Famish is a great cat but he gets out of control crazy sometimes.  It seems to usually happen after he has had a long nap.  It’s not all bad when it happens though.  Watching him slip and slide as he barrels across the hard floors has provided me many hours of happiness.  My favorite move is when he runs as hard as he can but doesn’t go anywhere because his nicely manicured claws can’t find any purchase  on the floor.  It is beautifully cartoonish.  I’m trying to catch that action on video so I can show you all.

Eventually, though, his craziness gets tiresome and even sometimes dangerous.  The gashes on Satomi’s arm are proof of that.  I’ve been trying to figure out if there is any music that will calm him down.  It’s definitely not John Coltrane.  Listening to Coltrane makes Famish even more bonkers.  Mozart will put him to sleep sometimes.  He seems to like Neil Diamond okay but not enough to totally chill out.  I want to give special thanks to those of you who voted in the poll about what will best mellow out our cat.  Special thanks to the person who voted “other” and added, “a cup of catnip tea served on fine china.”  I haven’t tried that but I will.  Oddly, there is no catnip to be found around here.  They sell something called matatabi that is supposed to do the same thing but it makes Famish so out of control I have to lock him in another room so he doesn’t shred the drapes or us.

Drum roll, please. The thing pacifies Famish is Eckhart Tolle. One person who took the poll got that right.  Yay, for whoever it was.  I stumbled upon Famish’s fondness for Eckhart Tolle when I was taking Famish to lose his manliness.  He is not a cat who enjoys car rides.  He meows a tortuous meow as soon as the car starts moving so I was playing different things from my old iphone (that now is useful only as an ipod), trying to drown out his suffering.  When I flipped on the Tolle, Famish became totally quiet almost instantly and didn’t meow even one more time the final twenty minutes of the drive.  I admit that there is something soothing about hearing Eckhart Tolle for me as well.  Maybe it’s that he only really talks about one thing so it is pretty easy to catch his point.  I also like the way he occasionally burps as he speaks. And with his German accent it is hilarious when he makes a joke and then laughs at it.  I hadn’t really given Tolle a listen until Famish became a fan.  Now I turn on his cd when I leave the house and Famish is a chilled out cat when I return.  I usually listen a little bit myself too.  I started using it in the house when he was having separation anxiety.  For a while he would scratch off big patches of hair if we left him home alone.  It was not attractive.  No problems now, as long as Eckhart is speaking.  It’s a crap shoot if there is silence or some other cd.

Check out this picture of Famish listening to Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.  Doesn’t he look like he is actually paying attention.  I guarantee you that he doesn’t normally look like that. Only when he is listening to Tolle.

Here’s some trivial news for you all.

Remember my story about heads that collide with bamboo in the night?  I finally made my world a little safer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-The Green Tea Dreamer

 

A report on Otosan is long overdue.  He is about to end his second stay in the hospital since his ambulance adventure in February.  His first stay lasted one month which sounds worse than it really was.  The Japanese love to stay in hospitals.  Some years back I broke my collarbone snowboarding in Japan.  I had to stay in the hospital for six days!  Otosan’s second stay will be ending after 15 days.

Otosan’s first stay in the hospital was a calm and quiet one.  He shared a room with people who had serious health issues and they didn’t make much noise.  This time his room is like a frat house from the movies.  There are four men living in the room but last time I went to visit seven dudes, from 55-80 were sitting around watching baseball and talking way to loud.  If they weren’t wearing hospital issue pajamas and a few of them hadn’t been wheeling around their IVs they could have been mistaken for a group of friends who went to Vegas for a weekend and piled into one room so they’d have more money for beer and gambling.  They were that rambunctious!  There is also one guy who has a high decibel snore.  He can sleep through the other guys shooting the breeze as they watch the ball game on one of the four TVs in the room.  I think that Otosan enjoyed the comraderie for a while but he is ready to leave.

