Seizing the day in the park

On Wednesday we finished the Autumn issue of Japan Harvest magazine, several days before September, the theoretical start of Autumn (according to some). I saw in my Facebook memories today that five years ago we were packing the Spring issue this week—wow, we've made progress in efficiency in those intervening years! (Five years ago we were still recovering from me taking a year off managing the magazine to go on home assignment, and had a designer who was trying to fit the magazine around a full-time job.)

Finishing each magazine is a milestone worth celebrating, and it frequently means I get a tiny bit of breathing space before the next thing begins. This week I really needed that. School started on-campus for our boys for the first time in nearly six-months last Thursday, but due to COVID-19, they've had a slow start (only half days till Sept 7). There have been sudden announcements and changes in what we expected of the school-start as we've progressed through the week, including more distance learning for one. So, I've been cooling my heels as I long to get my family-free office hours back.

That all came at the end of a stressful month. The first eight working days after coming back from holidays on August 3rd were frenetic as I caught up on the previous two weeks. 

It's been the usual August weather—crazy hot and humid—so our sleep hasn't been the best and for the first time in six months we've been getting up at 6am to get David to work on time, so we've been extra tired. 

Additionally, I've had interactions with several people I usually work with that have been more fraught than usual. I put it down to the stress of living in the midst of a slow-moving, and not-yet-ended disaster. 

Then I've had email problems that have come to a head on the weekend when my magazine email address stopped working. (The problem with email is that you don't know if it has arrived.)

So, on Wednesday afternoon, as I looked at what I needed to get done in the next few days, I realised that I had time to take a morning at the park. Unfortunately it didn't cool down as much this week as I'd hoped (we had a cooler day on Sunday and I hoped that would continue, but it hasn't). So instead of riding to the usual park, I took a couple of trains (only 15 mins on trains) to a different park for the morning.

I've never been to this park on my own, and I've not been there for a couple of years at least. We went there many times with the boys when they were younger, as well as with smaller and larger groups of people. There is a big playground that was great for getting rid of energy. It also has an aeroplane museum that was a great place to go when the boys were younger and we needed "out" on an inclement day. I even lost a child in this park one time...he's now at uni in Australia, so he was found, eventually!

It's called Kōkūkoen or Tokorozawa Aviation Memorial Park. Wikipedia says, "The park is built on the former site of Tokorozawa Airfield, Japan's first airfield, which was opened on April 1, 1911. Japan's first plane, the Kaishiki biplane No.1, made its first flight at Tokorozawa on October 13, 1911."

Though only 30/32C, the humidity was high (in the 70% range), so I quickly found a spot to sit. This was part of my view. Disconcertingly, it was close to a running track (you can see it in the photos). So I watched people actually running in the hot, humid conditions!

Below was my view from my seat above. Beautiful mowed lawns.

This small lake is quite pretty in spring and autumn, not so much in late summer.

The park has two or three long, straight roads like this (no external traffic on them). I'm guessing they are former runways.

No idea what this is, but they were pretty much the only flowers in the whole park.

Wisteria in the summer is a wonderful shade plant. These have amazing, twisted trunks, revealing they aren't youngsters. (In the background is part of the museum.)

One of the things I did while sitting, was read a recent book by Larry Crabb. It's given me much food for thought that will probably make its way into another blog post soon.

I'm thankful for a job that is flexible and with low accountability. I have no one closely looking over my shoulder. This suits me very well. It means I can run into difficulty if I'm slack, but generally it works out okay as I'm one of those people who repeatedly had "conscientious" on my report cards at school. I've learned to "seize the day" when slower periods like the latter half of this week happen along. If I don't they will slip away, and I might not get another chance for several weeks!

Do you get free-er moments sometimes in your week/month? How do you deal with them? Do you have a go-to activity?

Broken minds: learning more about mental illness

I read a lot, but I don't enjoy writing book reviews. However, I think this book needs to be shared. It was one of several non-fiction reads I picked for my summer reading and I'm so glad I did.

