost about $2. You know you're getting overcharged for something just so that the person you're paying carries zero risk of ever spending more than you're being asked to pay.

Dust Comet

There's an episode of the Simpsons in which Marge insists everyone help clean up the house before going about their daily business. In responses to this request to clean, Homer says, "are we so vain?" While I don't believe cleaning is vanity, I'm just starting to come around to Homer's point of view.

It's not that I believe cleanliness if an indication of vanity. However, I am beginning to think that keeping things clean may not be worth the effort. Those of you who were around for my posts about swapping furniture in the apartment may recall a post in which I showed some awesomely embarrassing pictures of my light fixture in the living room covered in crud. I removed it and thoroughly cleaned it and have since then been endeavoring to maintain it so I won't have to go through the same efforts of removing it and damn near killing myself again.

To keep it relatively clean, I bought a static duster and have been standing on the sofa and brushing it over thoroughly (inside and out) once a week before doing one of my twice weekly treks over the carpet with the vacuum. Since I also put up a number of framed pictures since my little "remodel", I've made a routine of just going around and dusting all of them along with the light fixture and the clocks as part of a regular routine so I won't forget anything. It doesn't actually take that long to do and I felt that I'd be avoiding a build-up of crud in the future.


Today, I was standing on the sofa giving the light fixture its weekly grooming session and a dust comet flew out of it. The ball of dust leaving a trail blazing behind it in the picture above is about an inch and a half long! If I weren't so averse to anthropomorphizing things, I'd swear that stupid light fixture is saving these things up and spitting them out at me just to spite me.

Apartment Layout

Click the image to load a much larger one which is at a legible size.

Awhile back, I was asked in comments about the layout of our apartment. Most people either have a copy of their apartment's layout or would have had one at some time or another because you get a copy of it when you go to the real estate agency to inquire about a place. In our case, we had never actually seen the layout since our apartment was graciously handled for us before we came over by my husband's brother. This is no small deal in Japan, incidentally, and it was likely an even bigger deal 18 years ago when fewer places accepted foreign tenants. Needless to say, it can be time-consuming and frustrating to find a place and secure and agreement depending on how much you want to pay (cheaper places are harder to get) and where you want to live.

So, I certainly don't mean to imply that we aren't grateful for the effort he went to to find a place when I mention that we didn't get a layout diagram as part of the deal. Honestly, up until I started blogging, it never occurred to me that it'd be interesting to even have such a piece of paper around to show people the size and orientation of our place. Fortunately, and unsurprisingly, the landlord had the copy that they give to the real estate agent to advertise the place and graciously gave me a photocopy which I've scanned in. He also wrote the measurements in pencil at the top and sides. I added other notes in Photoshop to make it clearer.

One thing that the diagram made clear to me was that my impression that the apartment was nearly a perfect square is correct. This means that there is relatively little "wasted" space unlike most Japanese apartments which seem to have "tunnel" areas, particularly at the entrance which are only useful for limited storage areas and tend to make the place feel narrower. When all the access points between rooms in a square-shaped place like ours are open, the space feels relatively large and unified giving the illusion of a bigger place.

If you look at the other two places in the diagram which our neighbors occupy, you'll see that the place on our right is a perfect mirror image of ours. This apartment has been occupied by the same woman ever since we moved in. That's right, we're not the only ones who have remained here for nearly two decades! When we first moved in, I believe this woman was living with her sister but several years after we moved in, the sister moved out. This woman is quiet and never bothers us. She is mainly noteworthy as a neighbor because she seems to go to bed and rise extremely early. We know this because she is meticulous about closes the noisy metal shutters at her back windows (sliding glass doors leading to the balcony). We hear them scraping open between 4:00-5:00 am each morning and shut around 10:00 pm every night. When we are having problems sleeping, that dreaded sound always signals the time for us.

The apartment on the left is occupied at present by a single man. Up until I got this diagram 2 days ago, I didn't know that was a slightly bigger place than ours. This particular apartment has seen more of a rotation of tenants. At one point, a family with a 2-year old lived there. A couple also lived there at one time. The man that lives there now is notable for a variety of habits but primarily for smoking like a chimney. When our kitchen window is open and he come and goes, a breeze full of the odor of stale smoke wafts in. He carries the aroma of ashtray around him like Pig-pen's dust cloud. This fellow also is a bit odd in that he seems to be in and out of his apartment several times a day, everyday, at odd times as if he doesn't have a regular job. I've noticed he often is running in and out at 8:30, 10:00, 1:00, 3:00, etc. However, he must have a job because our apartment is 110,000 yen and his is bigger so it may be more expensive. Other than his odd hours and smoking, he sometimes plays music very loud but we can only hear it from the walkway in front of our place when we approach our front door. We never hear anything through the walls.

For those who don't know, the "DK" on the diagram is for "dining kitchen" and is supposed to indicate that room is to be used for both a kitchen and a dining room but our room is really too small for that considering there is so little built-in cabinet space. If we had overhead shelving built-in and didn't require extra cabinetry for dishes and food storage, we might be able to get a table in there. Doing so now though would require us to constantly walk around a smallish table in the middle of the room and it'd look awkward in addition to being a hassle to constantly circumnavigate.

