Yesterday I went to my teacher’s Christmas party. It was pretty good and really great to be there with a bunch of other kindred spirits. Lots of great food – everyone brought a plate – I took rocky road that I had made. Read more
I did it! Friday I was off my anti-depressants with little or no withdrawal symptoms, which was good as I had 3 readings that afternoon!
Saturday I went to my course and I had no withdrawal symptoms and we had a great day too..thoroughly enjoyed it. I was pretty buggered at the end but because we had promised Jo we would go over for dinner, we went home to refresh and then went.
We were kind of hoping that the kids would be in bed by the time we got there because we were both knackered. However, as luck would have it, they had all had a nap that afternoon and had only just woken up, so were little bundles of energy. Poor Yasu was mr. popular and all I could hear was “Yasu can you come and see our veggie patch? Yasu can you read me a story? Yasu lets play cars…”
We had dinner, sausages, steak and salad. Was yummy but Yasu and I both had diarrhea this morning so thinking something was in there that upset us.
Jo had wanted a reading but I know what a skeptic she is and she did make a comment akin to that during dinner…and luckily we had to leave early because Yasu had to get up for baseball at 5:30am the next morning.
It’s not as if I don’t want to do the reading, but Jo asked me for a lark, not because she’s really interested. I do it because I love it and honestly want to help people and give them guidance, and I feel it’s a waste of time to be telling someone who is only listening with half an ear and who is not going to value what you are giving them, you know?
So anyway, we mosey-ed on home, we are about 5 minutes around the corner so it’s not far, and I found that I had another couple of readings to do but I was too buggered so I caught up on that today. 
I love being busy, but I seem to not be getting anything done at the moment!! Busy is good though
The airconditioning place rang to tell us we will be getting our heating and cooling installed on 20th november, so two weeks from now. One of the four bedrooms in our house is considered as our “junk room”, so I have to get a motor on and clean it up before the guys come to install.
Anyways, I am just vegging this afternoon and I think Yasu is having a nap because he’s too quiet…think I may do the same! x
Had a really fun day today, met lots of my spooky friends, did some readings (tea leaves and cards), received some readings, and ate lots of yummy food!
We had loads for morning tea including hand-made pies and sausage rolls and hot-out-of-the-oven scones with cream and homemade jam! Yum!
Lunch consisted of 3 types of quiche, bruschetta, more salads than you can poke a stick at, roast chicken and various other meats, scotched eggs and various other savouries. Dessert was cheesecake, pavlova’s, fruit salad, fresh mulberries, chocolate mud sponge cake, brownies, my lemon bar, spongecake, coconut pudding etc etc!
I piled my plate high and felt like I could have rolled myself home. I was that full. We had a sweepstakes, but I didn’t win anything. Then we got to choose a pressie hanging from the awning, and it had a $1 scratchie, which I again didn’t win anything on, and a ticket for the Lotto for tonight, we all got entered into it thanks to Joyce (my teacher) and Helen (my reflexologist). They set it all up by themselves! On top of that, we then got our names called out of a hat and got to choose a lucky dip, the whole 29 of us! I got a set of Maya Oracle Cards, and my other spooky friends got either cards or books relating to what we’re interested in. The non-spooky people there got other kinds of gifts like soap, smellies, home decorations etc. It was cool! Really nice to get something too!! What can I say but that my teacher is one of the most generous people on the planet!
I’m not sure if we won anything on the lotto ticket, I haven’t checked yet, but if you don’t hear from me again, you’ll know I won and have left the country! haha
Melbourne Cup Day @ Joyce's house
People getting their pressies from the awning
Pressies blowing in the wind
My morning tea
My lunch
Choices for afternoon tea
Hey everyone, I won’t keep you in suspense, my trip to Japan has been brought forward, I’m now leaving here on August 18th and will stay in Japan until October 3rd.