I didn't grow up with mental illness close by, indeed, I actively avoided this area as a young allied health professional, because I didn't understand it or feel comfortable with it. But, as a middle-aged adult, without my bidding, mental illness has come much closer to my life, but I am still an observer. It is a bewildering and challenging subject and, while I've learned more about it in recently years, there is still much I don't know. I’ve struggled to write about this area, in part because I’m protecting the identity of people I know and love, but also because I know I don’t know a lot about this topic.

This book has been a very helpful way of learning more. It is a great balance of personal story and information. The bonus is that it is written by a Christian couple who have intimate experience with major mental illness (as sufferers as well as a professional). But the book is written with the express purpose of addressing some of the concerns of the Christians about mental health and how it should be viewed and treated.

I am thankful that my family has been spared the worst of Christian viewpoints on this matter, but still, reading this book has been enlightening. As an Australian I come at it from a somewhat different angle to an American. There are many more American Christians than Australian Christians and, Americans have in the past generally been more willing, as a culture, to accept psychology and counselling than in Australia. (That’s changing as Australian become more open to counselling and psychological care.) Therefore, in most of Australia there is a paucity of Christians who are professional counsellors or psychiatrists. Yet, we have been advised in the past by Christians to only seek the counsel of Christian professionals in this area. This hasn't always been helpful advice—we've experienced both bad and good Christian mental health professionals. And we've also received good help from non-Christian professionals. 

The authors highlight how differently we treat non-brain disorders, and repeatedly ask us to consider whether that is a legitimate divide. Do I only go to a Christian doctor for my asthma? In my thinking about the people close to me who struggle with mental illness, I’ve had to remind myself that there is a legitimate biological problem. This is not something that they are choosing, it isn’t something they can will themselves out of. It has been great to see how medication helps, but also realize that medication isn’t a magic pill that makes everything normal again.

The book focuses in on biological depression (as opposed to depression that is caused by challenging circumstances and often resolved through counselling alone), however the authors do touch on other types of mental illness.

Here are some of my highlights from the book:

• understanding better how biological depression affects someone
• helpful explanations about medication
• a historical explanation of how mental illness has been viewed and treated over the centuries
• an explanation of three main schools of thought in Christian circles (sadly none of them 100% helpful)
• an examination of people from the Bible and history who may (or may not) have had varying levels of mental illness

I was even comforted by the admission of one of the authors that she has avoided the companionship of those who can't accept that mental illness is a medical condition. This is a challenging enough issue to live with, without unhelpful comments from other people. I’ve had limited exposure to such attitudes, but have no desire to expand that exposure!

I think most of us know someone these days who has been diagnosed with a mental illness. Do them, and yourself, a favour and learn a little more about this poorly understood area. This book would be a good starting point.

Our July holidays

We went away for two weeks in the latter half of July and I jumped back into work on August 3, only to be swamped. I'm only just in the last couple of days starting to come up for some air! 

However, I want to tell you a little bit about our holidays before they get too far in the distant past. Because other prefectures are nervous about Tokyo-ites visiting them at the moment (many more cases of COVID-19 in Tokyo than in other places), we decided to have a very quiet holiday. We mostly stayed at the holiday home, or only went to places where there were virtually no other people close by.

We did lots of sleeping, reading, game-playing, and movie-watching. That probably sums up our fortnight away very well. It was at the same place as we went this time last year (and also at Christmas), a delightful Swiss-chalet house that OMF Japan owns and rents to its members at a low rate. We appreciate the views, the green-all-around, the peace, and a place without Wi-Fi.

