October 11, 2009

• A good friend's mother in law frequently uses a word that my friend has grown to despise, "torageru," which is perhaps Hiroshima dialect for "toriaezu oite oku," which might translate as "place (perhaps random) objects in a box and put the box off to the side, up somewhere or at any rate in another place where it is out of the way because you can't decide what to do with the stuff and don't want to part with it yet.  MIL used this same handy technique for years, except she would just throw a cloth over an accumulation of several "torage" boxes and declare the pile "disappeared."  Well, it does have a neater appearance, but if one continues this magic trick over an extended period rooms gradually become disfunctional. 

  We have been gradually conquering the monster "Toragon" and on the last trip to Kagoshima I purged some more boxes of stuff that is going to be thrown out anyway.  It is also easier to try to deal with all of the stuff after the deadwood is cleared away.  With shifting MIL here and there the first floor of the house was becoming cluttered, so I was able to sort and move enough stuff to have at least one presentable room.

  Hubby also went crazy with his beloved garden shears and thinned out some more of the shrubbery.  This is fine, but he enjoys cutting more than cleaning up and never puts the second half of the task in his schedule.  Perhaps that is because he expects that the clean up fairy will wave her wand at the cuttings and make them dance into the bags, or at least throw a cloth over them and make them magically go away.  I have tried to enforce a "you cut it, you bag it" rule, but it doesn't seem to sink in.  Well, he does bag it, but he the bags end up torn and punctured because he doesn't bother to trim the cuttings short enough.  This greatly upsets the aesthetic sense of the clean up fairy.

  Also looked at care options for MIL, so all in all we probably got a lot accomplished this trip.

  

  The local volcano also burped a bit.

  • 20:25
  • 1 Comment