Anyway, here’s the low down on what has happened:

• During his first hospitalization he was diagnosed with three broken ribs from his tumble walking to the bathroom in the dark.  He also had pneumonia.  Those two things healed faster than anyone could have expected.  The ribs fully healed in two weeks!
• He was officially labeled as having Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). It wasn’t really a surprise.  He has been having trouble breathing the last few years and he has been a smoker for 55 plus years.  Japan is still a land of smokers and COPD seems to be a rite of passage for the farmers in our town.  Otosan is on the edge of needing oxygen at home but he really wants to avoid it.  I think deep down he thinks that his super recuperative powers are going to kick in and that his lungs are going to heal.  I don’t think that ever happens but for his sake I’m pulling for him.  Living life knowing that at some point you will be tethered to a tube of oxygen may be worse than actually being tethered to that oxygen tube although neither one sounds fun.  For now he is still fairly mobile.  Some days are better than others but on a good day he can walk for a few minutes without a problem but has been told to avoid walking up hills.  That’s hard to do when he doesn’t want to give up working and his fields are all on the side of a mountain.
• The doctor insisted on respiratory rehabilitation and that helped for a while.  He relearned how to use his abdominal muscles correctly and worked to loosen up his rib cage.  As breathing has become more difficult over the years and as he has lost muscle mass he became an upper chest breather.  That’s not a very efficient way to get enough oxygen in your body.  With the help of therapy he is breathing deeper now.  He is supposed to do the exercise bike on his own at home but I don’t think he has done it and the benefits seems to be slipping away.
• He was discharged after one month and went home.  It was a happy day for Otosan. The last week in the hospital he looked like a caged wild animal.
• One month after being discharged from the hospital he was having trouble walking and breathing again.  Satomi finally convinced him to go see the doctor.  He did and ended up being readmitted to the hospital “for tests”.
• It turned out that he had anemia.  He had had a bleeding hemoroid or something like that. He got the internal camera from top to bottom and was given a clean bill of health (or as clean as he is going to get with COPD).  Again his recuperative powers were at their best.  The anemia vanished with almost no treatment. Tomorrow he gets to come home.  He has orders to do his rehab.  The doctor wants Otosan to come to the hospital for rehab but he wants to do it on his own.  We’ll see how it goes.  It’s hard on him when he doesn’t take care of himself but it is even harder on Satomi’s mother who has to take care of him.

It’s going to be a year of change and decisions for everybody.  Otosan still wants to work but he can’t do much.  Okasan (Satomi’s mother) would like to quit growing oranges and just keep up gardening as a hobby but  the pension for farmers is low that they are worried about money.  The skyrocketing price of fertilizer and the plummeting prices for oranges aren’t helping anything.  On top of that the free trade agreement with the US starts this year so American fruit is about to become a lot cheaper.  It’s unbelievable how little they make do with already.  It has made me reconsider my spending habits. What they are most worried about isn’t the money to live but the money to pay the hospital bills if they get really sick. Japanese hospitals are cheap but it still adds up when you only get a pension of $300 dollars or so every month.  Otosan’s last stay in the hospital added up to $700 for 15 days.  Cheap by most countries’ standards but still more expensive than living at home.  I have no idea what their savings are like but I do know that the Japanese are good savers.  My wife always reminds me about that.

Sorry for the randomness and rambling of this post.  If you need a Cliff’s Notes version of what to take away from this, here it is.  Otosan is feeling well and excited to come home with his somewhat clean bill of health.  We all have our fingers crossed that he will take his rehab seriously not only for his sake burt for the sake of his wife as well.  The biggest question is will this be the year that they finally retire.  Otosan turns 80 this year so I think he deserves it.  Okasan does too.

Thanks for tuning in.

-The Green Tea Dreamer

Spring ambushed Satomi this week. Keep reading to find out why she needs our sympathy.

