The struggle to feel useful

Recently I spent time editing three short articles by colleagues from my organisation. They all were about staying healthy on the mission field (our social media theme for November). They all talked about various personal struggles to stay healthy in Japan. Not just physically healthy, but mentally and spiritually healthy too. I identified strongly with many of the things they wrote about, but one common thing struck me: the desire to feel useful. 

And a fire photo from last week's camping,
because I needed an excuse to share one
more camping photo! :D

One of the articles was by a couple who’ve been in Japan less than two years. Their struggles to take care of themselves as well as their young daughter on top of learning Japanese and living in a place where they felt like toddlers themselves was all too familiar to me, even though it’s been 20 years since we were in a similar position. Another article was by someone who’s been here a while longer, but her struggles were not so dissimilar. 

They all are in Japan because they (and many around them) discerned that God called them to serve him here, but the struggle to feel useful is common to them all. I think it’s an innate human trait, and certain none of us came to Japan with the intent on being useless, though we feel that way more often than we’ve ever felt like that as adults in our home country.

I've seen this "need to feel useful" struggle in others too when I've worked with people who have been here for a short time. There's often a great deal of gratitude when they're given a task that they can actually do, a feeling of usefulness that helps them through the other parts of their lives. 

Feeling useless is tied to the struggle to learn Japanese and that is innately tied to learning the culture (you can’t really do the latter really well without the former). In my early years here I was told that I needed to get better Japanese otherwise I would hold my husband back. That cutting statement only added to my feelings of uselessness and, sadly, the statement still hurts (my tears are flowing as I write). I doubt the person who wrote it knew how deeply that cut. I felt it was saying my poor ability to learn Japanese affected my ability to be the wife God expected me to be to my husband, while trying to live and work in the land God had called us to.

Over the years in Japan I’ve felt more useful in certain ways, but still feel very limited here. One of the areas I’ve felt most useful outside of my editing work, is maintaining a home for my husband and kids—doing my best to make sure they had good food and a clean, comfortable place to live. I think part of the big adjustment I’ve had this time is that I no longer have that way to be useful in Japan (to my kids). And so it’s felt more difficult in Japan to deal with that loss than it was in Australia where I am overall more capable.

However, I’m re-reading a book that always gives me a good readjustment to my thinking—Awe by Paul David Tripp. He defines awe as the desire of every human being to be amazed, blown away, moved, and satisfied, and clarifies that it actually is a universal craving to see God face-to-face. You've got to read this book!

In a recent portion I read, he wrote about how we humans try to place our identity in the wrong places. We try to be useful, we tie our identity to our relationships (kids, partner, friend, daughter/son), we identify ourselves by our jobs, by how much we earn or own, by our citizenship, by what we’re good at, what we’ve achieved, what our kids or parents have achieved. 

The grace that has connected me to [God] has also freed me from looking for identity anywhere else. I am what I am because of who he is for me by grace. In his awesome glory, I really do find everything I need. . . . I do not have to hunt elsewhere for meaning and purpose for my life. I do not have to look elsewhere to define who I am. I do not have to look elsewhere to measure my potential. I do not have to look elsewhere to find that inner sense of peace and well-being. Why? Because I have found all those things in him. Awe of him liberates me from a life-distorting bondage to awe of anything else. Remember, you and I tend to be in awe of what we are convinced will give us life (identity, meaning, purpose, pleasure, etc.). (All quotes from Chapter 13 of Awe, Paul David Tripp). 

This is in a chapter about work. He goes on to say:

Because work is such a huge and significant dimension of our lives, it becomes very tempting for us to look for our identity there. And when you look to work for your identity, you will find it very hard to resists challenges, demands, and promises of reward.

So we have this label "missionaries" or "cross-cultural workers" and we feel like that's our identity and that we have to "succeed" or at the very least "be useful" at that to have any worth. That's obviously a big mistake, especially in a place where it is rare for English-speakers born elsewhere to become native-level fluent in the language and culture.

But Tripp points out that it's a mistake for any human:

When I don't let awe of God give my heart rest and define me as his child, I will seek identity in things like success and achievement, power and control, and possessions and affluence, and I will work like crazy to get them, leaving a trail of relational and spiritual destruction behind me.

