Hello everyone! Here I am again, finally finding time to sit down, think about what we have been doing and imparting the more interesting/entertaining/important activities and issues we have undertaken and encountered.

Firstly, some good news regarding a couple of issues we had last posting time: we found the legs for my beloved coffee table and we found the missing eggshell china cup from the tea set my mother gave me 😊. This, as you can imagine, made me very happy. The trunk on the elephant, however, is still broken/badly repaired, no matter how much I wish for it to be otherwise.

The weather has now definitely moved into spring mode, with most days now above 20C. As a result, the blossom has opened fully and, as of today, it is definitely looking like it is going to be finished in the next few days. We took a walk down Kiyamachi dori today and it was literally snowing blossom petals, quite heavily at times when the wind picked up. So, I suspect there will be many disappointed people who arrive in Kyoto in the coming weeks hoping for blossom viewing.

On the home front, we have been working our way through the multitude boxes of ‘personal effects’ and struggling to find places for everything. It has been a process of arranging, then rearranging, then rearranging again. Unfortunately, the cupboards don’t get any bigger but we are getting most things in there – we just have to be careful when opening some doors…actually, it’s more like hoping the shelves and drawers don’t buckle under the weight.

We are down to two boxes of glassware in our spare room and the guilty secret storeroom/cupboard upstairs, which may remain a guilty secret for a while yet. We now also have another area which should be an empty guest room (no. 2) but is actually currently disposed as a cardboard room, full of empty boxes and boxes full of wrapping paper. The amount of paper that was used to wrap our items is mindboggling. A significant amount of the time we are spending emptying boxes is spent on the process of unwrapping then trying to flatten the paper and put it in some of the empty boxes. A substantial amount of the weight of our items in transport would just have been paper.

In terms of our minshuku, there is no further news on the hotel licence front, however, we have officially received our restaurant licence. So, we continue to wait. In the meantime, we currently have some friends staying here, who are very kindly acting as guinea pigs as we put into practice what we are hoping to do when we are fully functioning. The first day that Lyndie and Tim were here we didn’t have any furniture in the dining room, so we ad-libbed by using our outdoor furniture to seat them for breakfast.

Later that day, we had the delivery of the first phase of the dining room furniture (which basically means that’s all we could afford at the time…). We are very happy with how it looks and hope we can add to it in the near future. A few days later our pleated curtains (I would call them blinds, but our builder has called them pleated curtains) and standard curtains arrived. Gradually it is all coming together and it is looking better and better. Craig has also been busy putting up picture hooks so we can further decorate the spaces we have with various paintings/prints/items. Unfortunately the hardware store ran out of hooks, so we have to wait until they replenish their stocks to finish this.

We are now awaiting the inbuilt seating bench in the dining room so we can remove the two outdoors chairs and have enough seating for up to five people in the dining room without the use of stand-in furniture!! The process of preparing and serving breakfast has been a change for us, because we are more used to preparing and serving dinners for people, but it just means we are doing some of the prep work the afternoon before. Craig is enjoying making use of all the Japanese cookbooks we have – he is much more a ‘to the recipe’ cook than I am, so it suits him well. Having a rice cooker certainly makes things easier in the morning, rather than having to do it manually.

We started with Lyndie and Tim staying with us and now we have another friend staying here, so it is three for breakfast, which isn’t that much more work just more ingredients!! It has been very helpful for us, and in a way it is a good thing that we are easing into the daily process of serving guests rather than full tilt into the peak season. We are very much enjoying the company of other people, especially such nice people, and are very grateful for their indulgence! Next month we have more friends from Adelaide coming to stay, after they have attended the taiko workshop in Fukui, which we are looking forward to.

In terms of our ability to completely finish the fitout of the minshuku, we are still awaiting the sale of our flat, but unfortunately we still haven’t had any serious bites. We remain hopeful…At the moment we have enough in place for our current needs and we will add to what we have as needed and as money allows. We are getting somewhat used to the just-in-time way things are panning out for us.

Before I sign off, I just want to acknowledge the passing of Stephen Hawking, which I omitted last time. If there ever was a role model of perseverance against the odds, he is it. A great mind, with the ability to communicate his understanding to those of us who are not physicists and all through a range of technologies he was connected to. Vale Stephen.

Cheers for now

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 just a nice wall

 my new car…;-)

 happy easter!

 another new friend

Serena enjoys the window sill