1. Here is the most positive part of this post (for Satomi) and it isn’t that positive.  Satomi hates snakes and I always tell her she is too scared.  She worries about them coming into our house and I kind of laugh because when I lived in Japan before there was a five foot long snake who lived under my house and I didn’t mind.  I never had cockroaches or rodents and I chalked that up to the snake.  In return, all it wanted was to sun itself on my sidewalk in peace.  I obliged.  I also gave him a wide berth.  Well, we saw the first snake of spring, smashed flat on the road in front of our house. From the looked of it he was headed right to our flower garden where Satomi spends a lot of her free time. She’s going to have snakes on the brain from now until winter.
2. The cat, Famish, has spring fever and can’t get enough playing time.  Sometimes he gets confused and forgets if he is playing or trying to disembowel some poor animal with his back claws.  If Satomi’s forearm had bowels they would be a shredded mess right now.  Lacking the bowels it is just her skin that took a torrential scratching.  We bandaged her three bloody gashes up and she’s healing but it ain’t a pretty sight. One of the gashes resembles the Panama Canal.
3. The next day we were clearing weeds from under the orange trees.  A mukadae (Japanese Centipede) bit Satomi on the finger.  It probably wasn’t as big as the one in the picture.  I couldn’t tell because she hacked it to bits with her weeding tool. They are fierce looking and fierce behaving creepy crawlies.  In the past I have seen kids put two of them together to fight.  Brutal on many levels. Often, the sting requires a trip to the doctor for medicine.  Fortunately, she was wearing pretty thick rubber gloves and that softened the blow.  Still, they pack some nasty poison and she got a dose.  She immediately started to swell but we found her some steroid cream and a bag of ice so the injury wasn’t as bad as it could have been.  Even with the fast action the pain ran from her finger to her shoulder.  Remember to wear your gloves  when you work outside!  I’m pretty lazy about that but I made a note to change my ways.  Now, the swelling is mostly gone but the area itches beyond belief.
4. Later the same day, when when we got home, Satomi was stung by what she thought was an abu (a horsefly) in our living room.  It was hanging out on our drying laundry and we accidentally gave it a free ride into the house. I’m positive that isn’t what it was.  It was a lethal killing machine.  I’m guessing it was a hornet or wasp of some sort.  Again, Satomi was lucky.  Whatever it was stung her through a piece medicated tape that she had on her arm to relieve her (most likely) stagnating carpal tunnel.  The sting still swelled immediately.  More cream and ice kept the swelling more or less in check but like the mukadae bite it still itches.  Usually, I throw the bugs from our house outside if I can capture them alive. I killed this…eventually.  I didn’t like the idea of an angry stinging creature flying around.  It was harder to kill than a tick and ticks are pretty tough.  It was probably about an inch long but it was like one inch of steel.  In the end he was dying as I threw him in the trash can because he broke in half where two sections of his body came together.  That only happened after about a minute of trying to squish him with the leg of a clean pair of pants and then a wadded up paper towel, I never got his exo skeleton to crack.  Amazing!
5. On top of those things, some random bug bit Satomi on the leg and she didn’t notice at the time.  Now that seemingly innocuous bite that swelled up into a welt, turned red and won’t stop itching. Did I mention that bugs love Satomi.  Mosquito season is just winding up and, apparently, she looks like the desert tray.  It’s gong to be a long six months on that front.

 

The thing that makes me the most money hear in Japan is teaching English but it is not really my favorite ting to do.  What I really like doing is teaching yoga.  Because of the language barrier I had been just doing the occasional private lesson but that all changed the other night.  Seven people (4 women and 3 kids) came to do yoga.  It was for a free class that I offered as a way to drum up some business.  The women all work with Satomi at the town hospital and one of them brought her three kids.  Amazingly fun it was.  None of the members had tried yoga before so we got to start from scratch.  They claimed that most of my Japanese made sense too!

Because I have to keep things simple linguistically, I have been describing the yoga that I teach as movement and stretching linked to the breath.  I apologize to all of you yogis and yoginis out there who just rolled your eyes because yoga is much more profound than that.  Yes it is.  And, maybe it isn’t too.  If I find out the answer I’ll let you know.  The good part is that everybody understands my simple explanation and can latch onto it from minute one.  Overly simple or not, every had a good time and claimed to have left feeling better than when they arrived.  Some of that had to do with the yoga, I hope but I believe that some of it had to do with having kids and adults together in the room.  The energy was great!  In addition, the adults didn’t feel obligated to be overly self-critical of themselves as often happens.  If the kids didn’t understand they got my attention and I helped them.  Soon, the adults were more open to receiving some advice and correction on the poses.  It was fun for all, me especially.  I love the spirit of community that comes from yoga (or most activities that we do in groups).  I’m hoping we get to continue our yoga together.  I’ve been pondering the idea of family yoga for a few years but had never taken the pluge.  In my charmed life it just came my way.  What a lucky guy I am.  More luck may be on the way.  One of the free class members is going to see if we can use the Buddhist temple by her house for the classes.  That would be an added bonus.

