Kids Musings March 2017

Our latest Kids newsletter for your enjoyment. Remember that you can contact me for a full-sized pdf version. Feel free to use it however you wish.

What's up?

So what's going on in our house this week?

It's an odd kind-of week, starting tomorrow, but I'll start at the very beginning (actually before the beginning, the start of the weekend).

Friday night
A new family has moved into our neighbourhood from our mission, they've been in Japan for a number of years, but have moved here now so their two daughters can go to CAJ for school. We were glad to be able to have them over for dinner on Friday night. They actually moved in just before we went to Korea last month and it was horrible timing for us, it would have been great to have them over much earlier, but you do what you can.

Saturday
On Saturday we spent most of the afternoon and evening at a Wrestling-parents-in-the-stands party. A group of those families that just keep turning up every week to wrestling meets (there were five main families), and we've forged a bond. The wrestlers had a end-of-season party a couple of weeks back, so we thought we'd have a "family" end-of-season party celebrating the bond we'd formed while sitting on hard benches for hours on end, weekend after weekend. It was great fun!

Sunday
Was a pretty quiet day aside from our usual attendance at church. And after all the socialising, our "introverted" introvert son really needed it.

Monday
This was a long day for most of us. I left at 7.45, before all the boys, to go to meetings on the other side of Tokyo. I didn't get home until 5.45, and was beaten home by just one boy. Our two younger boys had athletics training. David and our eldest son had a meeting about what's happening from Friday for them (I'll tell you in a minute). Our son didn't get home till about 7.30 from that (thankfully they fed them there). David didn't get home till after 9 as he also had a head-of-school Search Committee meeting.

Tuesday
Yesterday was a catch-up day at the computer. I also had a Skype meeting with my editorial boss. We made some important decisions and had good discussion about relevant topics. Then I spent an hour or more following up on that before I went to the gym. I had to talk myself into it, it's been a couple of months–wrestling season really derailed me. 

From the gym I went to the post office to mail a parcel to my sister and then got some groceries to feed the mob. Then last night I chatted to my parents for an hour, particularly talking about their visit here at the end of May for a couple of graduations coming up.

Wednesday
This morning was even more heads-down than yesterday at the computer. I had to decide and give out all the assignments for those who've proposed to write for our Summer issue of the magazine. That was more complex than you might imagine. The jury is still out as to whether we will: 1. Fill the magazine. 2. Get too much. 3. Receive appropriate material from those I've said yes too. 4. Need to do some major adjusting to the current plans.

From lunch time I tried to listen to a Japanese grammar video in order to prepare mentally for my Japanese-English exchange time at 2pm (after last time's debacle). It did help.

Tonight our eldest goes out to a Christian high schoolers meeting, starting at 6.30. It happens every Wednesday, but always catches me by surprise. I need to do my best to feed him before he goes. Our middle son needs to pack for tomorrow, but he's resisting that necessity.

Thursday
The eighth grade class go on their "40-hour" Kyoto trip early tomorrow morning. It is a much-looked forward to event at the end of Middle School (by most).

Meanwhile I have a quiet day at home, continuing to work on my to-do list, which includes dealing with various issues that come up with both the Spring and Summer magazine, which are at either end of the production schedule at present. If I've got time, I'll also fill out a passport renewal form for one boy, send out a Kids newsletter, and get back to work at my inDesign online course. I probably won't have time to think about writing some guidelines to help train more editors for the OMF website, though, that's being too ambitious!

Friday
Early Friday morning David, our eldest son, and the rest of his senior class leave for Thailand. It is also a much anticipated event. They will travel all day Friday to northern Thailand where they will be helping a hillside tribe doing some building for their local school. Our eighth grader won't get home until late on Friday, so this day it will be just me and my youngest son for breakfast and dinner. He'll be the only one at school that day. We're planning on a TV dinner watching a movie he's been waiting to see for a few years now.

I'm meeting all the other OMF/CAJ mums locally for lunch. This year we've had two more families join the community, so for the first time in a long time our mission has five families at the school. Lots of fun!

The next eight days
It will be just me and our two youngest boys. I'll figure out just how much the two of them are eating (it is more than I last remember...particularly as they are both training for athletics now too). School finishes next Friday for the one-week Spring break and the seniors return the next day.

For sanity sake, I've scheduled some "adult" time during the day with girlfriends next week. 

Two days after they return we go camping! In the meantime, I hope the temperature increases sharply. Today was only 9C!

No resting on our laurels here.

Sexual assault in Japan

I found this sign in my favourite park last week. It looks bad, when I looked up the word, I knew it was bad. This is warning people to be careful about assault. My dictionary says literally "molester, pervert". 

I was there in the middle of the day, but I could see that in this rather isolated corner of the park, night time could be a problem. Most probably there had been one or more incidents in this area (there were two signs within 30m of one another, with the warning printed on both sides).