I am staying with April at her house, for some girly time. I am really looking forward to it!! It’s been 5 years since I last went to Japan, so I’m sure things have really changed since then.
Yasu only just unveiled his own surprise on me, that he will be joining me from 2nd September to 11th September! He can only have 9 days off work due to peak time at his company, but he is going to Nagoya, picking me up and we will take the shinkansen to Hokkaido to stay with his parents. I’m so excited about that! The only bummer is that there used to be shinkansen that travelled during the night, but now there isn’t anymore, probably not much demand, so we will arrive in Sapporo about 11pm and bunk down somewhere cheap for the night, then leave early the next morning for Tokachi.
Apart from that exciting news, I bought some more pan yesterday.
Yummy Pan
Top left – cream cheese pan, top right – matcha pan, bottom left – peanut pan, bottom right – pudding pan.
Yasu chose the peanut pan and took the matcha pan to work to eat with his lunch, and I had the cream cheese pan, my favourite, and I was left with pudding pan. I’m the kind of person who hates slimy things and pudding pan was definitely not my cup of tea, because it WAS a pudding, a wobbly, slimy pudding, in the middle of that pan!! I liked the flavour but not the texture. It was kind of a vanilla flavour but swallowing it was hard, my throat was really rebelling. I definitely won’t be buying that one again…haha
I’m sure you can gather by the title of this post that i didn’t end up spending Christmas day miserable and alone. Yes, Yasu decided to work at 4:00 am Christmas morning until 9:00 am and came home just after 9:30 am to pick me up and take me to our friends house! Seems like all my jumping up and down about it actually got through to him.
We had a lovely day, my friend’s family was there and we were included as “family” because we are now considered that. It was a lovely warm atmosphere. Lucky i took extra wrapped presents because we received quite a few from family members that we didn’t expect. As it turns out we had brought just the right amount.
Yasu got a hot chocolate making set from our friend Jo, who owns a cafe. Every time he goes to her cafe, she makes him a mega hot chocolate with extra marshmallows, so now he can make his own. He was pretty happy with it as you can see from the pic.
Santa in shorts made a surprise visit and handed out presents from under the tree.
We had Thomas the Tank going up and down the middle of the table during lunch, courtesy of our friends’ husband’s creative mind and their 2 year old son’s toy box!
As Thomas Tank went down the track it made real chuga-chuga woo-oo noises and blew steam! What a treat and very unique experience.
I celebrated my Christmas meal of Turkey, Ham, Seafood (of which i didn’t have any) and salads with a grape chuhai.
You can see next to the chuhai is a wrapped up bag of fruit mince pies dusted with icing sugar, courtesy of our friend’s cafe. Everyone got a take home bag!
Lunch was finished off with berry pavlova. The pictures underneath are of the mass production going on before we sat down to eat them.
In all it was a great day, and both Yasu and i enjoyed ourselves. At the end of the night i farewelled Yasu as he went home. He was working the next day so i decided to stay at our friends house overnight. He didn’t mind.
I didn’t get much sleep as i was sleeping in their 4 year old son’s room, next to the 2 year old son’s room, and the 2 year old son was crying all night. When i finally got to sleep, i was woken up at 6 am by the 2 year old wanting to play!! He must have known i was in there… being the good guest that i am i got up and played with both son’s as the other one woke up not much later than the first one. When my friends got up and saw us all playing they said they should have me sleep over more often!
That day we had decided to go to the Perth Zoo, but because it was so hot we decided instead to go to the movies. We saw Madagasgar 2 which was really good, quite fun, and the music was very boppy. I enjoyed it even though i haven’t seen the first one. The lion characters reminded me very much of the good and bad lions in The Lion King.
Yasu came and picked me up at 4 pm and i went home and fell into bed and slept until about 10:30 pm. Yasu had been good and made his own dinner, not waking me in the process, and we spent a few hours together watching Japanese tv before going back to bed.