One of the articles I edited this week talked about a new missionary's temptation to overcommit to things that they felt they might be useful at, but also to overextend themselves in language study in an effort to get to the level where they can be useful.

Only when your heart is satisfied in [God] can you be freed from looking for spiritual satisfaction in the fleeting pleasures of the physical world. When you're satisfied in him, you will be liberated form working constantly in order to possess more of what you hope will give you identity. 

So the bottom line: my identity is not tied to my kids, my job title, my usefulness or output, or how busy my schedule is. This isn't really news to me, and yet why do I have so much trouble remembering it. So much trouble lining up my emotions to fit it?

My kitchen

Inspired by a month of posts by expats about their kitchens by Taking Route Blog #thisglobalkitchen, I'm going to tell you about mine.

My kitchen is not glamorous, but it is functional and I love it. It's bigger than a usual Japanese kitchen, but nowhere near as large as a kitchen would be in the usual three-bedroom house in Australia.

Looking back to the dining room and my corner office from the kitchen sink.

When we first came to Japan, one of the biggest challenges at home was the kitchen. We were in a much smaller place (we were a smaller family then, just one boy less than two-years-old). What drove me crazy was no bench space (i.e. "counter"). It is pretty typical, we've discovered, for a Japanese kitchen to have little food preparation space. The only place we could prepare food in our first Japanese kitchen, was on the sink-drainage area. 

Thankfully this kitchen (and house) is much larger, though I'm not sure if I would have appreciated it as much if I hadn't had had to work in a much smaller space (that first kitchen shared a tiny room with the laundry and shower ante-room).

When visitors who know Japan come to visit, one of the first things they usually comment on is our kitchen. It has an unusual amount of storage room. These built-in floor-to-ceiling cupboards are unusual, what's more, a crafty previous resident has added tasteful internal curtains to these glass-doors. But there are other unusual elements that we've added.

This house has had numerous missionaries live in it previously. It is not owned by a Christian and was not purpose-built for foreigners. However, when we moved in the kitchen had a most unusual element: an ancient American gas oven/stove. It didn't fit, being far deeper than these cabinets were. In our small attic we found the original under-stove cabinet that was removed to put the oven in. A former missionary had brought an oven with them from the US!

I loved that dinosaur of an oven, even though we had to practically lie on the floor to light it. Its large four-burner top provided pseudo-bench space that was so valuable. Ovens are not usual in a Japanese kitchen. Most people use toaster ovens and microwave ovens with convection functions, which are obviously much smaller.

Alas, four years ago that oven started leaking gas. You can read about that drama here. The Japanese repairmen who came to look at it had never seen the likes of it! There was much sucking in of breath over the teeth (a clear sign in Japan that there is a major problem).

The end result of that drama was that we lost that old oven and bought this Japanese oven and three-burner stovetop to replace the dinosaur—that was not a cheap decision. We reasoned that we'd be living here for some years yet with our three growing boys (they were aged 10, 13, and 16 at that time). One of the things I love to do is cook and bake, I really struggled with the idea of going back to just two burners and only using my microwave/convection oven (even though it was the biggest you can buy here). 

This Japanese oven is the most spectacular oven I've ever used. It heats up quickly and cooks very reliably. I'm still holding out hope that when we move from here we can take the oven/stove with us to a new place, but know that that might not be a reasonable expectation as we'd like to move into a smaller place after all our boys move out.

We have underfloor storage. This is a cool thing about Japanese houses (not sure if they exist in apartments). A place to put food and stores under the floor is very cool.

Underfloor storage.

Oil, potatoes, and cereal in this side.

Breadmaker with rubbish "drawers" underneath.

Other elements of the kitchen that I love are the breadmaker (we make our own sliced bread), the chest freezer, and a large fridge with lots of compartmentalised drawers. All these make providing food for my family much easier.

You'll see under the breadmaker the plastic drawers that help us sort rubbish as we dispose of it. The top drawer is glass and tin, then "unburnable" (i.e. doesn't fit any other category), and the bottom is paper and cardboard. The rest is in the bin on the other side of the kitchen next to the stove: burnable (raw food, scraps, etc.) and recyclable plastics.

