Last chance for book giveaway

Did you miss my book giveaway post earlier in November? I have only three entries, two local to me (who I can cover by donating the book to the CAJ library) and one in rural Australia. The challenging qualifier was

someone who lives more than an hour away from their nearest English bookstore.

Anyone else want to enter? If no one else puts their hands up before the end of the weekend, I'll put you in the draw.

Two easy, scrumptious recipes for afternoon tea

I'm trying to do my best today to keep away a cold, or at least minimise the severity of a cold (and no, this is not an invitation for you to give me "cold hints"). I'm lying a bit low today and working quietly at home. However, I have an aching head, exacerbated by one writer's insistence on writing with a low FLESCH readability level (see an explanation here).

Hence, I'm going to opt for an easy blog post. Judie asked me some time back for the recipe for Snickerdoodles.

So here it is:

Snickerdoodles

85g soft butter
2 eggs
1 1 /2 cups* or 330g sugar

Mix thoroughly together.

Sift these together:

2 1/2 cups* or 375g plain flour
3 teasp. baking powder

Then stir into the wet ingredients. Roll into small balls and roll balls in this mixture:
2 teasp. cinnamon
50g sugar

Don't place them too close on the tray. Bake at 190 degrees C for approximately 10 minutes.

Absolutely scrumptious. If you like Cinnamon Toast this recipe is a double bonus. The cinnamon and sugar combo. can also be used to make Cinnamon Toast.


I would have shown you all these gorgeous apple muffins, they've just been eaten up so fast it was hard to take a photo!

Super Simple Apple Muffins

3/4 cup* or 170g sugar
260g SR flour **
1 cup* sultanas
1 teasp. bi-carb soda
3 teasp. mixed spice or cinnamon
1 egg
1 cup* cooked/tinned apple
90g softened butter

Mix all dry ingredients. Add egg, apple, and softened butter. Mix well. Place in 12 hold muffin pan and bake in moderate oven for 20 minutes.

And get your taste buds ready for some awesome action!

For some reason, this time I found the mixture a bit dry, but I simply added a touch of orange juice and that worked just fine.

And before I end, I have to give thanks for my mum who gave me both of these recipes, as well as the skill, and love of baking. Thanks Mum!


*These are Australian sized measuring cups = 250ml.
**SR Flour is Self Raising Flour. Australians are very fortunate to be able to buy flour that already has the raising agent in it. For those of us who don't have that luxury, you can just add 1 teaspoon of baking powder to every cup of plain/cake flour and you're set.

Australian Christmas comes to CAJ's 1st graders

And one of the Asian kids even knew
what this game was!

Yesterday I went to CAJ to teach the Grade 1s about Australian Christmases. I did this last year too. What I did was pretty similar to last year, you can check that out here. It was a fun outing. I hope the kids enjoyed it too.

I especially love it that they enjoyed Colin Buchanan. I played a short part of his Christmas DVD, that included a segment of him talking to the kids about what is different about the Australian climate in contrast to some of the Christmas cards that get sent at this time of year. He made an instant connection with this international bunch of kids who'd never "met" him before. Such a great screen presence!

And of course we sang "Aussie Jingle Bells" with him.

If you want to "meet" Colin, go to the link I posted above. He's a fantastic Aussie Christian musician/children's presenter etc. that our kids have loved since they were tiny.

When am I called "Wen"?

Today I went back to the hospital I went to last week (wrote about it here) for test results. In Australia they'd phone you, or maybe only phone you if there was a problem with a routine test. But, it seems, I needed to go back and get the results myself. As it was, it took longer to register at the front desk than it took in the doctor's office. I didn't even sit down, I was in and out so fast! I'm glad that I only had a 20 min bike ride to get there. If I'd sat on a train or in traffic for an hour, I would have been a bit annoyed.

After my struggle with one staff member last week, I was pleased to find a person in accounts who could see the funny side of things. She apologised with a smile in her voice as she gave me this invoice:

One problem with a Western name is that they sometimes don't fit on computer generated forms such as this. Most Japanese have between three and five characters in their names.

It is interesting that some places they use your actual romanised name. But more often they used our Japanese-spelt name (as in the second photo).

That shortens my name slightly. Marshall becomes five characters. Wendy is the same length, though. So sometimes they can't even fit my Japanese-spelt name into their computers, especially if they decided to add my middle name, even though it is short.

We have a colleague in Hokkaido who has more than one middle name, plus a long hyphenated surname. His name never fits and is downright annoying when filling out forms.

I remember being annoyed that I had to learn a new way to write my name, but even more annoyed that I had to pronounce my name differently for Japanese people to understand it. I didn't expect that when I came to Japan.

It didn't take too long for that to just become normal, however. So I'll answer to "Maashaaru" just as easily as "Marshall" nowadays.

Interestingly my first name, though they don't have a "W", sounds pretty similar in Japanese. I'm thankful for that. It is written phonetically as "Uendi".

Answer to Hard-Off and Off-House photo quiz

Time to reveal what these stores sell. They are second hand stores, hence "off".

Hard-Off sells second-hand electronics, hardware, cameras, other appliances, musical instruments etc.

http://www.hardoff.co.jp/shop_hard.htm

Off-House sells second-hand household goods, clothing etc.

http://www.hardoff.co.jp/shop_off.htm

As one commenter noted, there is also "BookOff", second-hand bookstores. I Googled it and to my surprise found that there are stores in the US as well as France and Korea. 

The names of the stores are a tad mysterious, though, for native English speakers.

