Winter afternoons

First snow here last weekend!
Felt a little early to have the swirling white stuff outside while we are still enjoying fall colors. 
My God, I'm English and I just wrote "fall", not "autumn". Have obviously been in Japan too long.

Okaasan isn't dealing with the changing season well.
Many days she fails to get out for a walk in good weather...leaving it till 5 or 5.30 pm, usually when one of us comes home bustling noisily into the kitchen - THEN she decides to go out for a walk.
Such a waste of good, sunny weather. By 5 pm here in October it's dark and cold. A few times I've tried telephoning her mid-afternoon and reminding her to go out. It sometimes works. But, if the TV catches her attention again then she settles down to slump and doze.

So we have an 85 year old tottering around the local streets at dusk as people are hurrying home. Not downtown, she only goes to the local supermarket. Buys yet another magazine to go with the identical one at home (or identical two!), and then home she comes.

But at least she is getting out and walking a few days a week. As the weather gets worse those chances get less and our responsibility to take her somewhere for a walk increases.

Only new thing we've noticed about her recently: green tea making. She is getting confused about that very, very familiar task. Something she has done all her life, probably as the girl child in her father's home business, as a young working office woman, as a wife, as a housewife. 70 years of tea making.
First put a few shakes of tea powder in the cup, then add hot, but not boiling water and whisk or stir it.

That order of doing things is getting mixed up.
The other night she poured hot water in a tea cup. Then picked up the teabox, took a spoonful...and put it in the water tumbler. Then started to pour more hot water into the glass. :-(

Ahh!!! Okaasan...no no...not a good idea! The glass might break, it will be hot for you to pick up...um...no.....

We rescued the situation and helped her get tea powder and water in the same place.

Other days she puts the water in first. Then the powder, so of course it doesn't dissolve, and the expensive tea ($40 a box) floats in balls round and round...then she drinks a bit of the hot water and leaves it all on the table....

So. A common action she has done all her life...losing the ability little by little.

Next week is November and our big trip to Okaasan's hometown is approaching.
About a week before I will take some of her better clothes for dry cleaning, and get her to the hair salon. And then tell her we are going....

And then the adventure will begin.

Winter Week 1

Hey!
Truckin' into the first full week of Winter Care on Okaasan and Me.

All going well.
The snow arrived - not a lot at the moment, maybe 5 cm, so the roads are icy and dangerous.
NOT the conditions for Okaasan to go walking. Luckily though, she understands that and doesn't seem to be keen to go out at all. I come home and she has switched on the porch light, closed her room curtains and has settled in for the evening.

A year or two ago I'd often come home about 5 pm and Okaasan would then start stirring to go out - of course it was far too dark/cold/icy - but this year she is less interested, maybe less confident, about going out for walks alone. So she'll be down to the twice a week outings: with day care helper on Wednesdays and me on the weekends.
( And no, I haven't forgotten about the Nishi-guru exercise DVD looping idea - just haven't had the time to set it up...)

It's good that Okaasan isn't wanting to go out alone. Before Dear Son left for ski work last week he and I talked about whether I should be hiding Okaasan's shoes to prevent her from trying to leave the house...but it seems there is no need because she is staying put in front of the TV.

This week?

I had Japanese test on Sunday afternoon. With hundreds of eager young Chinese students. Waaay above my level. Level 3. I knew it, and from the very first page of questions it was clear. So I just relaxed and enjoyed ticking random circles on the answer sheet...picking my way thru the stuff I could do as a language practice.
Listening section no problem. Reading and grammar - whooooaaaa!!!
It's ok. I haven't studied hard at all this autumn. So now I know what Level 3 demands. Maybe I'll try next year.

If there was a test in practical language ability I'd ace it. In the past few weeks I've done the following in Japanese:

* entertained and managed the life of an elderly lady.
* interviewed and arranged classes for a prospective student
* negotiated and booked a movie theater for a documentary screening next year (more on THAT later)
* given the Japanese language test room staff a blasting for being noisy during the first part of the test...