Most apartments are advertised with "DK" as part of the information. Our apartment is a "2DK" meaning it is a "dining kitchen" plus 2 other rooms. When my husband lived in Kita-senju alone, he lived in a 1DK but it was also one of the aforementioned places with a tunnel-like hallway. In fact, it felt a bit like a barbell with two rectangular rooms at the end of a hall. His apartment there had what is called a "unit bath". It was a smallish western-style tub in the same room with his toilet and a sink. It's considered a "unit" because the plastic of the tub and the plastic floor were all from one huge molded piece of plastic.

Our apartment has a relatively old-style set-up with a water closet containing only a toilet and a separate Japanese-style tiled shower room with a very deep but completely square and short Japanese tub. You can immerse yourself up to nearly your shoulders but your legs are all cramped in. I guess it was designed for shorter people. We never use the tub but I do love the roomy shower area right next to it. I've watched some Japanese apartment tours on Youtube and our shower area is definitely one of the bigger ones among this particular style.

I've asked several of my students about what they believe a place like ours should cost and, since they are taking their lessons in the place, they can gauge its size, age, and amenities accurately. Most of them feel that it is appropriately priced for its size and location. A few said it's slightly expensive and a few said it's slightly cheap. I will note that our rent was 93,000 yen when we first moved in and progressively raised to the point where it is now though it hasn't been changed for at least the last ten years.

Windswept Baking

The poor little fellow on the right in front isn't getting his share of heat and has become the runt of the litter.

Though I took delivery of a new oven a little over a month ago, I haven't put it through all of its paces yet. The biggest reason for this has been the lingering hot and humid weather. One is hardly inspired to bake goodies when one is baking oneself everyday.

While I've made several savory dishes and some cinnamon rolls in the new oven with very good results, I hadn't yet attempted to make anything in the cake/muffin style. This evening, I gave a batch of pumpkin muffins a try and learned about some of the uneven heating patterns of the new oven. To be fair, all ovens seem to have this sort of problem though I'm guessing more expensive ones may lack them. My former oven was always hotter toward the front.

The new oven is a convection oven though so I had though it might be a bit better but the muffins tell no lies. If you look at the picture above, you can see it heats unevenly such that the left side bakes faster than the right and the air seems to blow harder from left to right such that the tops appear rather windswept. This doesn't make for very pretty presentation but it's not a big deal. The main thing I'll have to look out for is the fact that the right side seems to stay "raw" while the left cooks through. I'll have to turn the tray around at the mid-point of the cooking time to accommodate this weakness.

The finished muffins. They erupted over the sides because of the way they rose unevenly. Note how the ones in the back were swept both left and right and toward the center. They don't look so great but I'm sure they'll taste fine.

The odd thing is that all the muffins seem to have had their contents shift with the breeze in different directions. All I can imagine is that the convection blows in various directions and, depending on the position of the food on the tray, they are pushed one way or the other. One thing I did notice though was that regardless of position, the silicon bake-ware (the blue stuff) did a better job than the old aluminum ones. I had my husband pick up one "tin" of them while in the U.S. (they are much more expensive and harder to find in Japan) and now I wish I'd had him get two. Silicon "pans" are a bit flimsy and hard to handle when you fill them up (you have to put them on a flat surface that you can carry over to the oven) but they're better at conducting heat, cool off more quickly, easier to clean and don't require oiling (though it does help to oil them a little, they can be turned inside out to remove foods).

Militant Minimalism

Lately, I've been looking around for more resources to improve small space living and I've run across some rather extreme notions and opinions which seem to be less about changing your space to support your "living" and more about shoehorning how you live into an aesthetic concept. While I absolutely respect the right of people to live their lives as they see fit and recognize that everyone has a different sense of style, sometimes, it seems that people go too far.

Before I progress any further, I'd like to address the notions that the uninitiated westerner seems to have developed about Japanese people and a minimalist aesthetic. There are some people, mainly your interior design types, who seem to think the Japanese are all sitting in bare rooms with the odd elegantly placed item here and there while viewing their rock gardens with perfectly raked sand "waves" through a window and sipping green tea as they sit seiza-style (on your kneels with heels planted on buttocks) in a kimono. I'd like to be the first to say this image is unadulterated poppycock. Most Japanese people who live in houses have one room that might resemble this sort of thing and the vast majority live in places crammed to the gills with crap. If you don't believe me, check out Tokyo: A Certain Style by Kyoichi Tsuzuki. What I sometimes see through random open windows as I go around my neighborhood is clearly displayed in his book.

Getting back to these web sites that endorse decluttering though, I've read some pretty extreme views. One site decided to set up a gallery that any reader who had cleared his or her desk could post a picture on. The reason for this was to show off how various people had managed to tidy up one of the spaces that is often in an advanced state of chaos because it's where work is usually done. Reading some of the comments on these pages, it became clear that some people can't tell the difference between "uncluttered" and "empty".

