It wasn’t the perfect weather to go to the beach, but for me, living where the nearest large body of water is Lake Ontario, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit the Pacific Ocean. So off to the beach I went.
I wrote this about the day:
I could have spent much more than the two hours I was there had I been able to sit. The weather was cool but quite comfortable in my winter jacket. A group of adults were there with their children, one of which–a two year old boy–was completely naked. Not something you’d see in Canada.
Soft, deep sand and gentle waves… Again I was warned about the hawks, but the crows were in abundance. The highlights of what they were eating were a stingray and a small (2-2.5 ft. long?) shark.
The conch shells were many – giant clam shells and starfish as well.
The next day it rained, but nothing was going to keep me indoors. I walked with my umbrella to Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine, where there was a wedding going on. I didn’t get any pictures of the bride, but I did spend 500Yen to make a wish and write it on a wooden board. It’s probably still hanging there.
Some pictures:
Near the front gate
Autumn colours in December
A reflective pond
I wrote:
I want to go shopping in Yokohama, but I’m reluctant to leave the quiet of here. Five days in Tokyo will be busy enough.
All this instantaneous gratification of social media and being able to have our words read immediately is somewhat dangerous: It’s not just “putting your foot in your mouth” anymore; now you can “put your keyboard in your mouth.”
Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below.
As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday, if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
Long ago I read a story–it’s probably a famous one, but I’ll relate it here in brief–about how the sun and the wind entered into a competition to make a man take off his coat. The wind, of course, tried to blow it off, but the harder the wind blew, the tighter the man held his coat around him. The wind eventually gave up and then the sun came out. The man, becoming hot, took off his coat. The moral of the story is that sometimes coaxing is better than trying to force someone to do something.
The story came to mind today, as it often does on a bitterly windy day, when I try to bury myself in my scarf. For some reason the thought led to parenting.
My motto has long been, “Pick your battles.” If it’s not that important, meaning no one is going to get seriously injured or be more than ten minutes late for something, I tend to either let the issue go or do my best to be persuasive rather than forceful. The practice has improved my powers of persuasion to the point that I’m getting pretty good at it. Failing that, I’ve learned to be patient. To take a deep breath and remind myself that it’s not the end of the world if Alex completely empties a drawer of perfectly folded clothes to do it again himself, or insists on cleaning his own feeding tube when I know damned well he’s going to ask for the help he at first refuses because it can’t reach where it has to hang.
But I’m only human. There are times when I feel I must stuff him in the car against his will, or restrain him to keep him from falling out his second storey bedroom window. Part of these necessities come down to the fact that I’m not completely fluent in sign language – part of it comes from his own behavioural issues and the fact that he’s mentally well below his age level but physically entering puberty. This puts him in the range of adolescence mixed with the terrible twos.
While there are large things in life that cause stress, like selling your mother’s condo whilst trying to maintain your own home, keep your family reasonably comfortable and happy and hanging on to your sanity (yes, I’m making this about you, because if I don’t I may realize what seventh circle of purgatory I’ve landed myself in), sometimes it’s the little things which finally make you snap.
Like when you take your kid for a haircut and the barber grazes the back of his neck with the trimmer and oh my Lord it’s the end of the world. He gets home, strips off his shirt and wraps himself in a fleece blanket that he refuses to take off even when he goes to bed that night, waking himself up at 2:47 (and you with him) because he’s so tangled up in coverings and the next day you find yourself applying Polysporin to a pink-tinged area that (point to it again? I can’t find it.) is so minute but he still refuses to wear a shirt over.
And then! And then! later when he’s almost forgotten about the agony he’s in over his haircut and he’s helping your mother wash the dishes (he’s washing, she’s drying) and he’s all done and putting the Tupperware bucket upside down on top of the clean dishes in the dish rack and your mother is taking it off to get to the dishes that HAVE to be dried and your kid is putting it back on and she’s taking it off (because by this time your mother’s OCD is battling to the death with your kid’s OCD) and he’s putting it back on and screaming and she’s taking it off and yelling at him in a language he can’t even hear (because he’s Deaf) let alone understand and all you want to do is run away from home…
…because it’s the little things that finally do you in…
Note: The following is something I posted yesterday as a Guest on HarsH ReaLiTy. Apologies if you’re seeing this in duplicate.