 

**I want to post about our cat Famish soon.  I’ve made Famish the topic of the first Green tea Dreamer Project Poll.  If you haven’t voted in the poll (and I’m betting that you haven’t) at the end of the the post “The Peril of line Drying Pants,” please cast your vote.  As of this writing zero people have voted and it’s making Famish sad.  Thanks for your enduring support.  It makes me giddy seeing how many regular readers I have.**

 

The Green Tea Dreamer

Have Japanese companies never considered running their English by a native speaker before printing something?  This is from one of the biggest drink producers in Japan.  Or, maybe it’s only funny to me.

I have been to “The Aso”, also known as Mount Aso before.  It is an active volcano here on the island of Kyushu.   Truthfully, it’s probably a great place to get water from  despite the unfortunate English.  I’ll try consider the English an added bonus and not a flaw.

Onto another subject.  The first Green Tea Dreamer poll is ready for you to cast your vote in.  It is at the bottom of the previous post, The Peril of Line Drying Pants.   Coming soon is the post where I reveal the answer to the question, “Which of these calms our crazy cat?”

Take care,

The Green Tea Dreamer

I know that I won’t get much sympathy for my struggle but I’ve been fighting a battle to keep my pants from falling down since we came to Japan.  Spoiled by having access to a clothes dryer most of my life I never fully realized the true value of high temperature drying.  Here in Japan we almost always line dry our clothes.  That means that my clothes, especially my pants, don’t get the post wash shrinkage that I am use to.  Until Satomi and I became eco-friendly (out of necessity) I always bought pants that would stay up without a belt when I put them on in the morning.  Sure, they would stretch out a little and sag a bit later in the day but in a pinch I could make it through the day without a belt.  Not now.  With no high-temp shrinkage my pants almost fall to my ankles from the moment I put them on in the morning.  My sag is too much even for a Venice, California teenager!  I can’t make it even a few seconds without a belt.  My whole method of trying on pants is going to have to change if I want to be able to function without a belt.  I’ll have to by things on the small side.  That could be a problem since I already struggle to find my waist size. Maybe tight “skinny” jeans are the way to go.  Then again, do I really want to show people how twiggy my legs really are?  Most likely, I’ll just keep wearing a belt.  Feel free to weigh in with your advice.

-The Green Tea Dreamer

Take the first Green Tea Dreamer Poll!

As a general rule, I like to approach things with an open mind.  It is a guideline that has led me to many happy times.  In all my years there have only been a few things that I remember not being willing to at least try once and see how it goes.  One of those things was bungee jumping.  After having a detached retina and surgery to fix it I approached that with a very closed mind.  Eating food that is still alive is another thing I feel fine about saying no to from the start.  In Japan, there are some restaurants that make an art out of serving up raw fish and squid…while it’s still alive and gasping for air (or water?).  I’ve had the unfortunate chance to see their handiwork up close.  It hurts just to look at.  My newest addition is spraying pesticides. Up until now Satomi’s parents had forbidden me from helping with the spraying and I was fine with it.  But, since Satomi’s father’s stay in the hospital (a full report on that is coming soon) I have been called off the bench.  I’ve never liked the idea of pesticides.  I prefer some bug damage over toxins. I like the idea of pesticides even less now that I have been involved with their application. First we mix in a bright blue powder into 500 liters of water.  Next we mix in a red liquid.  Rumor has it that if you put the red and the blue together before mixing in the water the result is a chemical fire.  Super not cool!  The result is like a muddy puddle and we drench the trees with it. The dousing the trees get is colossal. I don’t actually do the spraying though. I have been given the job of ushering the hose around the orange groves in close proximity to Satomi’s mother, who gives the trees (and on occasion me) their actual dosing of noxious stuff.