It's an unpleasant topic. But two other articles along the same line came to my attention last week.

The first one was about sexual assault on girls on trains and it is shocking, not just because it goes on, but because many girls don't realise that being fondled etc. is abuse.

The second is titled "Japan child abise, pornography cases hit record highs in 2016". Again, tragic.

Not a nice topic at all, but it's good to be aware and is definitely worthy as fuel for our prayers.

A monochromatic whimsy

I left home at 7.45 this morning and got back at 5.45 and started straight into meal preparation. It's only now, at 7.45 that I've been able to sit down for a moment and gather my thoughts into written words. The whole day was meetings and travel. Oh, and a little bit of chatting over food. But it's been constant people. So this is my small offering today. It's more of an Instagram post than a blog post, but I offer it anyway.

I live in basically a concrete jungle. Though that jungle has more space and green in it than you might expect if you haven't been here, it is still essentially kilometres and kilometres of houses and asphalt and apartments and more asphalt. 

Every now and then, though, you get surprised by "nature". This afternoon, walking home in the gloom of a cloudy late afternoon, I was surprised by a whole lot of birds. I have no idea what sort of birds—monochromatic, as far as I can see from my little iPhone photo. There were hundreds of them and many landed on these wires above my head. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, and periodically a whole bunch of them would take off together and fly around again. 

A bit whimsical, but it brightened the end of my busy day.

What brightened your day today? Was it a word from a stranger? A hug from a child? An unexpected letter? I'd love to know.

Six years ago yesterday: a disaster

I can't let yesterday pass without a mention of the anniversary of the disaster six years ago. But I also can't use hyperbole about our experience of that event. 

We were in Tokyo, Japan, but we were barely affected in terms of anything vital to daily life. Nothing fell down, nothing broke. Electricity, water, and gas kept working, our jobs didn't change hugely. We didn't move or evacuate. We only saw the disaster at a distance. Groceries were temporarily difficult to get, mostly, I remember, things like toilet paper, yoghurt, orange juice, and milk.

I bought these recently from Megumi Project.
Earrings made from up-cycled kimonos. What
makes the Project significant is that the artisans
employed by it are all women directly impacted
by the 2011 disaster. They have some great
products, go and have a look! Nozomi Project
is a sister organisation that makes jewellery out
of damaged pottery

The disaster brought a lot of stress with it, in terms of multiple times per day we experienced after-shocks (which, at any other time would be called earthquakes in their own rights). This brought exhaustion as it disturbed our sleep. 

But we had ample food and everything else we needed to sustain life. The distress it brought was knowing how many people just 'down the road' were in much greater pain. That tens of thousands were missing and many more were homeless was a heavy burden to bear. However, we didn't personally lose anyone or know anyone who was lost or homeless.

We did have the question of nuclear disaster hanging over our heads and as a result many of our friends and colleagues rapidly evacuated without time to say goodbye. That was emotionally traumatising for me. But mostly a temporary thing. We did have to consider evacuation ourselves, on a daily basis for a while. Not knowing if you've made the right decision and questioning that every time you'd heard of another trustworthy friend who'd chosen differently was stressful.

The question of evacuation for me came down to several factors but the biggest question was, Does it matter if lose my life now? Growing up in the relative safety of rural Australia, this is not a question I'd had to seriously consider. It was a great comfort to know that I had eternal security. But it was not comforting to know that the vast majority who were missing at that time, or who would die if the nuclear disaster had been more severe, did not have faith in Christ and weren't safe. That, among other things, made me determined to stay (and that was meaningful to the Japanese people who watched, for example, we were given an embarrassing round of applause at church one day).

But again, our lives remained very stable (even more so, because we didn't evacuate). School was cancelled for a few weeks, so we had schedule upheavals. My job got turned on its head when I discovered that instead of being a beginning assistant editor, I got to be the managing editor/art director for the next issue of the magazine.

Many around us were regularly volunteering in the disaster zone. But we never did. In fact we never visited the disaster area until at least a year later. Instead we focused on doing the jobs we had in Tokyo to the best of our abilities: parents, teacher, magazine editor etc.

So I can't really say that the disaster was life changing. It is a day I'll never forget, but I can't say that it was an epoch moment for us personally.

It remains to be seen whether it was an epoch moment for the church in Japan.

I know that a lot more attention has been directed to what had been previously a neglected area. Many more missions have moved into an area that had previously just been a vacation zone for many (but where our mission was already working at the time).

Post-disaster was a time of amazing cooperation between organisation, churches, and denominations. It was also a time when the whole world focused their eyes on a Japan they'd barely contemplated in recent times: a Japan in distress and need.

One of the consequences of having the tsunami take out
the nuclear reactor that provided electricity for parts of
Japan, electricity cuts were common in some places.
Not in our area, but energy saving measures were in place for
many months, including the shut-down of escalators at our
local station.