One person remarked that she was appalled at what was being posted as she showed off her "desk" (actually, a small table) with a notebook computer, a desk lamp and a bud vase. Somewhere in this person's office space, there has to be the equivalent of her desk's portrait of Dorian Grey holding all the stuff she needs to do work at a desk so that she can snootily put down people who have the audacity to organize and tidy the stuff they use and actually keep at their desks. When this person needs to deal with her bills or any paperwork, I'm guessing she runs to a shameful, secret hidey-hole where she stashes unsightly paperwork, pens, notepaper, etc. and drags it all to the desk then and does her work. Eyes darting around nervously for witnesses, she then rapidly deposits it all back to it's holding pen so her barren desk is once again free of unsightly debris. Of course, I guess it's also possible that she doesn't do any actual work and just sits at her computer all day criticizing people who use their desks as desks.

This attitude was nothing though compared to some of the tips about getting rid of things you don't need in your apartment to declutter. One of the headings for one of the posts was something like "shoes are clutter". They weren't recommending you get rid of your Carrie Bradshaw-like collection of shoes in order to free your closet from the groaning burden of several hundred pairs of shoes. They were recommending you go barefoot if you could possibly manage to do so in order to have as few shoes as possible littering your home. I guess stepping on a tick and developing Lyme Disease in summer is just fine so long as you've got one less pair of shoes sullying your decor!

Another suggestion was that people could get rid of their beds and just sleep on the floor. Since I currently live in a culture where people often sleep on the floor out of necessity, I can see where this may have value if you live in a very small place. However, even in Japan, it seems a great many people sleep in beds if they have the space. The only ones who use futon are the ones who live in an apartment that has so few rooms that they still need to put their bedding away regularly to allow the space to serve double duty as both living and sleeping quarters or those who are older and just used to camping-style accommodations. The idea that one would sleep on the floor mainly to service a militant minimalist aesthetic rather than a philosophical wish to have few possessions, a desire to sleep on a hard surface or a space-induced need seems a step too far.

This sort of extremism is a good example of how many people are unable to find moderation in any thing in their lives. We either live in piled up messes or pristine vacant spaces. There's no logic or pragmatism applied to the notions people are applying. They seem to simply adopt a philosophy and live by it regardless of the potential consequences or practicality.

Little Boxes

The old joke that your kids like the boxes their toys come in at Christmas time more than the toys themselves wouldn't ring true to us if it didn't have a grain of truth. When we were kids, any time my parents bought a new appliance or something fairly large, there were arguments over who got the box and what we would do with it. I remember taking big boxes and setting up little houses in a hollow area of some trees at one point and feeling that I had my own little place in the world and I couldn't be happier. Of course, I was about 7 or so at the time.

I'm not sure of the psychology of our love of boxes. I guess it could be that they represent shelter and we respond to the shape from some primitive part of our minds which associates the general shape with the potential for security, warmth, and safety. It could also be that we are conditioned to like them because so many good and new things come in them. Personally, I think humans have an affinity for geometry which appeals to a shared aesthetic sense. This applies not only to boxes but to any balanced shape.


For some time, I've been trying to solve a clutter solution in my one and only bathroom shelf and have been looking for boxes to hold the necessary tidbits we keep in this small but very necessary space. The box pictured at the top of this post is a Japanese paper box from the local 100 yen shop and it turned out to be perfectly sized to fit my shelf.


This little shelf has always been a bit of a curiosity to me. It's clearly homemade out of leftover paneling material but this particular type of paneling is nowhere in our apartment. Based on the size, I'm nearly certain it was made to hold extra rolls of toilet paper as each little area perfectly accommodates one roll. Since our apartment has no built-in storage anywhere, let alone the luxury of a medicine cabinet, I've always used it to store the sort of stuff most people can hide behind their bathroom mirror back home.


Once the boxes hid the chaos of scattered unguents and potions, I decided to tidy up the big bottles of Tums and pain relievers by decanting them into small, corked milk bottles (also from the 100 yen shop). To distinguish them, I put a letter on the cork. They're up high and the letters can't be seen unless you pull them down but I know which is which based on position. The letters are there for my easily-confused husband who can't keep up with all the re-arranging I do.

My bathroom shelf "before".

With my little ersatz medicine box in order, I couldn't leave the tension bar shelf in the state it was in and also revamped it with recycled plastic drawers from other areas I've purged.

My bathroom shelf "after".

The white paper in the front of the clear drawers helps hide the chaos of the contents. It's still not the model of a pristine minimalist water closet with shiny new fixtures but it's good enough for me (at least for now).


The 100 yen shop had two types of these paper boxes and I incorporated one into my desk set-up to store odds and ends that were previously visible desktop supplies.


I'm not sure how well these boxes will hold up as time goes by since they are made of paper and will likely be impossible to clean should they get too dusty. I also don't know if the humid Japanese weather will eventually undo their glued together joints but they are quite a nice little treat for now.

Tiny Things, Big Problems

Any time something goes wrong, people are apt to quote (or mis-quote) Murphy's Law. Murphy's Law is often said to be, "whatever can go wrong, will go wrong" though Wikipedia states the original law was "things will go wrong in any given situation, if you give them a chance." The latter seems slightly more reasonable than the former given that it allows for some sort of intervention or error in the equation, but Murphy's Law, like so many other pessimistic and cynical "laws" concocted by wags who everyone likes to read and quote, is simply wrong.