Everyone around here is so nonchalant about safety of when using pesticides.  They don’t seem to mind breathing the fumes and mist or getting soaked by the pesticides.  I end up getting soaked but mostly it is because I wear so much protective gear and almost sweat to death.  I bought a plastic rain suit with a hood.  I wear rubber gloves, long brimmed hat, boots and a mask.  I want to upgrade the mask to one with a respirator. I’d like to enclose myself in human sized hamster ball for extra protection but then I wouldn’t be much help hauling the hose around. Despite how much gear I wear, honestly, I think that I had myself convinced that the pesticides we are using are weak and somewhat harmless.  I am singing a different tune now that I have seen the collateral damage.  It’s easy top miss if you aren’t looking but I have started looking and don’t like what I see.  It only took about a minute for a beautiful blue butterfly to succumb to to the power of just a few inadvertent drops.  It flew through edge of the pesticide mist far from where the spraying was taking place and immediately plunged to the ground.  I scooped it up with some unpolluted grass as soon as I saw it fall from the sky but he was dead by the time I got him to a clean place.  I saw  a lizard sprinting out of the field as fast as he could.  The only dead and dying things that I have seen from the spraying are the things that eat the “bad” bugs.  That explains why the spraying has to be repeated so many times.  The spraying gets rid of the problem but it also gets rid of the natural defenses. I really wonder how necessary the spraying is.   Satomi and I have some evidence that pretty nice oranges can grow without pesticides. One of the fields that has been abandoned in the last few years has become our pet project.  For two years now we have pulled the weeds that seem to cause problems and this year I gave some of the trees some manure since they haven’t had any fertilizer in a few years. I spread some clover seeds in the field this year to with the goal of fixing some nitrogen into the soil and preserving the hillsides that have been damaged by the wild boars.  For the most part though, we just let the field be as natural as possible and it produces oranges that look and taste pretty good  Some of the trees taste exceptionally good. Our friends prefer the oranges without the pesticides so we give them away free or sell them cheap for juice.  I think we could probably sell some directly to more health conscious people if we tried.  If the oranges still taste good this year we might give that a try.  The government co-op won’t buy unsprayed oranges so we can’t go the traditional route.  This is hearsay but a friend here in Japan told me that to sell your apples as organic in Japan you just use “less than seven kinds of pesticide and chemicals on the trees”.  He heard this bit of info from his friend who grows “organic” apples. I’m going to check into that.  After seeing the amount of deliberate misinformation in the world it wouldn’t surprise me.

-The Green Tea Dreamer

This is a cautionary tale.

Satomi has been calling me Harry Potter recently and it isn’t because I have saved the world from evil.  That’s high on my list but I was sidetracked by a bamboo pole we use to hang out the laundry.  I don’t know how many of you have cut bamboo with a Japanese nata.  The nata is an amazing tool.  If you channel your inner Bruce Lee when you swing it is possible to hack through some pretty stout bamboo in one swing. The resulting cut is angled and sharp and very stylish.  I cut a few pieces of bamboo so that we can hang out more laundry to dry.  It’s isn’t very common to have clothes dryer in the house (at least in this part of Japan) and going to the coin laundry every day adds up so we air dry as much as possible.

Now that I  know I’m not permanently disfigured I’m ready to tell the story so we can all laugh about it.  The other week we forgot to bring in some laundry while it was still daylight and when we heard the pitter patter of rain I rushed out to grab the laundry.  Outside it was almost pitch black and there is no outside light.  I wasn’t worried though, I have made that trek dozens of times.  The bamboo, however, is a recent addition.  Earlier that same day I distinctly remember thinking, “I should do something about that sharp end of the bamboo before someone gets hurt”.  I hadn’t done something about it (and still haven’t). I was rehashing that inner conversation as I bashed my head straight into the end of the pole.  Immediately I felt blood running down my forehead.  I wondered if the bamboo had made it all the way through to my skull.  Honestly, I didn’t want to look but denial wasn’t going to staunch the blood flow.  With a river of blood streaming down my face the rushed to the bathroom mirror.  I wiped away the blood.  It seemed like there was no skull showing but it was hard to be sure because the blood was fast and furious.  I am operating under the assumption that I didn’t strike bone.  It did however leave a one inch perpendicular gash midway between my right eyebrow and receding hairline.  I probably could have benefited from a stitch or two at the doctors office but it was late.  Instead, I opted for taping it back together with some medical tape and covering that with a bandage.  It worked well.  Two days later when I removed the tape there was already a nice pink scar.  The cut was so clean and straight that the scar may completely vanish and I will no longer resemble Harry Potter.

If you visit Japan, I hope you leave that experience off of your itinerary.  I will be doing my best not to repeat it.  But, if you find yourself in such a predicament, I will be happy to tape you back together.