Look closely and you will see that the lino is torn in places. The mat in front of the sink helps to hide that. Also, there is a gas-outlet in the floor that we don't use, but it dangerous for foot traffic, so it's covered with a carpet tile! The wall tiles are an ugly green, and the trim on all the doors are hard to clean.

It's not a shiny, new kitchen with fancy appliances. It's not particularly space-efficient and it's challenging for two people to work in, but it works for us and I'm very thankful for God's provision. Not just of this kitchen, but this house. Next year it will be ten years since we moved in here. It's an old house that has it's flaws and quirks, but we've done the majority of our child-raising here and we're thankful for the stability and convenience it affords (it's close to school, church, shops, and the train station).

Japan is not an easy place to live and work as a missionary, but we have many things to be thankful for in terms of ease of living and stability of society. Indeed "The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places" (Ps 16:6 NIV).

Job list in our house

Oops, I only just saw a comment on my post in May about household jobs and negotiating with teens. My friend asked me to post our list of jobs. 

Of course, they would differ for every household. Each family runs slightly differently and different things cause more stress than others, plus different ages and differences in schedules change how you do things. For example, when the boys were younger, two of them took turns to vacuum under the table after dinner. This was mostly because I struggled with how messy that place got and with the feeling of crumbs under my feet drove me crazy. Plus each family is made up of people with different preferences and limitations. 

We also do things differently here than in Australia for various reasons, for example, rubbish sorting is more intense here and we wash more often than we might in Australia with a rotary clothesline because the hanging space is smaller.

Here's our list of the regular jobs done to keep our household running:

These are shared by Mum and Dad

Make breakfast (7 times a week)

Make lunch (7 times a week)

Make dinner (7 times a week)

Set table for breakfast (7 times a week)

Set table for dinner (7 times a week)

*Clear table after breakfast (7 times a week)

*Clear table after dinner (7 times a week)

Breakfast washup (weekends)

Dinner wash-up (7 times a week)

Put clean breakfast dishes away (7 times a week)

Put clean dinner dishes away (7 times a week)

Rubbish collection inside (incl. replace bags)

*Rubbish – take out (3-4 times/wk)

Toilets clean (once a week)

Vacuum whole house (once a week)

Clean bathroom basin and mirror (every 1—2 wks)

Cleaning shower and bath and shower room (periodically)

Grocery shopping (2-3 times a week)

Washing clothes (~5 times a week)

Washing towels (once a week)

Washing sheets (once a week)

Bringing washing in (~5 times a week)

*Folding washing (~5 times a week)

Refill heater with oil (winter)

Ironing (periodically)

Mending (periodically)

Boys’ jobs

Hanging up washing (~5 times a week)

Breakfast wash-up (5 times a week) NOTE: This has recently been renegotiated and been replaced with the jobs that are asterisked above.

From high school: wash own clothes

Jobs we all do 

Get ourselves up on time

Shower ourselves

Clean our teeth

Manage our personal items like bags, lunchboxes, medication

Take care of ourselves by eating and sleeping well

Strip our beds and remake them

Keep our rooms tidy

Take care of our “work” responsibilities, including homework and schoolwork.

During the summer holidays we've added the job of planning and making one meal a week.

Joy in the small things

Writing yesterday's post made me very sad for several hours afterwards. So today I want to tell you about some joy I had yesterday. 

I don't like housework and spend as little time on it as possible. However, I've found over the years that if I vacuum and clean toilets regularly, I expend less emotional energy in the long run and actually get a reasonable amount of satisfaction at having those two things under control. I've also discovered that routine is also something that also reduces energy spent, so I've developed the routine of doing these two mundane, yet important jobs on Wednesday mornings. It is the morning that school has a slow start for the students. They start at 9.30 instead of 8.30, so the morning is a bit different anyway, with them here later.

Routine is something that was almost completely missing from our six months in Australia. It's a big thing we missed. And, try as I might, I never established a routine for vacuuming and cleaning toilets.

So yesterday morning it was with strange delight that I got reacquainted with my cute Japanese vacuum cleaner. I have yet to meet a vacuum cleaner in Australia that I like as much as this little machine. I even took a selfie with it to show you how tiny it is. Oh, and I cleaned the toilets too. Which, despite most of my house being around 6˚C, wasn't a hardship as I was warm anyway from vacuuming, and then used warm water to clean.