The truth is that, in any given time frame, very little goes wrong. If Murphy's Law were true, very few of us would ever manage to successfully leave the house and go to work each day. The alarm clock wouldn't go off, we'd spill coffee in our laps, the buttons would fall off our shirts, zippers would get painfully caught on sensitive fleshy parts, we'd choke on breakfast, trip and fall on the way out the door, and our trains would all get derailed. Clearly, many things go right far more often than they go wrong.

Sometimes though, things do go wrong and they do so in the tiniest and most unexpected ways. Those things are hard to detect and make trouble-shooting the resulting big problems that much harder. Though I wouldn't say I had a recent experience with Murphy's Law, I would say I was ever so slightly careless in a fashion I did not notice with unexpectedly large and irritating consequences.

Yesterday, I experienced three random power outages when the fuse kept blowing in the apartment. This was particularly baffling because I wasn't using as much power as we have in the past. In fact, in the past, we've run two air conditioners, the television, the oven, 3 computers and their affiliated equipment, and had on several lights with no ill effects. Since the weather had been a bit cooler as of late, I wasn't using the air conditioning when the second of these outages occurred and nothing other than a few lights and two sleeping computers were on.

A few months ago, we had the power capacity of our apartment increased in order to accommodate a second air conditioner and I was starting to wonder if something from that operation was going amiss or if perhaps we'd inadvertently been swapped back to our old capacity. I was dreadingthe high probability that we'd have to go and bother our ever-so-helpful landlord again and ask him to contact the electric company to have them come for a look at the situation. It's not that he wouldn't smile and act as if there is nothing in the world he'd rather do than waste his time assisting us but just that I think he's already done more than his share of such things in the past year and I would prefer not to trouble him if it can be avoided.

I tried to think of what could be causing this problem if it wasn't related to the over-use of various appliances (which it clearly was not). The only other odd incident I'd had with the power and fuses blowing occurred a few weeks ago when I plugged in an extension cord that I'd accidentally knocked loose. At the moment I plugged it in, the fuse blew and I figured that somehow that cord had shorted something out. When I threw the switch back, all was well and I didn't experience any other problems until yesterday.

I figured the next course of action was to consider replacing that extension cord. I really don't know much about how electrical systems work but I figured a malfunctioning cord could be causing shorts. When I looked down at it, I noticed that their was a wire from a 3-prong adapter with a grounding wire very close to the extension cord. As far as I know, there are no grounded outlets in Japanese places (though this could be related to my particular apartment and not all domiciles) so I have to leave the wires hanging free when I have to use such adaptors.

Yes, I know it's all dusty but I bet your extension cords aren't much cleaner.

I reached down to move the grounding wire and it shorted out the system and the fuse blew again. I then realized that the problem was that this had gotten caught in the plug weeks ago when I plugged that cord in but I hadn't noticed. Yesterday, I vacuumed and I'm guessing I pushed the cord a bit while vacuuming the sides of the living room and that pushed it closer and caused the random shorting out.

It's amazing how one little errant wire and not noticing where it had gotten to could cause all sorts of trouble. I'm very, very glad now that I didn't bother the landlord as I'm sure it would have been incredibly embarrassing to bring an electrician in and have him find out I made such a careless mistake which may have ended up wasting the time of two other people.

My Home, Your Trashcan

This morning I was standing in the kitchen preparing an English muffin for breakfast when I heard the familiar sound of something being shoved through the slot in our front door. If you live in Tokyo, this is certainly not an uncommon experience, but most businesses pile up their flyers in your mailbox rather than bother to walk from door-to-door leaving them inside your apartment. Usually, it's the religious types or the gas or electric meter readers who have to be at the door anyway who will trouble themselves to leave their detritus in your genkan (entryway for shoes).

While I'm accustomed to having to clean up the odd copy of The Watchtower or a slip of paper from the electric company telling me how many kilowatts I've consumed this month, I have never experienced what I did this morning which is someone pushing a small handful of papers through the door. When I looked down, I felt like someone had just used my door slot as a litter bin.

From a certain point of view, there really is no difference between tossing trash through some one's open window and into their home and dumping a bunch of advertising paper onto their floor via the door slot. I have to go over and pick it up and toss it in the trash now. It's a much more obnoxious thing to do than leaving it in the mailbox as junk mail (which is as inevitable in life as rude people and dogs piddling on the carpet) which at least comes in stacks in a container outside your domicile and are easy to scoop up. I'm sufficiently civilized that I never toss a bunch of papers on the floor in my apartment but someone else can come along and legally do so.

In the recent past, there were problems with people tossing inappropriate things through door slots as a form of vandalism or possibly revenge for perceived injustices between parties. At one point, there was a rash of incidents where people were cramming food through the slots, particularly cooked bowls of ramen and vegetables. Some people also poured paint into the slots to leave a more permanent mess.

After those incidents, one would hope the government would attempt to regulate access to door slots and only allow them to be used for things like failed parcel delivery notices and newspaper delivery (which is, after all, the main reason for the slots as newspapers don't fit in most standard mailboxes). Unfortunately, the government is either too supportive of the businesses who want to litter your life with advertising or too disinterested in enforcing any sort of regulation to trouble themselves with this issue.

