Monthly drop in....

Once upon a time this blog was an hourly affair....then a daily affair...now you're lucky if I call in once a month.

I've been busy: being a TV star! Yes - my blog got scooped out by Japanese Tv and now I am in hot demand as a dementia　X　international family life　X　chocolate commentator on sofas across all channels.

Not.

But my activities for Hokkaido on Trip Advisor do get me into tourism monitoring. writing, advising work sometimes and this month has been full on. I will be a 4-minute guest reporter next month on "J-Trip Plan", a program by NHK World - made for Internet and foreign viewing.
It involved lots and lots and lots of technical checks, visiting a fish market and eating everything I could find and filming it...writing and more technical stress. And finally, last Friday a computer to studio piece to camera with the presenters. It'll be aired next month.
And I did a weekend trip to a rural region hoping to open up farm visits for foreigners, with wine tasting (my kinda work!!!), and there is another date for my Japanese speech at a tourism seminar in November.

So, last weekend it was wonderful to finally have an ordinary weekend at home. Preparing the garden for winter, doing laundry, arranging cat toys, catching Pokemon...

Dear Son too was working nights for 2 weeks and that finished. So we actually had conversations of more than two sentences.

Sunday I sent him and Okaasan out for Mother/Son lunch. She hadn't been out for days. And I needed to get into her room and do a monthly clean.

Put away her summer clothes, put winter clothes where she can see them, and threw out some of the multiple magazines, hid away the shopping bag gifts she gets from magazines and folded up pairs and pairs of her socks - it is braining training for ME to re-pair 40 pairs of little pink and brown ankle-length socks...so obviously impossible for Okaasan. I put them all in a basket on the floor where her sock pile is.

Makes me think: how long ago did her clothes shopping become repetitive? We all buy a color or style we like, of course. But from Okaasan's clothes evidence it's clear that for years she has been buying almost the same thing over and over again. The wine red shortーsleeved sweaters and T-shirts, the pink and brown socks, the flowery-pattern towels. Somebody should do a study on this - at what point shopping preferences slide into early-dementia repetitive buying.

So. End of October.
Trying to get her to go out. But she doesn't. We have to take her much more. I can see a winter of walking round shopping malls ahead of me...