And then I sat down with coffee that I made with my Baccarat stovetop expresso maker (another item that I missed in Australia). A little piece of routine reclaimed and with it, joy. I savoured the moment.

How have the summer holidays been?

Summer holidays are rushing to an end and I want to write a little about how things have gone in the realm of time-management for the boys. (See this post about the guidelines we set at the start of the holidays.)

Oyakodonburi or Chicken and Egg on Rice, a favourite Japanese meal of our
middle son. He needed help with this, but it tasted pretty authentic.

Truth is that there has been a lot of electronics. However, there has also been a lot of reading, creativity, and jobs done.

We spent 16 days away in July and those days had very limited amounts of electronics/screen time and lots of reading and board game-time. There were few complaints.

It's been encouraging to see one boy walk away from electronics significantly on most days in the last month.

Exercise has been spotty and I think two boys are going to be sore when they get back to school and cross-country training begins.

Bedtimes have been somewhat managed by us still. Setting limits on when electronics end . . . alas that hasn't stopped some boys staying up to the early hours of the morning reading. Last Monday we instituted a 9 am limit on sleep-ins and tomorrow it will go back to 8 am, then it's 7 am rising on Thursday in preparation for Friday's 8.30 start at school. That has made people grumpy (mostly later in the day when they're tired—they've acquiesced to the early rising times), but hopefully helped them to get to sleep earlier.

Meal cooking has been interesting, and it's been a lot easier to get cooperation than last year. Typical for our household: second time around is better. The boys aren't very creative, in that they've just chosen meals that we usually eat, but they're slowly getting better at cooking main meals (we need to work on speed a bit though—we've had some very late meals). I'm getting better at being the nearby "help desk" rather than getting in the way.

Late-July we did a big change-over of household jobs. That's gone fairly well too, I expected a challenging learning curve, but the boys have moved into their new jobs well: 

• Washing: As a result David and I are now only responsible for three people's washing (and the sheets and towels). That's a significant change. It's been great to see our new high schooler taking on responsibility for his own washing. He's also now responsible for hanging up the washing for the rest of us, and has done a good job for the most part. It's better now that he's not getting up at midday!
• Breakfast dishes: Our youngest has done a great job of getting into breakfast washups. Only whinge has been on those days when it is hot enough to make him sweaty or when he hasn't gotten to it before lunch and ends up with some lunch dishes to do too. Next challenge for him will be being organised enough to get it all done before school.
• House elf: Our eldest doesn't have a set family-related job at this point aside from cooking once a week. We have asked him to help out randomly with washing up at night-time, though. I don't know how this will change. Maybe I'll get him to do some grocery runs when I'm extra busy in the coming months.

Another staff-mum asked me this morning if I was ready for school to start and I heartily said yes. She, however, is in a different life-stage (little ones) and isn't looking forward to her husband being back at school, especially before her kids go back into Japanese kindy. 

I'm glad that these big boys of mine will soon be back at school, they need the routine and challenge. They need the world to not revolve around their own pleasure as much as it does during holiday-time.

I'll also be happy to get my schedule more back under my control. Having them home now is nowhere near as challenging as it was when they were little, but I also have more outside-the-home responsibilities now than I did then. I'll enjoy having less interrupted time, especially in the afternoons. 

Lately I've been getting a bit frustrated at the interruptions and the self-centered assumptions that I should interrupt whatever I'm doing immediately my name is called to attend to whatever they deem is important at that moment (usually these aren't super urgent matters). 

I am torn between being being available and teaching them not to be so self-centred that they assume that whatever they are doing is more important than what I'm doing. Not to mention that they rarely respond immediately when I call their names! 

Then there's the guilt-ridden message that gets showered upon us mums: enjoy them while you have them at home. But they no longer need me constantly and oftentimes what they're asking of me could wait a little while. Not to mention that I can't take 11 weeks off work, nor am I a super-mum—able to work through the night so that I'm available for them all day! So, I'm between a rock and a hard place. A situation that all working mums (and dads) have to deal with.

Anyway enough ranting, I'm just looking forward to having more boundaries in place around my work-life. When they're at school and training—I can work without guilt.

New rhythms

This week we've quickly gotten into a new temporary rhythm.

Another photo to help me remember our time away...