My Apartment Is Getting Bigger

Those of you who have no interest in how I continually move the furniture around in our small place in order to maximize efficiency and are tired of hearing about the joys of de-cluttering may want to turn away now. I imagine I've just lost 99% of the male readers at at least 20% of the female ones but that's the way it goes. ;-)

My kitchen storage area "before". (As always, click on any picture to see a larger version for more detail.)

The gargantuan shelf pictured above has been in our place since before the day we moved in. As I mentioned in previous posts, as a wedding gift to my husband and I, my brother-in-law furnished our place to a utilitarian state from Salvation Army finds as well as arranged for the apartment itself (he didn't pay for the apartment, just the furniture...he's not incredibly rich, just helpful). In addition to the shelf pictured above, he also bought us a chest of drawers which I believe was designed for kimono storage or bed clothes because the draws were really long and shallow, a kitchen table, and several futons. Having these items when we got here was incredibly helpful.

The shelf shown above was probably more than 22 years old when it finally went to the old cabinet's burial ground (where its spirit will frolic and cavort with other discarded pieces of cabinetry). We had it for 18 years and I'm sure whoever had it before had it for at least 4 years and possibly far longer. The handles had broken off of 3 of the 4 drawers (hence the reason I removed them) and the laminate that was covering it was starting to crack and peel off in a lot of areas. Every once in awhile, I'd see what looked like an ultra-thin paint chip on the floor when I was vacuuming and that was this old shelf shedding it's coating like an old man losing his hair.

About 3 weeks ago, I was sliding one of the glass doors shut and it cracked the entire length of the door along the point where an indentation was in the glass to allow you to grip and slide it. If I hadn't put plastic on it to make it look frosted, I imagine it would have fallen down and there may have been a potentially ugly and bloody accident but the plastic held the pieces together sufficiently to spare me that. The door, however, was now useless and I had to choose between finally ditching that old crumbling (but highly useful) thing or keeping it without the doors. Given that I covered the glass in the first place so that I wouldn't have to look at the unappealing jumble of dishes inside and it's continual state of decay, I decided to retire it.

My kitchen storage area "after". The dishes are safely out of sight in the cabinet on the right.

I didn't want to buy any new furniture to replace the cabinet for several reasons. First of all, I think we have more than enough furniture for our place's size and it'd be better to try and reduce the quantity overall. Second, we're trying to save money so spending it on new stuff, particularly when we're operating with an eye toward leaving Japan rather than an eye toward staying, seems wasteful. Besides, we've had to replace every appliance in our place in the past 2 years except the television and washing machine so we've flexed our consumer muscles enough lately. Finally, I've been wanting to move our oven away from it's resting spot next to the refrigerator literally for years. Having it there has been causing the refrigerator to work over-time compensating for the heat being put out right next to it and it's just really bad in terms of energy efficiency and the life of the refrigerator.

The rolling cart serves double duty for storage and a surface we can place right in front of the oven should we need it. Those dark spots on top are where the varnish has worn away. I really should re-finish it! Those baskets are mainly full of baking and cooking supplies which are infrequently used or the remainders of what can't yet be decanted into canisters.

Since it was going to take 3 weeks for the "dai gomi" (large garbage) people to come and pick up the cabinet, I set to work on some deep (cutting down into the marrow in the bones of pack-rattery) de-cluttering and space optimization. I threw out 2 trash bags of stuff, mainly related to inefficiencies in my filing system and old "Before and After" magazines I didn't want to let go of, but also about a half dozen dishes I was never going to use. In terms of space optimization, at this point, I'm literally looking for any open space in a drawer or cabinet which is only 2/3 full and trying to fill that space without cramming it full. Through doing this, I was able to empty out the entire shelf that you see in my kitchen now. I guess it just goes to show that you often have more to work with than you think.

Behind the canisters, I have a tray to toss random food items into for extra storage. Having the tray allows me to pull everything down or out and makes sure nothing falls down behind the shelf. You may recognize the jar of Skippy on the right from it's trademark blue lid.

The main problem I've always had trying to move the oven was that it is nearly impossible to find a shelf that was strong enough to take its weight and had the right sort of material to take the heat. Most of the shelves designed for ovens are relatively small and low so they provide too little storage space or are too wide for my available space. They're also very expensive. So, I decided to re-purpose the tall metal shelf our T.V. used to be on when it was in our bedroom. This skeletal metal monster has been a real problem to place ever since I changed around my living room and bedroom and I've actually taken it apart and put it back together 6 times and put it in several different places in the past several months. If you enjoy manipulating large, unwieldy, sharp, metal pieces, this is an ideal hobby but I was getting pretty tired of it.

One problem with the shelf is that the slots don't always space in a way that works for my needs. I couldn't both create a storage area for my frying pans at the top and easily fit the toaster oven into the shelving if I had to put the bottom shelf up high enough for the rolling shelf to fit under it. I ended up having to re-construct the shelf with the toaster oven "trapped" in there. It just fits under the lip of the shelf (the shelves are like shallow boxes turned upside down). If I ever need to take out the toaster oven, I'll have to tear the whole shelf apart to get it out. :-p I'm hoping, however, that this is the last time I'll have to puzzle that shelf apart and together and that it's found a penultimate home (the final resting place is obviously with its now deceased predecessor).

