One year anniversary

This is now our bedroom.

Last week I missed an anniversary here. The one year anniversary of moving into this house! We remain so thankful for the convenient location of this house. It is fantastic. It is also just the right size for us. With room for visitors on occasion too!

If you want to, you could look back at a couple of posts around the time we moved in last year here and here. But I've replicated my favourite embarrassing story of the move here:

My first grocery shop was the first day we arrived in our house. Of course - there was absolutely nothing besides our water bottles in our marvellous fridge. Especially nothing for breakfast the next day. Thankfully I'm already fairly familiar with the area and didn't have much trouble finding the shop I wanted. It was not much trouble shopping, either, because it is a smallish shop of a chain that I shopped at two or three times a week for four years, so I know what they stock (very unlike Woolworths or Coles in Australia). There is very little choice of brand, but that is fine - I get through fast!

The trouble came when I got to the cash register and realised that in Japan you pay in cash, not with your plastic card (as I always did for the groceries in Australia). And I only had 7 000 yen on me (less than AU$100. So, red-faced, I explained in a halting-just-returned-from-a-year-without-speaking-Japanese way that I had to go and get some money. He was very kind and held aside the rest of the groceries while I rushed home with what I'd managed to buy and asked my husband for more from his wallet (Japanese ATMs are still too scary for me).

In my rush I had to try and find our house. I got close. Our neighbour's houses all look pretty similar to ours. They're all close to the road, close to each other and have covered garages next to the front doors. With my car blocking half the narrow street, I climbed out and dashed into the most likely door (which was unlocked) - shouting, "David, where's your wallet?" Too late I saw that the entry hall was not jammed with boxes...I left as fast as I could. I still haven't met our neighbour (coming up soon - another Japanese custom we must adhere to). I don't know if anyone heard me or not. I hope not.

Too many embarrassments for one afternoon! It is a good thing that someone brought us some pizza for dinner. 

To this day I don't know whether our elderly neighbours know about that "house invasion". These are the same neighbours who have given us advice about gardening and gutter sweeping. The wife occasionally sweeps our gutters when we don't get around to it fast enough and are always amazed when I have one or more of the boys helping me sweep.

But again, I have to say how thankful we are to be able to live here. We hope we'll be able to live here a lot longer! Just today we had to clear out the top of our china cabinet so that it could be shifted temporarily so that a new air conditioning unit can be installed (to replace a geriatric one). Just the removal of those things threw me back to bad memories of moving. But for now we don't have to think of moving and I am so thankful!