• The boys have swapped their household chores. We do things a little differently around here. Boys have jobs they do for years at a time. So a change is significant. Thankfully they all seem to be happy with the change.
• To mark moving into high school our middle son is now in charge of his own washing, he's also taken over the job his big brother had of hanging up all the washing for the family through the week.
• Our youngest has taken on his big brother's job too: breakfast washing during the week.
• Our eldest is moving in to new territory. He will be helping more with meal preparation. He also suggested that I could consider him a "house-elf", which apparently is something from Harry Potter. We'll see how that all works out.
• Speaking of Harry Potter, we've embarked on a seven-day marathon of Harry Potter movie watching. Tonight is number two.
• All three need to work on their fitness, so David proposed that they could all go for a run at 5pm. That worked yesterday, then this afternoon we had a thunderstorm that put them all off kilter and no running happened at all. Hopefully they'll be able to get into a rhythm with this.
• This week David and our eldest are in charge of menu and meals. David's a good cook, so there's no concerns there. Our son is quite adequate at following a recipe, but he's a little inexperienced when it comes to main meals. Last night we ended up eating quite late as a result.

And I'm sitting at my computer working. I'm glad to be back at work, actually, as holidays were getting boring. But I'm feeling a bit frustrated this evening. I'm plodding along at a pace that doesn't seem to be making too many inroads into what needs to be done. Indeed my To Do list is growing faster than I can cross things off on it.

The weather doesn't help me a lot. It's hot and humid. We typically try to live economically, which means without air con as much as possible. At this time of year that translates to turning it on some time during the morning or early afternoon when I'm sick of coping in the heat (David seems to be much more tolerant, maybe because he grew up in a hotter climate than I). I lasted until 2pm today. Nights are challenging too. We have no air con in our bedrooms. For me, going to sleep when my room is 30C+ and no breeze is hard. We have a floor fan and I use an "ice pillow" (like a slow-melting ice pack), but when I woke to use the toilet at 2.30 the ice pillow was already room temperature. To get back to sleep I wet my t-shirt and hair, which worked.

Tomorrow I'm determined to get up earlier (I've been lazy, still on holiday-mode these last couple of days) and get more done!

Life this week in-between Christmas and New Year

Life around our place has been very cruisy. Not much getting done beyond the basics. We're sleeping late and going to bed late. And getting a little social again.

On Wednesday we went to see Rogue One with a Finnish family of boys from CAJ. All enjoyed it. I did too...but I was a bit sad nonetheless. I'd tell you why, but don't want to spoil your fun if you haven't seen it yet.

Yesterday we had an English/Finnish family join us for morning tea. The main attraction was for our English guest to enjoy his first Fruit Mince Pies of the season! But we had a good couple of hours just sitting around and chatting. Their two children had a great time playing with our old Duplo and Kitchen toys. It was lovely. In the afternoon David and I ran away for an afternoon tea date at a coffee shop. That was really good too!

Today we've got a Japanese/American family joining us for lunch (I must finish this quickly so that I can get to making the soup I've planned). They've got three young children too, so the toys will be coming out again. We're hoping for some great conversational times with them too.

Tomorrow we're hoping to go for a family bike ride, but the jury is out as to whether we'll be able to motivate all the kids to join us. Then tomorrow night we'll join with more international friends to celebrate the New Year.

It's great to have the time to be more hospitable. It's wonderful to have friends around at a time when we might most miss being with our families.

Though I do have bits and pieces of work that need to be worked on or at least monitored too:

• I've written/desk-top published three newsletters this week
• Believe it or not people still contact OMF Japan via our website at this time of the year (I guess they have more time to think about the future...) So I'm still answering emails.
• Our magazine design/proofreading team is (supposed to) be working on getting the Winter issue done. That inevitably means emails to me with questions. I'm yet to check what our proofreader has been finding.
• Articles for the Spring issue are due in two weeks and some are already dribbling in.
• Never mind the shopping and cooking for the family...that's a given!

But for the most part I've been relaxing. One day I'll get back to vacuuming the house and cleaning the toilet...

Washing is inside again

We had a lack of sun in September and it's continuing. This morning it's really cloudy again. Though the weather report says no rain until later I'm not game to put the washing out. So once again it's hung up in our stairwell. It will stay there until tomorrow. 