My old table and refrigerator set-up "before".

Besides no longer cooking my refrigerator along with my food, moving the oven freed up the space on top of the table. For the first time ever, we have the option to use the table top for what it was intended though I don't know that we'll ever actually sit at it and eat. It is, however, very nice to have all that area to work with when preparing food rather than having to work in a cramped space in front of the oven as I did before. The table, incidentally, is the last piece of original furniture left from the items my brother-in-law initially bought for us and we have no plans to replace it.

My new table and refrigerator set-up ("after").

After removing the oven, I had to deal with the wall that had been lightly-scorched by the oven's proximity so I decided to cover it with some 100 yen shop finds. The cork board is empty because I just put it up yesterday but I'll probably use it for recipes and reminders in the future. I mainly chose it though because it was one of the few things large enough to cover the space. The pictures above it are print-outs of food from a Kai's Power Photos collection I've had for a long time in wooden 100 yen frames.


In my attempt to fill vertical space more efficiently, I re-did the storage on the top of my refrigerator. A plastic book-holder is there to keep the boxes in place (it's the green thing you can barely see). I also killed two birds with one stone and found a place for the overly-many plastic storage containers we have and got rid of un-tidy bags of chips and croutons by decanting them into the containers. It looks better and means fewer containers in my reduced shelf space.


The sink area was little changed though I could see rather clearly how yucky the front of my gas table was. I'll have to work on cleaning it up though I don't know if it's possible to scrub off nearly two decades of dust and grime. The only difference here is that I hung a few baskets to keep our toothbrushes (which used to be on the table as well) and some of the spices.


The counter area was not changed at all. Since this is a record of various aspects of our life in Japan for my own reference, I'm including a picture here for the sake of completeness.

The laundry/shower area "before".

The one part of the apartment which I really feel still needs some work is the laundry area. It's probably the hardest because it has to be a catch-all for cleaning products and storage of dry goods that we've had to purchase by the case from the Foreign Buyer's Club. I also used to store tools there but have since moved them into storage under the sofa. I think the landlords who decided not to give us any storage space should have to keep my cleaning products in their huge house. :-p Their genkan (shoebox) is bigger than our one closet.

The laundry/shower area "after".

While I've cleared this area out a bit of it, it still needs some work. The bicycle pump, for instance, really has nowhere to go though I must say there's no excuse for not having covered the front of those clear drawers with white paper to mask the chaos within aside from procrastination.

I love new furniture and have had to squelch the impulse to go the easy path of buying things more than once while doing my alterations but I must say that it's gratifying to just use what we have. It's especially nice because every piece of furniture we get rid of makes the place "bigger". Virtually every room now has more space due to the changes I've made and it feels more open and it is easier to move around in. I'm sure there's some fancy Feng shui reason for this but it's all just common sense to me.

An Equation

This morning, I decided I'd better go out and pump up my low tires before heading off to the market. The front tire seemed okay after about 25 pumps but the back tire refused to stay up even about 50 sweaty pushes in the blazing sun. It was clear that the tire needed repair rather than air. The first part of the equation at hand today is: a flat tire.

My husband usually deals with taking the bikes to the local repair fellow when there's a problem but he has more than enough on his plate on the weekends and far too much on the days when he's working with his 48 hour work week. I decided I'd just bite the bullet and walk the bike to the shop myself because I wanted to spare my husband the time and effort on his day off, particularly since he's already going to have to deal with some dai gomi (large trash) scheduling and sticker purchasing to get rid of our old oven and a huge shelf we're abandoning after 18 years of use.

When I set off on my little walk to the shop, I noticed that some other places along Ome Kaido had their metal shutters down and were closed. I considered for a moment that Thursday might be the day the shop just happened to be closed but thought that was unlikely as Wednesday and Monday are the big weekdays for places to close up. It didn't occur to me that this week is the first week of the O-bon summer holiday season in Japan and that the shop may be closed for that reason. In fact, the bike shop was closed as were a great many other shops on the local shopping streets. Part two of the equation was: the summer holiday season.

The problem at this point was that I've got a bike with a flat tire and a desperate need to get some shopping for food done. I also need to pay some bills that are due today or risk having my gas, electric, and water access cut-off. While it's unlikely they'd shut me down for being a little late (today is the actual due date), one doesn't want to take chances when people are dropping dead or being hospitalized all over Japan as the temperatures hover near or over 100 degrees.

Since I was somewhat closer to a few of the places I needed to shop at than I'd be if I just went back home, I decided to just push the dead bike along and walk to the shops. I knew that it'd take some time (in the end, from pumping the tires in the sun to getting home, it took about an hour and a half) but the bike isn't going to get fixed any time soon so I felt it was better to do it while I was already close than to walk home and think about how to deal with things later.

The local carpet and draperies shop.

