On the Side of the Narrow Road – (Flat Tire in Tokyo)

I think I have mentioned before that driving in Japan is not my favorite thing to do. Yesterday upped that sentiment by quite a lot.

Japan has narrow roads and shoulders that are not very wide. When you drive your car has to undergo a rigorous inspection every two years where they inspect everything and it usually ends up costing you quite a bit in repairs, because everything is based on prevention. To keep you from ending up on the side of the road. This I realized, is a very good system.

But if you run over something random (we still have no idea what happened) you can still end up on the side of the road.

Our tire blew on the Chuo. Chuo is major road (think I-35 in downtown Austin only much narrower) supposedly the speed limit is 80 kilometers per hour, but we get passed when we are going 120. There are sound barriers on either side, so there is no where to go to get off of the road. We were a little concerned about not getting over in time because traffic was moving so fast, and people were not slowing, to not to eat our wheel, but it was fine after all.

We got out of the car and looked at the tire – there were little pieces of it strewn quite a ways back down the road. We walked over to the “safety area” a little inlet with a phone that says “SOS” this is a clever invention, it lets you identify where you are and connects only with roadside service. Anthony called the base with his cell phone, and I tried to figure out the box. There was a button that said “push if you don’t speak Japanese well” I pushed that one, but wasn’t sure if anything happened or not. Anthony got a hold of the base interpreter.We decided to try and change the tire ourselves as roadside service would be about 15,000 yen. (Roughly $200).

All Japanese cars have flares in them. We pulled out the flares thinking that would keep the traffic back further from the car. Except that the instructions were in Japanese only. We never could figure out how to get those darns things to work. Okay – plan B.

If you have spent any amount of time driving in Japan, you will have encountered the red-stick-waving traffic directors. They are usually quite comical to watch – so I used the flares (that we couldn’t figure out how to ignite, so they resembled red-sticks) to wave the traffic further out. To my astonishment, the cars did exactly that. Unfortunately, the previous owners of our car had put on new rims, but hadn’t bought a new lug wrench. It didn’t fit.

Anthony called the base interpreter (thank you Mr. Kobayashi!) who called roadside service and gave them our location based on the SOS box number. About this time two highway patrol guys showed up – in a combination of bad-Japanese and halting English (their English was better than our Japanese for the record) and creative sign-language, they tried to help. They also did not have the right lug-wrench. But it was fun watching the guy waving the traffic around the car with a giant orange flag! They were super nice and were seemed really intent on helping us poor gaijin (foreigners) not to get hurt, emphasizing several times to stay behind the railed area in case of sleeping drivers. This English-Japanese-gesture conversation I wish I had on video!

Eventually they got another call and left us with a big orange cone behind our car. Japan AAA showed up just a few minutes later, towed the car to the nearest rest stop and changed the tire for us (he had the right lug wrench! Finally! When we sell this car we may have to charge extra for nice rims ). The spare donut seemed a little low on air though.

We were about 30 minutes from base, so the guy just towed us back to base. (We didn’t have enough yen to pay him anyway). Mr. Kobayashi came out to the gate as Mr. AAA seemed really intent on telling us something. Turns out our other back tire was cracking and he was concerned that it needed to be changed too. He charged only 10,000 yen ($130) and gave us the lug wrench attachment so that we could change our own tire next time.

It was days like yesterday that remind me how much I love Japan. In the midst of a crazy situation, we were really blessed by the kindness of the people who helped. And thank God for getting us off that crazy road alive and unharmed!

 

 

 

 

 

Patio Gardens

So the one thing that people always ask about living in an apartment rather than a house is about the yard. I love flowers and love gardens. But to be honest, I don’t miss the grass at all. The pictures are this years flowers, though it is only May, so I am hoping to see them grow quite a bit before the fall.

On the whole lawn question – I don’t miss it. I haven’t had one most of my adult life and when I did in Austin, it was more of a pain than anything else. Someone has to cut the grass. That someone is not me. I think of all the money we have saved over the years by not having a lawn – money I haven’t had to spend on paying someone else to mow the lawn, on equipment to mow said lawn, on water on lawn equipment maintenance etc.