If tomorrow isn't sunny and we can't put it outside, it might end up in our dryer. Dryers aren't common in Japan, but we're thankful for ours. Someone gave us a special gift back when we had littlies in snowy Sapporo. We don't use it every week, but it certainly comes in handy when there's a run of damp, grey weather.

Mood-lifting park ride

I've been feeling a little out of sorts recently. It's a combination of factors. I'm missing people and that grief has hit harder than I thought (I wrote about it here) but more than that, I've been "between projects" since the start of the month.

In my work there is fluctuation in my busyness. Sometimes I'm over-the-top busy, at other times it is slower. I don't necessarily have a lot of control over it, because it depends on a lot of other factors, like how fast my editing team works. That also means I can't necessarily anticipate how busy I'll be at any particular time. Though there are some things I can anticipate, like the last week of the month, for example, has become busy as I've taken on a couple of extra responsibilities for our mission that are due in the last few days of the month.

Hence, I had to work (a bit) during our camping holidays in July and after that while everyone was still home into late August, I was still working fairly hard. Now that they're all back at school I find that the pace of my various projects have slowed. I'm mostly waiting for other people to do their thing so that I can do mine.

These stunning Red Spider Lillies are only around at this
time of year. In Japanese they are called Higan after the time
of the year that they bloom (autumn equinox). I've learnt
(vis Facebook friends comments) that they are associated
with death because this is the time of year that Japanese
visit their ancestor's graves and hence these flowers don't
appear at the florists, you don't give them to people.

Basically I hate being bored. I hate running out of things to do. It's why I've never aspired to solely be a housewife (not to mention I don't like cleaning, but I can't find enough to do around the house all day to satisfy my need to stay occupied). When my youngest was nearing school age I was actively looking for more things to get involved in.

Ironically I would have happily taken more leisure time in August, while everyone was at home, but I find it harder now, it seems like I'm bludging (Aussie slang for shirking responsibility)! This post isn't an invitation for people to give me more work, because I am well aware that, as I've already said, my work fluctuates and there are coming times when I'll be extra busy.

I've been trying to get more exercise (I've been slack this year) and have been scheduling park-rides as well as gym times. Yesterday was a day I set aside to ride to my favourite park. I really didn't feel like it, but because it was on my schedule and because I had to do some birthday present shopping on the way home, I just went.

I'm so glad I did. It had rained during the night and was overcast, so things were damp, almost misty in the park. There were few people around, so it was very peaceful too. I took my camera and found some gorgeous things to shoot. The overcast conditions gave me beautiful diffused light to work with and the colours just seemed to pop out. 

I took a picnic and enjoyed sitting on one of the benches I photographed across the seasons in the last 12 months. On top of having good success in my birthday shopping, riding 20+km, and relaxing in the park, I came home at 4pm very happy. That elation lasted right through the evening. I'm so glad I went.

In the background you can just see a hint of a large number of kindergarten kids who were having a games day in the park.

I don't know what these are, but they are delicate and gorgeous too.

A white Spider Lily.

The advantage of going around with a camera just after rain 
are the raindrops adorning plants!

Working from a home-corner

My home office-corner

I usually work from my desk at home, in the corner of our dining room. There are many things accomplished from the little computer desk in my dining room. 

But it's a question I'm often asked: do you have an office, do you often go down to the JEMA office downtown to work? Well no. The only time I go downtown is like today, when a magazine is ready to post out, and that is only four times a year. 

As I type this on my phone on the way into the office, I'm standing on a crowded train with sniffs and occasional coughs. I am glad that my commuting most days is minimal. Even though my house is chilly, this is a very convenient arrangement and gives me lots of flexibility in how I use my time and allows me to be available for my family when they need me most of the time. It also has a better view than either the JEMA office or the OMF office.

The city office of the organisation that publishes the
magazine. Of course my work from home doesn't
just encompass this editing work, I have a number
of roles, most of the others are related to OMF or CAJ
or are our own news/prayer letter or my own writing.

My boys understand that I work from home, but sometimes I don't think what that means fully registers. Because my computer is in the dining room it is hard for me to work once they're home (although not as hard as it used to be). So the arrangement isn't perfect. School holidays are tricky. So are days when I haven't finished what I wanted or needed to get done before they come home from school. 

