I’m back!  After a whirlwind trip to Colorado for Christmas and back to Japan for the New Year I am back to blogging.  We actually had a snowy day here in our neck of Kyushu and I loved it.  Nothing lasted long on the ground but the laundry that we hung out to dry (not expecting it to snow) turned a wintery white.

The orange season is winding down for us and the search for work that pays in intensifying.  Now that we are living full time in our rental house we need some cash to pay the bills.  I taught my first private yoga class in Japan last night…entirely in Japanese.  It went pretty well and I think that I will have a returning student.  I have big plans for teaching some English classes for elementary school students in the near future (when I track down some students).  Right now my only income is from teaching a few classes on Saturdays at a local pre-school.  It is amazingly fun to teach 4 and 5 year olds.  I have a line on teaching at another pre-school in town as well.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it works out.  In addition to the fun factor pre-schools pay really well!

Here are a few pictures of what I’ve been up to:

This is a picture of a typical days picking for Satomi’s parent’s and I.  I don’t think it is particularly large by orange farmers’ standards but it seems pretty impressive to me.

I pounded the shells?  hulls? off of a garden full of soy beans.  Talk about exhausting work.  You can see the wooden mallet I used.  Apparently, Satomi’s grandmother used that mallet for the same work until she was in her nineties! Unbelievable!  I am less than half that and I found it exhausting.   I don’t have a picture of the next step but we used a hand crank winnowing (I hope I have my terminology correct) machine to sort the soybeans from the chaff.  That part was easy.  I don’t know what we will use the beans for.  Tofu maybe????

Satomi and I picked oranges for our friends and to use to make our own orange juice.  We don’t have a truck so our tiny Subaru had to be our beast of burden.  These oranges were from a field that Satomi’s parent’s abandoned because it has become too difficult for them to take care of.  It’s on a steep hillside and the wild boars have broken many of the terraces and made the paths somewhat treacherous but I like the field so I pulled all of the weeds and carried the oranges out by hand forty pounds at a time.  It was well worth the effort.  Our friends thought so too.

-The Green Tea Dreamer