I know that it was an epoch moment for many Christians inside and outside of Japan. We've seen a spike in people coming to Japan, and I think some of that is because of the 2011 disaster throwing Japan on people's radars.

What's my point of writing this today?

I don't want to forget that more than 20,000 people died on March 11, 2011, and that many are still displaced and will never have the same lives again. But at the same time I don't want others to forget that many more have died in Japan since that day (about 1.3 million each year).

That day in 2011 was shocking, in its unexpectedness and severity. But the reality is that we live among an ongoing disaster in this land with less than 1% of Japanese people knowing Christ. Because it's not ensconced in a disaster it isn't so shocking, certainly not newsworthy to most. But indeed a disaster.

Whole Orange cake

I made Whole Orange Cake last weekend. Love this cake! 

The boys have, over the week, given their whole and honest appraisal of the cake. They're not so totally enthusiastic. Their main beef being that the skin of the orange is included in the cake (despite the fact that they eat orange skin in a fruit cake with no problem).

It's super quick and easy, so I thought I'd share it here.

1 medium orange (about 240g)
200g butter, melted
3 eggs, beaten lightly
1 cup (220g) white sugar
1 ½ cups (225g) self-raising flour (or same amount of plain flour plus 1 ½ teaspoon of baking powder)

Icing
2 teaspoons orange juice
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1 cup (160g) icing sugar
Optional: 2 teaspoons orange rind and 2 teaspoons lemon ride

1. Grease a 20cm cake pan, line base with baking paper.
2. Wash and dry orange, cut into quarters, remove any seeds. Process in food processor until it becomes pulpy.
3. Transfer orange to a medium bowl, stir in butter, eggs, sugar, and sifted flour until smooth.
4. Pour mixture into prepared pan. 
5. Bake in a moderate oven (180C/160C fan-forced) for about 50 minutes or until cooked. 
6. Stand for 10 minutes before turning onto a wire rack.
7. Icing: sift icing sugar into a bowl, stir in juices. If it needs a bit more liquid, add a small amount of hot water (1 teaspoon). Stir in rind, if you're using it.
8. Spread citrus icing over cake.

Enjoy!

Friday Fragments

Yesterday I did more than just ride to the park and take photos. I rode home via a large road that has lots of shops along it. I'm looking for a case for my camera, and stopped at a couple of secondhand stores along the way, which is always fun. I didn't find any reasonably priced camera cases that I liked, but I did see these:

Very fun. I find myself wondering if I could find a use for one of them, because they're so cute! I'd go back in a flash if I could just think of a good reason...

This next photo is from the park. What do you think these are? (I'm waiting to see your answer in comments below or on Facebook, if you're a FB friend.)

One of the other stores I went to is a discount store. Not one of my favourites because it induces visual and auditory overload. The idea, I think, is that they stuff the store with goods and people get a thrill looking for "just the thing". But there is so much stuff! I took a short video to give you the idea of not just the visual, but the auditory (turn the volume up to get the true effect). There was at minimum two different sound tracks playing, often more, depending on where you were standing (lots of shops in Japan have motion-sensored audio recordings that play when you walk past them plus the general shop songs as well as other seemingly random tracks urging you to buy various products you might be located near).

They also had these for sale! Um, no thanks.

I guess the below goes with the above? I showed the boys and they wanted to know what a "girdle" was.

Now this is the ladies rest room. I guess this is where stressed customers and staff go when they are feeling overwhelmed by the store. REALLY a rest room. Pity there were no sofas!

The beautiful tiles even extended to the toilet cubicles!

So this IS titled Friday Fragments. My Friday contribution is a random happening at a coffee shop. I'd planned to do three things this morning: go to an hour-long prayer meeting  at school, the doctor to get more asthma meds, and groceries. 

I ended up staying longer after the prayer meeting to help a new mum figure out how to apply for base clearance to come to track and field meets at the US base in April/May. Time well spent!

Then I spent two hours waiting at the doctor and pharmacy for my meds. Thankfully I had my phone and internet access, so I got some little jobs done while sitting there (like a meeting rescheduled, a couple of small emails sent etc., even the bare bones of a couple of blog posts).

By then I was feeling a bit flaky, so I decided to stop for a coffee at my favourite local coffee shop before going on for groceries. It brought back a special memory of doing the same thing with my mum on occasion, when doing errands with her on a Friday morning.

While I was there, I was again on FB when I saw a message from a great friend (my matron of honour). There was a spare seat across from me and I thought it would have been fantastic if she'd been able to join me for coffee (she lives in Wagga Wagga in Australia). Well, we managed to connect up, via Video call on Facebook! What a sweet surprise for us both. It's been months since we've actually chatted. Precious blessings.

"I will send down showers in season; there will be showers of blessing." (Ezekiel 31:26 NIV)