I went to Japan for five minutes and thirty-six seconds. I’m not talking about a virtual trip on the internet. I’m not talking about astral projection. I’m talking about an eleven day trip which included 25 hours of flying time from Toronto to Tokyo and back for the sake of a five minute and thirty-six second long song.
I fell in love with it the first time I heard it. It moved me to tears and I knew deep inside that I HAD to hear it and see it performed live. I was that passionate about it, about the man who wrote it and sings it – about the deep meaning in the lyrics and just the way he sings it and how utterly beautiful it is… So I made it happen. I couldn’t not.
Before you write me off as insane, please consider…
Merriam-Webster’s definition of Passion, ganked off the internet:
pas·sion
noun \ˈpa-shən\
: a strong feeling of enthusiasm or excitement for something or about doing something
: a strong feeling (such as anger) that causes you to act in a dangerous way
: a strong sexual or romantic feeling for someone
Passion is something we humans share. It’s responsible for much of the world’s most beautiful art in all its forms; it is the cause of some of the most heinous crimes. It gives us the ability to love deeply and to hate with seemingly every fibre of our being. It’s something that our children have also. And how scary can that potentially be?
You can say to a ten-year-old, “Son, there are things you will be passionate about when you grow older. You may feel like killing someone one day. Don’t,” but what’s the use? Because in the heat of passion we lose all reason. Logic goes off into the stratosphere and all that is left inside of us is pure emotion.
Passion is one of the things I believe we can only teach our children by example. For instance, if we talk about killing the guy in the car that cut us off, they will learn that passion can turn us against one another. If we follow our passion and turn it into a career, we will teach our children to follow their dreams.
And so I come back to my adventure – my trip to Japan. Aside from personally needing to make the trip, I feel in doing so I showed my children that if they want something badly enough, they can make it happen, no matter how unlikely. And no matter how insignificant it might seem to someone else and no matter how they may be judged for going for it; just do it.
The song? It doesn’t really matter. But here’s another one by the same band. It is appropriately called “Passion.”
The lyrics, in English, can be found by clicking here. But if you read them, don’t do the stuff he sings about – just sayin’ 😉
If you’d like to read about the absolutely incredible experience I had at the concert, click here. The post includes a picture of me, taken by the lead guitarist of the band from the stage during the concert!
If you’ve been hanging out at my blog for a while you’ll know I hate whining. The last thing I want is for people to feel sorry for me – that’s not what this is about. What it is about is something I’m reminded of during every waking moment.
Other than when I was pregnant, I’ve never dealt with this much prolonged pain in my life. I’m talking about my shoulder. In December, just before my trip to Japan, I went to see an Occupational Therapist, who told me I needed to “stay off” it, so to speak. To try not to do too much with it. The timing was actually perfect for this. Going to Japan meant that I didn’t have to reach for things in high places like I do at home – things like plates in cupboards and hanging laundry near the rafters in the basement. I could give it a rest. Therein lies my biggest problem.
It turned out that I was exercising the muscles around the joint and protecting it with these regular household tasks. What happened when I came back from Japan? Pain. Pain like nothing else. Gone were the protective muscles. Now I’m told I have tendonitis on top of the degeneration in my shoulder joint. It’s not just the shoulder now, it’s the elbow as well. Nerves are affected and as I sit here typing my funnybone is numbing my baby finger. Good thing I don’t have to hit the “enter” key at the end of every line, eh?
I fear I’ll be living with this for the rest of my life. Gone is the ambition to ever go back to Karate, though Tai Chi I might be able to manage. It might even help. What I really seriously need is a series of exercises to build up the correct muscles around the problem so that I can function properly. I have hope! In the meantime, I have pain. Oh, and Advil. Lots of Advil.
I did want to take the time today to thank everyone who participates in SoCS. It’s been a while since I did that, and it’s now in my own stream of conscious to do so. I’m grateful for so many things in my life and I rarely have the feeling that I’m showing my appreciation enough. I do appreciate every single one of you who take the time to write using my prompts and visit one another. I earnestly don’t know what I’d do without this community of writers, of people who care, of like minds who relate so well with not only me but with each other. Nothing gives me a thrill quite like the one I get when I see people meeting one another for the first time and it’s SoCS, or JusJoJan, or One-Liner Wednesday that brought them together.
