Doing okaaay......

Okaasan management ok for another day.

I had lunch with her in the kitchen - lots of Japanese stuff for her, salad, apple and cheese for me. She chatted on merrily about how I shouldn't worry about cooking and eating Japanese food because it isn't the food I ate when I was a child....which is sweet of her...but somehow I don't reckon a bowl of salad and some garlicy cheese would be her idea of lunch!

I got her to bundle up some old newspapers in the afternoon for recycling. She gets quite breathless doing this - but I reckon it is good exercise for her fingers.

***I ALMOST made a HUGE mistake with returning cleaning underwear into her room.....I thought she was in the toilet, so I opened the sliding doors of her room and hurled about 6 pairs of pants onto the mountain of clothes on the sofa.
3 minutes later Okaasan's head popped up from the space between the table and the sofa! She had been laying there all the time!!!
Luckily, luckily, luckily she didn't actually see me hurling her pants back onto the sofa......maybe she just heard the door slide shut.
This taking dirty underwear, washing it, drying it and returning it is all done surreptitiously...if she ever found me with her underwear I think there'd be a meltdown.

Mid-afternoon Okaasan got ready to go for a walk.
And success! I gave her the hiking, walking stick a friend gave me for my bad leg. It has a spike on the end. Ideal for ice. And she took it gratefully...saying she used to have something like it when she traveled abroad etc. GREAT. And she set out using it.

In the evening I had the Christmas potluck party of the Hokkaido branch of the Japan Association of Language Teachers at the Hokkaido International School. I took along a friend and her son too and we all ate far far too much turkey and veggies and desserts.
I used to be very active in JALT a long time ago when life was simple. Now I just go to the party once a year to catch up with people and eat.

I set out food for Okaasan on the table. Put croquettes on the toaster oven tray and left the oven door open so she could understand how to do it. Cooked a fresh batch of rice, left instant soup, some broccoli and pickles.

Came home at 7.15 pm from the party...and found she'd come home in one piece, eaten dinner, hadn't burned the house down and was safely tucked into the kotatsu with the TV.

Another day done.

I have an evening class tonight and a Year End party tomorrow, so Okaasan will have 3 nights of dinner alone - but it can't be helped. After that I'm on winter holidays and she'll get more attention.