As I did last year, I organised myself to not do any work during those two weeks, that included not looking at email at all. Our daily routine was simple and refreshing. To get even more sleep I also took time-out from caffeine. Not without a challenge (my body is very sensitive to caffeine), but in the end I manage to stay off caffeine totally for a week and have been on reduced caffeine in the two weeks since then (instead of 2 ½ cups of fully caffeinated coffee a day, I've had two half-strength cups a day, decaf coffee is a very handy thing, even if the coffee snobs turn their noses up at it). As I result I got 9 or 10 hours sleep every night for a couple of weeks, which was very nice indeed! During July I also stopped doing my daily Japanese review. The sum total of all that was lots of read and many books read. 

So, even though today I feel pretty blurry and am having difficulty thinking clearly, I know that I did have a good rest in July, so I'm hopeful that that will be a good thing for whatever lies ahead for the rest of the year. For starters, we've got our second son beginning year 12 next week. That in itself will potentially mean stress for the family, if it is anything like his big brother's senior year! Not to mention that we're by no means free of the wide-reaching consequences COVID-19 pandemic.

But back to our holidays in the mountains. Staying "home" made things very simple and we slipped into a gentle routine. Dinner and an evening movie we did together, sometimes late afternoon included games. Watching a movie each night was something we did last year also and it seems to be a helpful way to enjoy the holiday as a family, as well as provide fodder for conversation around the table. We watched The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series, then several other older movies like Back to the Future, Forest Gump, and Jonny English. 

All these latter movies were borrowed from a local DVD rental store—yes, Japan still has them! But let me tell you that it's not easy to find movies in a Japanese store if you're an English speaker. Have you ever thought about learning "alphabetical order" in another language? Japanese has its own order! And even if that is fine, and your Japanese reading is up to scratch, many English movies have completely different titles to their original versions.

Things are ramping up again now in our house with both David and I have worked full-time this week and school starts (I say YAY) next Thursday. But we think back fondly to our July holiday with great thanks that we could take the time off and had a place to go, and look forward to next time we can recharge like this!

Here are some photos from from our time away:

We caught the last two weeks of the rainy season and everything was very
green. This was one of the trees in the local park where we played Park Golf.

Park Golf. I am appalling at it, but it's a fun activity (if you don't record your score).

This lily's flower was bigger than my hand!

A cute frog posing on our youngest son's hand.

We had many rainy days and only saw two sunsets. This is the view that we could see from the dining
room and lounge area.

David and I went on a couple of local walks. Beautiful!

Wild boar trap along one of the roads we walked on.

Reading my Kindle at the dining table...with a view.

We took one 1,000-piece puzzle loaned to us by friends, it was fiendishly difficult. An overall picture of Yoda,
but made up of 1,000s of micro pictures.

Wet = fungi. I had my eyes open for some photogenic mushrooms in the park.

One of the two sunsets we saw from our living area.

Inside our holiday apartment. Our middle son loves this loft. He set up
his bed and recreation area up there. Our bedroom door is on the right of the photo,
the other side of the ladder is the entrance to the bathroom and far left of photo
is the kitchen. It's pretty compact, but the lofty ceiling with exposed beams
makes it feel spacious.

In the last couple of days the volcano we were perched on showed its peak.
This is taken from the verandah.

Ginger Slice

 I’ve got a blog post in the works about our holidays (now nearly two weeks ago!), but in the meantime, I posted a photo of the Ginger Slice I made on the weekend and there have been requests for the recipe.

 Here is it:

Base

60g (2 oz) brown sugar

115g (4 oz) butter

1 cup SR flour (1 cup of all purpose flour plus one teaspoon of baking powder)

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1. Cream butter and sugar, add flour and ginger.

2. Press into a flat tray (about 20 x 25 cm).

3. Cook in a moderately hot oven (about 180/190C) until golden brown.

Icing

140 g (5 oz) sifted icing sugar (powdered sugar)

60g (2 oz) butter

1 teaspoon ground ginger

2 teaspoons golden syrup (you could substitute another syrup here, maybe corn syrup)

1. Mix ingredients together in saucepan while base is cooking. Stir over low heat until thickened.

2. Pour over base immediately after you take the base out of the oven.

3. Cut into rectangles while hot.