Beyond that, from what I understand from friends on base, you can get ticketed if your lawn isn’t cut correctly at the right time. This seems to me like it would be a pain to deal with. And honestly – I am trying to think of what I would even do with a yard? All I did when I had one in Austin was sit on the patio. Which is the same thing I do with the balcony in Japan.

I guess that’s just it – a matter of perspective. Everyone is different. So what one person might regard as a necessity, another might see as an inconvenience. We choose an apartment – we were actually offered a house with a yard when we came and turned it down. Sometimes while we might think what would I do without…..? Someone else might be thinking what would I possibly do with…..? It’s just a matter of perspective.

No Heat/ No Cool

After living in China and now on the base here in Japan, I have been through many seasons of no heat/no cool. For the unfamiliar, or uninitiated, this is where the government (whose government I am not positive perhaps this is just a local tradition that we don’t have in the US? I don’t really know…..) shuts off the heat and/or air conditioning for a time to save on electricity.
The timing always is fantastic – the heat is usually shut off right before a drop in temperature and the cool right before a spike. However, here are the compiled ways that I have heard over the years that people (myself may or may not be included )  have used to get through the seasons changes comfortably.

• Turn on the oven and open it just a crack. (This suggestion came from an individual from the fire department. He said this is a very bad idea…..but gives him something to do…….)
• Turn on the shower on “High” to the max amount of heat and open the door. (Also not recommended – the water bill is awful and my apt in China might have had a slight mold problem after a few days of this……eh – you live and learn….)
• Go to your local Pizza Hut and order their endless cup of coffee and camp out for six hours. (In China Pizza Hut serves coffee. The downside of this – severe caffeine high!)
• Drag a space heater with you around the apartment. Its good to buy one on wheels.
• Wear more layers – (this of course is the most obvious, but after months of winter who wants to do that?)
• Iron your clothes before you put them on in the morning. (One girl I heard of threw hers in the microwave. This also didn’t end well.)

For temperature spikes before the air comes on -

• Open the windows (problem: pollution, people barbequing etc. upside, cute little insect visitors!)
• Get a good fan and drag it around the apartment. (this is like the space heater suggestion – reversed)
• Drink lots of iced drinks.
• Take cold showers.

So relax enjoy! Let the creative juices flow…… May will come soon! In the meantime – see everyone at Starbucks where you too will be drinking coffee and mooching off someone else’s heat!

Hiatus

So – I unintentionally disappeared from the blogging world for about a month – my apologies to those who were eagerly anticipating my latest nonsense as it was not forthcoming. The wordpress App on my ipad died – and all those blogs ended up “failed” and disappeared off to blogging Heaven – it was quite depressing actually!

Anyway, for those of you who were worried that I had disappeared off the face of the earth – nothing to fear – I’m baaack

Gas Prices

I am not living in the US right now. I live in Japan, courtesy of the US military. So some of the headlines that I read from the US seem odd at times. I will be the first to admit I am often not entirely sure what is going on, I see mostly the news from the perspective of an outsider looking in and sometimes that is a very odd view. One thing that I remember very clearly was leaving Alaska in 2009 when the gas prices there had hovered above $4 for months. In summer of 2008, the US had hit an average of $4.11 a gallon, and there was a lot of talk about who was to blame. President Bush was in office then and I remember watching this (click on Link to Fox News video). “When you hear a politician say he or she will bring down oil prices, it is BS” -Bill O’Reilly That particular phrase stood out to me, because I saw that he was right. I had lived in China for four years, from 2003-2007 and could definitely see the wisdom in noting that the president (Bush) wasn’t responsible for the prices, but the international competition was a huge contributor.

I live in Japan right now. Off base, the price per gallon is over $7.00 – I have never seen it cheaper than that. China and India are adding more cars every day to their roads. I can personally attest to being stuck in Beijing traffic, and wondering how it was affecting the rest of the world. As more people in China and India rise to middle class and start driving, the competition increases and prices go up. Politicians can’t do anything about that.