From Yokohama Station I hopped on another train which took me to the little seaside town of Kamakura. I’d done my research online before I went – it’s a place with lots of Temples, a little shopping street (by little I mean narrow, not short) and had what I thought would be a nice, inexpensive place to stay. In a word, it was beautiful.
Villa Sacra in Kamakura is a little inn with several uniquely decorated rooms. A very old, traditional Japanese house, the floors creak, the ceilings are low, and the hospitality is fabulous.
The room, however, was quite small. I spent most of my time out wandering the shopping street, eating at Mister Donut – hey, it was cheap and free refills on the coffee! – and walking. Oh boy did I walk. I’d estimate about 4-6 hours a day, rain or shine.
I was in my room for the only earthquake I felt. At first I thought it was someone leaning against the wall behind me. The walls were thin enough that I could feel the people in the next room, but the rumbling sound and the extensive swaying of the entire room led me to believe otherwise. When I looked it up on the internet (I had excellent WiFi), sure enough I was on the outskirts of a quake. It wasn’t nearly as frightening as I thought it might have been, probably because if the house had been standing that long already, it wasn’t likely to fall down while I was there, right? Right.
Besides, I had other things to worry about. I wrote this in my notebook over coffee:
December 9th, 2014 – Mister Donut, Kamakura
I’ve been sitting by the window for about 20 minutes on this lovely bright sunny day and so far only one person has walked by in sunglasses. Okay, now it’s two. But that’s among hundreds. This must be a nation of people with eyesight issues.
Not that that’s the biggest danger here – every 3rd hydro pole has a sign that says “Be careful of tsunamis,” stating that here we are just a little more than 5 meters above sea level. Be careful – as though if you see one, just step around it.
I think I’ve been bitten by a mosquito. In December. Life is good.
After that I took a day trip to Enoshima. It is, apparently, the honeymoon capital of Japan. In a way this seems appropriate, like if you can handle the uphill climb here, you can handle being married.
December 9th, 2014, Enoshima (Island)
An island carved in rock and surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, yet not too far from land that one can’t walk here across a bridge, it is populated by shrines and hawks. I’ve now seen my very first “Beware of the Hawks” sign.
I tried to get a few pictures of the hawks but they’re fast fliers.
I managed to nab this one in a tree.
The weather was gorgeous – in the tens to low teens, celsius the entire time I was in Kamakura. The food was fantastic and very inexpensive – I managed to eat for between 500-1000 yen ($5 to $10 Cdn.) most days. Lots of seafood, as you can well imagine.
I was going to write about my entire time in Kamakura in one shot, but there’s still so much to tell. I’ll try to write again soon!
Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below.
As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday, if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
Right on the heels of my trip to Japan, I’ve already started planning my next adventure. No, not London, or Paris, or even Beijing. I’m going to beautiful Kingston, Ontario. Less than an hour’s drive away. In July.
Call me crazy, but I wanted to make sure I get a good, cheap room close enough to downtown that I’ll be able to walk to where all the action is – to the Busker’s Festival and on my annual pilgrimage to the setting of my novel, The Great Dagmaru. This will be my third year in a row if you count the hospital-ridden disaster last year was. Which brings me to my next point.
Booking.com. I decided to try them out last year, taking them at their word that if I booked a hotel with them I could cancel any time. Well, last year I had to cancel. At the very last second. And it didn’t cost me a cent for the hotel. So I thought great – I’ll take a chance and book with them again for my trip to Tokyo. Again, smooth as silk. All my bookings were exactly as planned, no upfront fees.
And that’s why I already have a B & B booked for July 9th at $140/night and two nights at the Queen’s University campus in a two bedroom suite for $99/night.
What kills me? The most I paid in one of the biggest cities in the world – Tokyo – was less than $90/night. The cheapest, and it was a nice hotel, came to $66 for the night.
Canada is damned expensive. Even if you book half a year in advance.
I wrote this about the day:
lindaghill.com 