Room cleaning...and how.

A mammoth chance to clean Okaasan's room came upon us.
And boy, oh boy - did we clean.
And...SHE cleaned. In a way.....

Mid-week she was complaining about some pretty savage looking insect bites and swellings - her hands, arms, feet etc
Maybe mosquitoes, but also highly likely to be the untold beasties that live in the carpet and blanket Okaasan lives, sleeps, eats, pisses and sits on 19 hours a day and night.

Great! Let's clean your carpet and blanket!
hey - why don't we try and get rid of half the stuff on the table and actually SEE the table surface below for the first time this summer?
Shall we? Oh yes :-) Let's.

She happily accepted us sweeping in and putting piles of stuff from the carpet to one side, then taking out the carpet and blanket and moving the table top to the floor...along with a mound of stuff.
I cleaned carpet and blanket. I vacumned. She hovered and basically let us do it. And...

...And Okaasan sorted thru the table stuff herself!
Mid-afternoon I saw table surface. Hurray!

Late-afternoon she went for a short walk. Then I realised.
.......Three piles of stuff had just been moved to the floor in the other room - the room Okaasan only uses for changing clothes. There are piles of stuff in there that have been the same since she arrived here 3 years ago.
But. But. Plus side is: she won't remember what was what and where.

So today, I slipped into the other room and skimmed off the bottom third of each pile :=)

It's the usual stuff: little squares of old supermarket flyers cut into squares for notepads, endless little notebooks and purses, recipes from Tv written on bits of paper, cuttings of recipes and clothes from newspapers and magazines, handouts of shampoo samples, shopping receipts, bits of random English from TV programs on notelets, screwed up balls of newspapers to stuff into bags and shoes as shape-keepers - the debris of careful old lady life. Times 10, cos she thinks about keeping these things every single day.

Aghhhh. Her room looks much better. Two boxes of old magazines have gone too.
Cleansed.

Had a jump into it week of Oyomesanning as Yujiro's blind lady customer was in town and he was working late. Had a dinner or two with Okaasan a deux. Usual mindless stuff - weather, cats, food, wartime.
A week ago I was still in the UK. Bye bye holiday....

Had a dinner out with a friend and her family. Got an overload of advice about: are you sure Okaasan HAS dementia, why don't you get her tested and then outside help etc etc. They are kind people and I know they meant well, but it gets me all defensive. I get on my soap box and shout on the topic a bit.
Must stop that. Otherwise I won't get invited anywhere.

Oh, and took MY body along for the health service annual check up. Was too badly organised (well okay, a bit scared actually) to do it last year. Thanks to a Japanese friend explaining what was on offer and where, I took my body to the community center on Saturday afternoon  and paid for all the fun extras I could. So I had pee tests, heart scans, chest and eye X-rays, touchy feely all over by semi-retired doctors and gave a lot of blood.
Now I wait about 3 weeks for the results. The Japanese health service costs me lots, so I want to get my value out of it. But X-rays in this country, honestly - doctors here give them to any human form that flits briefly through their office, I reckon. Short-sighted docs probably X-ray passing shadows.
Aren't too many X-rays meant to be bad for you? I've had a whole whack in the past few years: for the knee, the melon monster, the thigh spasms...and now my lungs.
If all is clear in 3 weeks time I think that's enough X-rays for a few years.
Darkly ironic in a country with a big throbbing blob of radiation in the center since March 11th last year.

And so....tomorrow is back to full schedule work for me....

We have other, meaningless stuff ongoing -
* one of the cats is sick and we are doing vet visits and mopping up of little piles of cat vomit.
 *The garden looks great now I've weeded it.
* Adam Lambert is Japan doing promotion for the second album and looking good on TV.
 *The forgotten potatoes in the garden grew and multiplied and today we harvested 20 more.
*Ordinary Lives, the Fukushima people documentary is nearing completion with the English sub-titles.
*I'm fighting to get rid of 3 kg of British carrot cake. (Surely I ate MORE than 3 kg??!! Where did it go?)
* Oh deary me...I've been asked to give a talk IN JAPANESE about going-to-the-Olympics to the ladies of Rotary. But it's in October, so no need to panic just yet.

Life ongoing.

@ Google have totally mucked up Applications and now Blogger doesn't seem to recognised 100% of the time - so I am fighting to get into this blog sometimes. If there is a long silence it's probably for that reason.
Computers, doncha just love 'em.