It was a relief to come to Japan and be freed from the dependency on cars. The public transportation system here is the best I have seen anywhere and a lot of my friends get by perfectly fine without a car. I didn’t even have a bicycle the four years I spent in China, and could get anywhere around the city without one.But I also know that is a construct that America doesn’t really have. Perhaps we should.

What concerns me more though is the loss of civility in politics – Bush was not to blame then; Obama is not to blame now. It’s circumstantial. Can we get beyond the political rhetoric that plagues election seasons to do something about the problem? Something more constructive than getting someone elected, whatever party they may be? It seems there is a lot of finger pointing and not much action. I don’t know the solution. Whatever it maybe however, I don’t think pointing fingers at the latest guy in office is the answer.

iPad for Stress Relief

But likely not the way you think – I used to get stressed out all the time about lesson plans. I have always had major user error when it comes to printers. I cannot get those things to work with any sense of regularity. One of the biggest stresses in teaching for me has been the printer. Meaning the fact that I had to use them.

Last year for my birthday, Anthony bought me an iPad. I cannot express what a relief this has been. Rather than printing my lesson plans, losing my lesson plans, getting upset because the printer won’t print because the ink is low or it doesn’t understand something or it is busy entertaining itself by not printing and beeping “ERROR, ERROR, ERROR” I just load my lesson plans on my iPad and go off to class. I am calm when I come into class because I haven’t spent the previous hour and a half freaking out over why the printer won’t print. I no longer worry about it. My life as a teacher has greatly improved through this one change; not having to rely on a printer! I’ve started to just email out handouts ahead of time too because of this. If students want the paper copies, they can print them themselves. Most of them are going to lose or throw away the paper copies anyway though, so removing the stress on me to have to have those copies has greatly relieved my overall stress.

It’s amazing to me how one change has helped me so much as a teacher. It was an expensive change – but one that has more than paid off in exchange for my own peace of mind. Sometimes one little change can do that. Its just a matter of figuring out what to change.

Absence Makes the Heart……

When I was a little kid, my favorite movie was the Disney version of Robin Hood. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” was one of the lines that I heard probably a hundred times in it but never really understood. I think I do now.

A lot of people outside the military have asked about the frequent absences, the deployments and how we deal with it. How anyone deals with it. Several have told me they wouldn’t be able to deal with it.

I don’t think that is true. You can. Most women would. Women are a lot stronger than they think they are. They can and would deal with it if they had to. It’s just not the “ideal.”

There are a few things I think I have learned from this way of life. One that I realized recently was that when you realize that when you have limited time with a person, the depth of that time increases. You want to get the most out of it, so you make it intentional to spend good quality time together. If Anthony was around all the time, I think I would find it easy to take him for granted. Since he’s not, I think I have a greater awareness of what I have. When you miss someone, it can be a good thing I think – it reminds you of what you have.

Sometimes the absence helps you to see what you have – to realize the value of the person you love. On the flip-side, sometimes it reminds you that you are stronger than you think you are. That you can be alone and it is okay.

I think the frequent absences have shown me that in almost every circumstance in life, quality trumps quantity. If I had Anthony here every second of the day, but took him for granted, then really I am much better off to have it this way – this way I have to learn to savor the moments and value them.

I’ve realized that about living overseas too – that my absence from the States has increased my love for it, not decreased it. The same with China – I miss it, and being gone yet returning now and then have made those good quality moments even better.

And that deepened love is why we pick up and keep going. When you face not having what is yours, when you have to wait for it, when you have to work more, when you fear loss, you find it all over again. It’s not that you don’t miss what you don’t have right now. It’s that you learn to look at it differently – you look at the good that can come.

Back to the Robin Hood quote “Absence can make the heart grow fonder – or forgetful.” I think its a choice that we choose – to grow from our circumstances rather than to be beaten by them. If we see the absence as an opportunity to become better people, our marriage can be better for it.

So to answer the people that say “I couldn’t do it.” You could. You would. We aren’t super women. It’s not that we don’t care. We do. Deeply. But most people don’t realize the depth that they are willing to go through until they have to do it. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Really. But you have to choose that it will.