Yesterday I wrote about 35 emails during the course of the day. I had not quite finished a couple of important ones when two boys came home. My youngest, who is only just getting used to his own email, watched over my shoulder as I typed. I mentioned to him it had been a high volume email day and he said, "Yeah, while I've been watching you've already written two!"

I never thought I'd work willingly from home  because I grew up in a house that also housed my parents' electrical contracting business. Them working nights and weekends in the office doing paperwork was common, even normal. I never wanted that. 

Yet then I became an aspiring missionary and was working nights and weekends to raise awareness of what we believed God had called us to do. After nearly two years of that we flew to Japan and both began full-time language study while taking full time care of our very active toddler. Guess what? We were working nights and weekends. Then another boy was born while still at language school and the pattern continued.

Life as a stay-at-home mum took up the next few years and I was working at home because that was where my kids needed me. It's how I got into the writing/editing business, because I could do that from my home computer corner.

So, now the boys are all at school and have been for a few years now, I'm still working from home, and liking it. I do, though, have my rules. I generally don't do housework (except for grocery shopping and sometimes putting the slow-cooker on) when they're all at school and I try to confine my computer work to school hours. I also try not to do work in the evenings, if at all possible.

I am an extrovert (or ambivert, explanation here), so I do need my times out of the house with adults. I get that mostly by meeting friends for coffee and going to school and mission prayer meetings. As I wrote earlier, I also get a lot of email interaction (and social media, to tell the truth), that helps tame the extrovert beast in me. I get antsy if I can't spend face-to-face time with one or more adults after a day or two, though.

How about you? Do you have experience at working from home base? How did you like it compared to going to a work-place/s?

Oven/stove drama

Today's drama is barely over and I'm mourning. This oven has been given a thumbs down. But the story hasn't ended yet. There is hope, but I'm not sure this is going to turn out the way I want it to.

On Sunday I turned the far left knob to boil the kettle and I felt a tiny click. The back left burner hasn't worked since then. But it's worse than that. There was a discernible smell of gas even when the oven or stove wasn't being used.

With the stove top off while the gas guy examined it.

We don't know how old this is. It is American, obviously imported by someone who lived in this house previously (and there have been several American families connected to the school who've lived here). It doesn't even really fit in the kitchen (much deeper than the bench to the left of it). It's ancient, dirty, rusty . . . but up till now has worked brilliantly.

So the drama this afternoon has gone something like this:

Gas man came looked at it and said he's never seen anything like it.

Gas man made lots of phone calls.

Gas man decided it was unfixable and needed scrapping. 

He asked for the owner's phone number. I gave him the number of the Japanese person employed by our mission to help with things like dealing with owners. They talked.

Gas man rang real estate agent who said they'd ring the owner.

Gas man taped up the gas line knob so none of the oven/stove could be used. Gave me a form to sign that I think said, "I understand that I shouldn't use this 'cause it's broken."

Gas man left.

Meanwhile, I'm on Facebook (yes, I admit I'm addicted, though at times like these it is one of the most economical route to getting help in an expat community) and messaging David who's at school.

I was resigning myself to the loss of this magnificent piece of equipment and about ⅓ of the bench space in my kitchen. I regularly make batches of several dozen biscuits, that will take twice as long without this oven. Every day we put stuff on the stove top: from lunch boxes, to dishes that aren't quite dry yet. Yes, I know most expats in Asia don't have anything like this . . . but that doesn't mean I can't mourn its loss.

Then people on FB started suggesting that it might still be fixable. Just because a Japanese repairman says it isn't, apparently isn't the end of the story?

Phone rang. It was the person in our mission who conveyed a message from the owner saying they were going to try and fix it. Or they will replace it.

I'm in disbelief. I can't believe that they'll find someone who'll fix an old American oven. If my disbelief is true, then I don't believe that they will replace with anything close to equivalent...

However as an expat community we have resources they don't have, so while we wait for whoever they send, we'll make our own enquiries.

But again, realistically, not many expats have something as nice as this in their kitchens in Asia and they probably don't feel much sympathy for us. I should be thankful. And I have been. It still hurts to think that I might lose it so soon.

This is the extent of my kitchen benches. Can you see how little bench
space we have left without the stove?
We'll miss that probably more than the oven.