Return to milk Chocoball
I picked this box of Morinaga Chocoball up from an inner-city oriental supermarket (Loi’s). It was a bargain at only 88 cents as opposed to the normal $1.69, and it wasn’t past it’s used by date either, in fact, it still had a year to go. When i looked on Jbox i found it was a newly released flavour and i wondered to myself how did we get it so fast? Usually Perth gets the new or limited release flavours well and truly near the end of the flavour’s life-cycle. So anyway, at that price i grabbed two. As Yasu and i were going to the movies that night i decided it would make a great movie snack.
The name “return to milk” somewhat baffled me though, when did Chocoball ever have the flavour milk? They started out originally with peanuts and caramel flavours, then strawberry, and a few limited edition flavours like banana, black sugar, white chocolate etc. So how could they return to something they never had in the first place?
Anyway, the outside of the ball is white chocolate with a very light, almost indistinguishable milk flavour, in fact, if you didn’t know it was milk, you would never notice. The inside is a dark cookie-like texture, like an Oreo. The dark cookie is a little bit too bitter and there is not enough chocolate on the outside, so the two are unbalanced, and don’t really match well in my opinion. What kind of milk used in this chocoball is not mentioned, but i would say it’s probably powdered milk. It’s kind of dissapointing for me. For Yasu, diehard Chocoball fan that he is, this was an opportunity to indulge in his favourite snack from Japan, he didn’t mind the flavour at all, but he didn’t really over-analyse it.
I only had a few of these, Yasu ate the rest of my box, and his own. In all it wasn’t bad for 88 cents, i guess i wouldn’t pay the regular price for these though.
I had a hard time getting to sleep last night because i couldn’t stop coughing. I have been taking antibiotics, and i took one just before bed but i couldn’t get to sleep. So i stayed up and played Jewel Quest on my ipod touch while coughing myself silly. Finally i couldn’t stand any more, and about 4am i took half a restavit sleeping pill. Within 20 minutes my eyes started to get droopy and i crawled into bed and must have fallen asleep because the next thing i knew Yasu was waking me up to say goodbye, he was going to his baseball game at 8:30 am. I said my goodbyes and crawled back into bed, the next time i woke up it was 1:30 pm in the afternoon and i felt pretty shocking.
I got up, got dressed and attacked the big sink of dishes waiting for me from the last two days. Yes no maid here to come and do them for me! No fairies either it seems. Just after i finished those, Yasu came home from his game, his team had lost, and he recanted all the funny things that had gone on.
Yasu’s sister had bought him a Japanese itunes card so he got on the itunes store and created an account and set about downloading some of his favourite bands, including Chage and Aska (or in my words “creepy music”). I don’t know how i could meet someone with such different tastes in music. Ugh. Anyways, he spent the whole afternoon downloading music onto his ipod, and then uploading music from his cd’s, and then he started singing… ugh. Not again. He always sings in the car, drives me crazy, he’s such a songbird, i wouldn’t be surprised if he was a canary in a past life!
Yasu watched the latest episode of 篤姫 (Atsuhime), the current Taiga Drama on NHK. I love all the costumes on that show and the female lead is such a good actress. Later on Yasu downloaded the soundtrack from the show on itunes so i had to hear the song over and over. Now it’s stuck in my head.
I made a big pot of chunky potato and bacon soup and some home made garlic bread for dinner, though we didn’t get to eat it until 8:30 pm as Yasu was stuffing around on itunes. It was yum though! A couple of pics from my phone below.
Chunky potato & bacon soup
My home-made garlic bread
I watched CSI: Miami, a double episode tonight, then served dessert – fruit and icecream. Yasu went off to bed with his earphones in, very annoying as every time i talk to him now he doesn’t answer because he can’t hear me. Boys and their toys! I guess i’ll just have to bear it until he loses interest in his new gadget.
Looking ahead to a busy week of cleaning, scrubbing and washing until our guest comes from Japan.
