A Well-Defended Park

Another geocaching story!  (Again, if you don't know what I'm talking about go here before you continue.) Don't worry, this one involves no blood-shed and disaster.  Several weeks ago I decided to look for a cache in which to drop a travelbug that I had been carrying around for some time.  I looked at the list of caches near our house to see if I could find an easy one that was big enough to hold stuff.

One immediately piqued my interest....it was called "Ruins of a Small Fortress".  Who doesn't want to go see a fortress on a lazy weekday afternoon?  And it was only about three miles from my house!

So I loaded up Cora and off we went.  After some going around in circles on one-way streets I finally got us into.....a very small neighborhood park surrounded by a moat.  It was a bit of a let-down.

This "fortress" is so small that I can't find any information about it at all on the Internet, except for these random photos that are better than mine.  You'll notice at this website that the fortress is labeled "Koizumi Castle".  That's stretching it a bit if you ask me.

iPhone photo of the moat, sorry

no idea, but it down't look old enough to be actual ruins

stone markers and the entrance to an underground cave

ducks in the moat

and the requisite carp

If you're wondering about the geocache, well, I never found it.  After we got there I checked to see if it had been found recently and it had not, so one presumes it is lost.  Let-down all around, but after our most recent geocaching experience, I call it a success that no one was harmed in the hunt. ;)

Also, I will be taking some time off from blogging throughout December but check back after the New Year for more adventures!  Happy Holidays!

Our Moldy Summer

Late summer got a little interesting for us because we had to have most of our upstairs re-wallpapered within a three-week window.  Why?  Well, I believe I've been clear about our issues with heating and cooling our house.  In the summertime it gets really hot and humid here so we run our air conditioners a lot.  This summer we ran the one in Cora's bedroom basically all the time.  It's where she sleeps and naps, you know?  And personally I believe that it wastes less energy to just leave it on all the time than it does to turn it on and off frequently.

So, anyway, there we are, running her air con constantly during really humid weather and uh....not really airing out her room much.

And then one day I was moving things around in her room and saw this.....

Now, Chad had already noticed that the wallpaper was bubbling so we weren't that surprised to find it (although I did shriek and pull my hair a little....wouldn't you?).  We had even already notified the maintenance people.  But after I found this we called them back and told them to step on it.

So Cora spent a few nights in the guest room and a dude came and re-wallpapered her room.  Everyone always asks me how he got rid of the mold.  After some lengthy and confused conversations with maintenance men, I finally learned that he sanded it off.

While he was working in her room we found a little mold in our room and ended up having it redone too.  And then we did the guest room because by that point we figured it was only a matter of time.  (For the record the guest room had no mold because we don't run the air con in it all the time.)

So, for anyone thinking about moving to Japan, or moving to a house with air conditioning difficulties, let the following be a public service announcement to you.   Don't be like us! 

1. Invest in dehumidifiers for the summertime!  They help a lot.

2. Air out your rooms regularly!

3. Give the air cons a break occasionally!

Geocache 'Til You Drop

This past weekend we all went to Tokyo to get flu shots.  We spent a night in a hotel so we would have time to eat some good food and do some sight-seeing.  While we were there we did some geocaching.  If you don't know what geocaching is, stop right now and go read this.

Alright, so we headed for a cache located in the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden.  This garden used to be the home of a feudal lord in the 1600's- 1800's.  It eventually became Imperial Gardens for the royal family of Japan and then after that became a national garden open to the public for a small fee.  It's about 140 acres, very wooded and well-landscaped.

taken on my iPhone, hence the quality

we will refer back to this picture later

So we went to the cache location and it turned out to be one of the best kind of geocaches in that it was located exactly where you thought it would be.  It was in the edge of the woods near some old concrete rubble.  It was big enough to hold items and we dropped off a trackable travelbug that we had picked up in a cache near the Tokyo SkyTree.  We picked up a new travelbug to take to the US over the holidays.

And now....for the rest of the story.  You didn't think this was just a nice, boring tale about a garden and a geocache, did you?

As I walked out of the woods after replacing the cache, I banged my knee hard on a piece of the concrete sticking up out of the ground. I hit it riiiight on the bone but it was a small gash with minimal bleeding.  I came out onto the path and told Chad what I'd done.  And then I tried really, really hard to walk it off.  I'm a big fan of  "walking it off"......in theory.  I thought I was fine and over it.

And then.... I had this really good dream that I can't remember.  I was very confused when  I woke up on the ground with Chad holding me and yelling at me frantically.  I was cold and wait....oh, yeah...I'm in this park. Fortunately Chad had caught me before I hit the pavement in a dead faint.

Now those of you who know me very well said "Uh-oh." two paragraphs ago.  For the rest of you, well....I pass out easily.  Blood, needles, childbirth, intense sharp pain of the funny-bone type or any combination thereof and I will keel over in a second.  It's very annoying and seems to be getting worse as I get older.  At this point I've had enough "episodes" that I know I'm supposed to lie down.  But the park was chilly and there was no place to lie down (refer to the photo above) so I was just going to walk it off.

As Chad was trying to get me to wake up a nice man came by and tried to help.  There was a language barrier but he was trying.  I told him I was fine (in Japanese, no less!) and sent him on his way.  Because clearly I was fine, right?  I was just walking it off.

Chad left me kneeling on the ground and went to see to poor Cora who by this time was crying in her stroller.  I was drinking some water and then....I had another great dream that I can't remember. This time when Chad woke me up I was much less confused and Chad was much more frantic.  Let's stop here and appreciate his dilemma.  He didn't want to leave me lying on the ground and go for help yet he couldn't move me and handle the stroller.  And I'd sent away the only person who had offered to help.

At that point I managed to get it together and get up and walk out of the park.  We took a taxi the half mile back to where we'd left the car and just went home.  I'd like to say it ended there but apparently my digestive system had been compromised and I polished off the morning with some carsickness on the drive out of the city.  And now Chad I both have bum knees because he wrenched his catching me as I fell.

But now we're home, safe and mostly sound with another geocache found and a (hopefully) entertaining story to tell.

The end! :D