-The Green Tea Dreamer

 So we have this cat now.  In fact, he is sitting on my lap as I write this.  His name is Famish (Satomi named him that because he is always hungry) and he is pretty great.  We had been thinking about getting a cat for a while and even went to the shelter a few times to play with the cats there.  They were young and frisky and very cute but, at first, we thought that we wanted an older cat.  We had visions of a mellow older cat sleeping peacefully while Satomi made handmade quilts.  We soon came to our senses and decided not to get a cat since we aren’t planning on being in Japan continuously for the full normal lifespan of a cat.  Decison made! Then, Famish found us one night when we were out for a walk.

Satomi has a habit of “meowing” when she takes a walk.  It probably isn’t a mental condition or anything but just her way of finding where cats are hanging out so she can befriend them.  It’s amazingly effective.  Satomi had been meowing away for quite a while (and had befriend a few cats already) but we were almost home so she stopped.  For some strange reason I decided to give it a try.  I let out my best meow and Famish dashed out of a nearby garage.  He wasn’t skin and bones thin but he was headed in that direction.  He was so hungry that he wouldn’t stop meowing.  From her pocket, Satomi conjured up a packet of cat food and the cat went bonkers.  He made such a funny sound when he ate that I immediately had a soft spot for him.  For the next few days Satomi brought food with her every time she went out and Famish was always waiting either somewhere in that garage or in the vacant lot next to it.  Satomi wanted to take him home but I contended that you can’t just take a cat that lives in someone’s garage home with you.  In my opinion a person should at least ascertain if the cat has a home before making off with it.  Satomi didn’t wholeheartedly agree so I volunteered to go talk to the garage’s owners and see what was up.  But, before I got around to Famish threw up the food that Satomi had been feeding it, on the garage floor, and word went around that a stray cat was causing problems for the neighbors and they wanted the cat gone.  So, without further ado, we were the owners of a (previously) stray cat.

Another one of our requirements for a cat was that he or she be an indoor cat so in no time at all Famish went from life on the streets to being a house cat.  He must have lived in a house at some point because he knew how to use a litter box and loves being held and sitting on laps.  The one challenge we were facing was that he was all man.  It is spring our un-neutered cat was going crazy listening to the coos of all the ladies.  I can’t even describe the sound he was making but I will say that it was painful to hear. It was worst at night and made sleeping pretty tough.  As a guy I could kind of sympathize with him so I was tolerating it pretty well.  Satomi wasn’t.  She wanted him fixed ASAP.  No sympathy or empathy whatsoever.  She went as far as to taunt him that he wouldn’t be a man for much longer.  Ladies, I give you this advice…don’t taunt your pets that way when your husband is around.  I guarantee that he will begin to doubt how you feel about him and his gender.

As always, Satomi got her wish and Famish is less manly than he used to be.  I hoped that she would take Famish to the appointment but it turned out that she started her new job that day so the duty fell upon my shoulders.  I still don’t know how I feel about the whole thing.  After all, I am the one who gave the a-ok for his snip snipping and brought him to meet his fate.  As I was driving him there kept thinking, “a dude shouldn’t do that to another dude,” but I did it anyway.  Famish doesn’t seem to mind.  If he is holding some resentment toward me I haven’t seen it.  Truthfully, he seems happier and he has become more interesting without his mind on kitty booty all of the time.  The three of us, Satomi, Famish, and I all sleep a lot sounder at night.  But there will  never be more little Famishes running around.  That’s good and bad I think.  Famish is pretty special so he could make other families really happy.  That’s the bad part–no more Famishes.  On the other hand, there are already too many Famishes running around our neighborhood and all of them are strays so we won’t be adding to that population.  That’s the good part–no more Famishes.  When I say there are other Famishes running around I really mean it.  There are several cats who appear to be siblings of Famish.  They are similar right down to the guttural  pre-op meowing.  In addition to the brothers and sisters there are more distant relatives each with some similarity but I won’t bore you with the details of that.

A fun fact about the whole experience is that Dr. Nishmura, who performed Famishes neutering, is the same doctor who Satomi unleashed her righteous fury against at when we had the injured bird (Leaving a Friend to Die in the Woods Post).  Luckily for us, he isn’t holding that against her.

-The Green Tea Dreamer