As I was walking to the first market, I passed by the local carpet and draperies place where we bought our new living room carpet. I need a carpet square to put under a metal shelf I plan to move into the kitchen so that it's spiky supports don't tunnel through the newish kitchen flooring and (eventually) through the floorboards. The finished carpet bits (which I guess are throw rugs) are in the picture above just behind the hanging "500 yen" sign. As I was pawing through them and checking out their sizes (my shelf is 40 cm x 60 cm and I wanted one that wasn't too big or small), the fellow who works there and delivered our carpet popped out and started helpfully educating me about the sizes of the bits I was looking at by saying things like, "that one is long." In the end, I found an acceptable one which was 45 cm x 65 cm (which he helpfully told me was "smaller" than the "long" one) and purchased it.

The man who works in the shop is really quite nice and well-meaning. I really don't know how he stays in business though since I rarely see anyone buying things there when I pass by (and I go by two or three times a week) and we shop there only once every 8 years or so. These shops that mysteriously linger on despite seeming to sell nearly nothing are all over Tokyo. Roy at Q-taro once made a post about such a place and I speculated that they're intentional failures as tax dodges for high value property but I really don't know how they manage.

As I was walking from the carpet shop to the market, my back started to bother me a bit so I took advantage of the useless bike I was pushing around and leaned a bit on it. By the time I got home, this "leaning" and the friction it caused on my thumb and palm actually resulted in a sizable blister. I didn't even notice what was going on until I scraped something against my thumb while putting away groceries and ripped off the thin skin cover the blister to expose the raw skin underneath. I can't tell you how much fun this was to clean off with rubbing alcohol but lets just say it was a new adventure in pain.

The cheapest local market, Utakaraya, with its fine selection of what I'm sure are semi-aged vegetables out in front.

Getting back to my little journey though... By the time I reached the market, the heat was starting to really bother me. I'm the type of person who has never known a suntan because I'm so fair-skinned that I make the journey from ghostly white to freckle to lobster in a very short time. There is no pit stop at "tan" between. I'm also exceptionally sensitive to heat and I don't mean that I'm one of those whiny people who says I can't tolerate heat because I get sweaty and uncomfortable. I mean that I get faint, nauseous, and feel like I'm going to pass out when I'm in the sun and heat for too long.

I was thinking at about this time that it'd be a good idea to get the shopping done and try to get home as quickly as possible but I'm hindered by old women who linger in front of the piles of carrots poking at and inspecting every package to make sure they get the very one which is absolutely the best for their 100 yen. I get tired of this and snatch my carrots from around the old bat who seems to be the official carrot inspector (I'm surprised she didn't whip out a magnifying glass and inspect them for blemishes) and make my way inside the store, grab a few avocados and the greenest bananas on the top of the pile (this time reaching around a middle-aged woman who needed to lift every single one of the bunches on top to see if any "better" ones were lurking underneath). I glanced at the wilted lettuce and moved on to the meat section. Six diet Cokes and a 4-pack of cream cheese and ham "panini" later, I'm fighting through check-out where a mother bemuses herself by allowing her 2 sons to each hold onto multi-packs of tiny blueberry yogurt containers separately so the check-out woman can't finish the job of ringing up the woman's purchase and so I can't get out of there.

It wasn't that getting out of there was such a great deal. At least Utakaraya is air conditioned to around 80 degrees whereas it's closing in on 100 outside. All I've got to look forward to is a walk in the heat while pushing my bike with the flat tire and now also carrying a heavy back-pack. The cheap housewife bikes most of us use for dealing with daily running around aren't all that heavy when you have inertia and you're riding them but they can be a chore to push around for a long time, especially when it's sweltering and when you have to push them up hills.

I decided to take the back way home because it's shorter but I overlooked the fact that it also has no shade. Ome Kaido has trees all over it but the back street is almost all cement walls and pavement being cooked in the sun. The sun is beating down on me and I literally feel like I'm stewing like a sausage in its skin. The third part of the equation is: 97 degree-heat and no shade.

By the time I was approaching home, my heart was really pounding even though I was not greatly exerting myself. I figured it'd be prudent to walk home slowly given how badly I'm reacting to the baking I'm taking but this just leaves me out in these horrible conditions longer. I'm starting to fear that the sum of the equation is going to me lying on the road suffering from heat stroke but I talked myself down from such notions and made my way back.

In the end, I was okay after a bit of a woozy spell while I slowly sipped water and let the air conditioner do its thing. The valuable lesson I've taken from this is that I need to live with my limits rather than try and tough it out, and that I should only shop after dark and allow my husband to fix the bike from now on.

Flat Tire + holiday season + baking heat with no shade = stay at home!

New Oven

I recently read that the difference between people who shop so much that they end up living beyond their means or at least who shop for recreation is that they don't feel any guilt when they spend money on things. If you're the sort of person who feels guilty for spending money, you're far less likely to be a shopaholic or to spend money you don't have on meaningless crap.

I used to be guilt-free in regards to buying things then at some point that changed and now I find it hard to buy things that I arguably need without feeling guilty. I think it has something to do with not working full-time anymore though I'll admit it started at least 3 years before I quit. Perhaps it's age and the feeling that "stuff" isn't really making me happy anymore.

Anyway, I've been limping by with my old oven (which must be at least 13 years old by now) since I posted about problems with the timer knob in April. In an attempt to use it until it was truly dead, I was baking or roasting in a step by step process in order to accommodate the knob that would not set a proper time until the oven got really, really hot. The process went something like this:

1. Painstakingly attempt to dial up one minute of time at the pre-set temperature and push the start button to initiate the pre-heat sequence.
   