Our camping frustration

Just in case you got the impression that we had a perfect camping trip. I want to tell you about the most frustrating part of camping for David and I. It is the kids. Actually, it's their unwillingness, at times, to help out.

I have to admit they are better than they were on our early camping trips, but we still have times when they won't help do simple things like unload the car, cart bags, or help pull the tent down.

This trip I tried to relax a bit, remembering that they are kids and need to goof off a bit. My improved attitude did help me a bit. But I still get annoyed when it feels like David and I are doing all the work (especially when it is work that the kids can easily help out with). It becomes even more annoying when you ask for some help and you are ignored. Or they start to help, you leave them to it, and they get distracted and wander off to look at an ant, or have a pretend sword fight with a stick they found.

Fanning the fire. Our youngest especially enjoyed
collecting pine cones to add to the fire this time.

There were times this trip that one or more were doing a fantastic job. For example, our eldest, particularly, did a great job of pumping up beds on our first night. The younger two also did a pretty good job of helping with the fire most meals (which is, of course, more attractive than carting luggage or rolling up sleeping bags). They all helped out, at times, with various other camping-jobs too. Just not always as willingly as I'd have liked.

But they all did jump in (admittedly, after a tongue lashing and some negative-consequence applying) to help us get all the gear back into the house when we got home.

This last thing is a bigger deal that you might think. To unload the car, we have to park it on the road, which is only just wide enough for two cars to carefully pass at low speed, so we are being an inconvenience to anyone using our road. And in putting things into a Japanese house you face the barrier of the shoe-changing step in the entrance. So everything gets piled in the entrance and it soon gets so that there is no room to go in or out. Having one person inside and shoeless to ferry stuff out of the way is pretty important.

But generally, I'd have to say that they are improving in attitude in relation to helping out while we're camping. They're gradually learning all the different tasks that are required during a camping trip. I guess that's half the battle. My feeling is that the more everyone pitches in, the more enjoyment we all get out of the trip. If only I could get them to fully understand that.

I guess it is part of the whole, "Why should we help out with chores at home?" question that kids ask. And parents try to answer as best we can. The "it's a privilege" is usually met with a good deal of scepticism, at least in our house. Do other people have similar experiences in their house?

A new tradition

Reading in bed was popular.

Well, we're back from camping. Actually we've been back more than 24 hours, but I loathed to even open the computer, I was enjoying my non-computer time so much. I didn't turn it on until this afternoon to do an important email, and of course, type this blog post.

We had a much more successful trip than when we did the same trip this time last year. Everyone was appropriately dressed and had sufficient clothing and bedding to stay warm. It was also just a little warmer than last year: 3 degrees Celsius for breakfast instead of -2C! It makes a big difference.

We've noted before that our family does better when we're not doing a "first". We're all more comfortable knowing what to expect. It was fun to go back and repeat the same things we did last year.

The weather was different this time. We didn't have the wind that kept me awake half the night last time, but we also didn't have clear skies and sunshine. We mostly had grey cloud and drizzle. That's probably why it wasn't quite so cold. However, the rain wasn't bad enough to keep us indoors. In fact it held off while we enjoyed playing Park Golf.

The Swing

We also discovered a couple of new attractions. They've strung up a couple of swings from high branches. One of the swings swung out towards the view down the mountain and the ground fell away, so it felt like you were a lot higher than you actually were. There also was a flying fox that looked sedate, but it actually was a bit scary: you hurtled towards a tree and only stopped at the very last minute!

The Swing

 The autumn leaves were beautiful again.

After Park Golf-ing, we retired to the tents, and blankets
for a game of Monopoly. This all ended abruptly when
one of the pegs holding the annex came out of the soft
soil and knocked everything off the table outside. Once we'd
fixed that it was time to start the fire in preparation for dinner.

 And fire was not only practical, but a fun occupation. Quite a few hours were spent in front of the fire, either enticing it to greater things, or cooking food on it. Such fun!

I've learnt too that chocolate is a Must Take for camping. Not only will it melt nicely in foil over a fire, tastes even better when combined with banana and marshmallows in the foil — it covers over any lack of food that occurs. You finish a meal with chocolate and no one remembers that they'd desired just one more slice of bread, even though there weren't any left!

 Our trip included a Japanese public holiday and the start of a long weekend. The second night we were there the campsite was full. Almost every tent held children, so it wasn't a loud night. And the campsite is actually well laid-out, so that it didn't feel crowded. There were plenty of places for the kids to run and play.

Mt Fuji was shy while we were in its vicinity (too
much cloud and haze), but here is something of a view.

One of the other fun things we did was go to an onsen (Japanese hot baths), on the second evening. We learned from year's experience and  we did that after dinner, then raced home and jumped into bed before we could cool down too much. After a day in the good old outdoors, a hot bath made us all very sleepy.

The advantage in going camping in the cooler part of the year is that the night is longer, and once the sun is down, it is too cool to do much, so bed's the best option. We got more than eight hours of sleep both nights and have come home feeling refreshed.

Apple Farm shop

On the way to the campsite on Thursday we noticed this apple farm with their roadside apple shop. We stopped there on Saturday on the way home. They had "seconds" for sale for only 100 yen per kilo. We got a big bag and I've made Apple Pie and Applesauce this afternoon. I wish I could go back now for more apples. They are simply delicious. The boys enjoyed this stop. They got to see apples on the tree for the first time in their lives. More and more I appreciate the old adage that food is the way to a man's (and boy's) heart!

As we travelled home, I asked if this was to be our new family tradition: camping on the American Thanksgiving long-weekend and I got an enthusiastic "Yes" from everyone.