Yes. The test staff. They were tramping up and down the classroom during the first 15 mins of the grammar section - shuffling papers, clattering pens on the table and generally failing to Keep Quiet in the Test Room. So, in the break time - I complained to them. In perfectly ungrammatical, but getting-the-message-across Japanese!!
Cos I am bossy. Sadly, got that trait from my mother...

Anyway.
Okaasan and me.
Doing fine.
She had lunch box deliveries. Dinner with me on Sunday and Monday night. A bath on Sunday.
Dinner chat about Kyoto and wartime food. If students give me some Japanese snacks as souvenirs from a trip, I leave them on the kitchen table because then I can use them as a prop to get Okaasan talking about the place they come from.

Yesterday I had my first year end party with students. A friend came in to feed the cats in the evening. She could access the cats upstairs without disturbing Okaasan downstairs.

I left curry in a pan on the cooker. With a box of pre-cooked rice. As I was leaving the house at 10 am I wasn't sure that the food would keep hot in the food flasks until 6 or 7 pm.
So, somehow Okaasan would have to heat it up herself. Her ability on heating up food is hit and miss: sometimes ok, sometimes half heated, sometimes the food is forgotten in the microwave within a minute or two of her putting it there.

At 6 pm I found a quiet spot near the shoe lockers of the party restaurant to call Okaasan and tell her that I was out - so sorry etc - your dinner - DS's famous home made curry and rice - is on the cooker. Sorry. See you later.

At 7 pm I escaped the party again and by the shoe boxes checked in with Okaasan...
Dinner? No, I didn't eat dinner. I was watching Tv....oh...wait a moment...what's this...oh...curry...yes, I ate curry...here it is...

I got home just after 10 pm and could smell the burned saucepans from the entrance hall. Two burned pans. She'd cooked rice with water in one pan. And next to her sleeping form I spotted the other pan: burned curry and a bowl of half eaten curry.

Oh well. She ate something. For one night it is ok. Six years ago, when DS rescued Okaasan from her chaotic home in the Tokyo suburbs, he found many burned pans in her kitchen. She really can't do cooking or reheating. She knows there is a microwave and sometimes uses it...or pans, and burns the food. That's why we bought a cooker that cuts out when the heat gets too hot, or if the pan is not moved for an hour.

Sigh. Oh well. 
Time to start pan scrubbing.

But today! Day care day!!! Yippeee!!!
Now I only have to worry about leaving my kitchen in clean enough state that the helper lady isn't shocked about my housekeeping level.

Evening walking..

Okaasan did it to Yujiro last night again.
Dinner was almost ready (albeit a tad earlier than usual because we were both home by 5 pm).
Anyway, we were both in the kitchen putting it all together. The salad was on the table, the chopsticks and Yujiro was heating the tofu thing, the rice, the soup.....
And Okaasan opened the door from her room to the kitchen and announced she was going for a walk. The door actually has big glass panels in it so she can see what is happening in the kitchen easily.
But didn't make any difference.

Off she set:"just going to the station and back."
BUT! This time Yujiro just went ahead and served dinner for the two of us. No: "Let's wait for her etc". I was a bit surprised, but of course ok with that. I haven't actually been home to have dinner with Okaasan for 5 nights in a row and one more night escaping that chorse is fine by me!
We ate our dinner. Washed up. Okaasan came home around 7 pm (with another small supermarket box to add to her room collection) and Yujiro served her food and we left her to eat alone.

*  Supermarket boxes. This started a few weeks ago. Okaasan got one and then another box from the supermarket and has them on the carpet in her room. Now there are three! I think this was spurred by an idea about collecting up newspapers for recycling. I went to her room to try and prise some newspapers away from her - and I had some newspapers in a box. I think she has remembered THAT and then brought the boxes into her room to do it herself.
But actually she has forgotten WHY she brought the boxes in. I tried to gently suggest taking them into the hall cupboard a few weeks back but Okaasan stopped me: "No! I brought them here specially, I'm going to use them for something. What was I going to use them for?".......