2. Wait 15 minutes for pre-heat sequence to complete then place food in the oven where it ran for one minute. Look at the clock to keep track of cooking time since the timer wasn't going to do the trick.
3. Repeat step one.
4. Repeat step one.
5. Repeat step one.
   
6. Painstakingly attempt to dial up more than one minute (4 minutes was a lucky day) to continue cooking.
7. Repeat step 6.
8. Depending on how hot a day it is and my luck, I may be able to finally coax the oven to run dial up the remaining cooking time (calculated by the clock on the wall, of course) or repeat step 6 again.

You can see how this might be a problem. What was worse was that the timer was even more useless when using the microwave function because the oven didn't heat up and the timer didn't get easier to set. The only way I could use it was by using the auto-cook function whereby you open the door to activate the microwave, close the door and push "start" and the microwave was supposed to auto-detect when it reached whatever random temperature it felt was correct for that food. Sometimes the food was only lukewarm. Sometimes it overcooked. When I heated water or milk in there, it more often than not boiled over if I didn't keep an eye on it.

My old oven. It worked as good as it looked.

I even soldiered on after the lower left bezel cracked and the front glass plate slipped down some. I just taped it up and kept on going. After months and months now (possibly well over a year) of fighting with it and it getting harder and harder to set the timer on even on hot days (initially, it worked pretty well in the summer but poorly in the winter), I found that I was starting to hate it so much that I didn't want to cook with it at all. When the notion to bake or roast something popped into my head, the laborious process of dealing with the oven chased it right out again. It was at this point that I decided it was time to bite the bullet and get a new oven.

The two main criteria for the new oven were a relatively modest price and that it's internal cavity be large enough to cook a whole chicken. After considerable research, I found a Mitsubishi for about ¥32,000 ($271) which accommodates two 32 cm (12.6 inch) square ceramic trays. Since my old oven uses two 32 cm square metal trays, I figured the size should be sufficient and the price well within what might be expected for such an oven. The old Toshiba we bought was ¥80,000 ($678) but part of that high price was a reflection of the fact that such ovens were not as commonly purchased in those days. Based on my pre-purchase research, I believe a comparable one today would be ¥60,000 ($508) or so.

The shiny new oven. It works better than its tacky color scheme makes it look.

The new oven is just as wide and deep as the old one but not quite as high. I'm pretty sure it can still roast a whole chicken but it may be rather close to the top of the oven. The new one is one of those fancy convection things which swirls the air around the food for even cooking. Our old oven twirled the food around on a circular plate in the center and left the air alone. I often had to turn food around at the mid-baking point because the front was hotter than the back and it wouldn't cook evenly otherwise. The new one also has more custom temperature settings including the ability to heat food to precise temperatures and it allows you to cook with steam though I'm not sure how useful that function is going to be for me. Except for the steam cooking, I'm pretty sure most of these functions are old hat for people who aren't using antiquated equipment.

I used the microwave function several times last night and this morning to re-heat food and make tea and it was a delight having knobs turn and actually set the time as I wanted. The target temperature function was also pretty nifty though I can't say I know what temperature is best for certain foods yet. I tested out the oven today by making a banana bread recipe which is tried and true. Since I know how it usually turns out, a comparison between the old and new for this particular item was easy.

Here is where I ran across the differences between a cheap and an expensive oven. For one thing, the oven can't be set at 5 degree temperature variations. It's either 170 degrees (338 degrees) or 180 degrees (356 degrees) and not 175 (which is often the preferred baking temperature as 176.6 is 350 degrees - the near universal setting for baked goods). Also, I noticed that the door has an overzealous spring on its hinge and slams shut rapidly and loudly unless you ease it up by hand.

The oven also appears to have a separate preheat cycle and a separate timed cycle but I could be misunderstanding how to use it. Today, I preheated it to 180 degrees and it beeped when it reached that temperature but I couldn't figure out how to set the timer for 45 minutes. I had to stop the oven then switch to one of the other 3 oven modes and then set the time and temperature again. One good point though is that the pre-heat time is easily 1/3 the length of time that the old oven took, possibly it's even faster than that. This is certainly saving on energy consumption.


Since I had to choose too high or too low for the temperature, I settled on too high because I was afraid too low would impede the rising of the banana bread. This made it darken very rapidly compared to baking in the old oven. I also noticed it didn't rise as much in the center but rose more evenly overall (because of the convection). About 2/3 of the way through the baking, I reduced the temperature to 170 degrees. Next time, I'll have to split the time or try the lower temperature first.

Though it is a bit darker, it turned out very well. The texture seems softer and better than ever. I'm not sure if this was a random preparation factor (though I doubt it as this is my standard no fuss banana bread recipe made largely in the food processor so there's little variation in method) or the convection oven's influence.

The irony is that last night after I received the new oven and had set it up, I started to feel guilty for not having endured dealing with the old one until it conked out for good. Somewhere along the line I went from the type of person who blithely bought a new Macintosh every year and a half to the type who feels bad about replacing a dying piece of necessary equipment. I've got to work on finding the happy medium between those two, especially since I also ordered a new toaster oven. ;-)