Denki carpet! ...and socks. Etc.

Here I sit, windows open on this grey Sunday afternoon, about 12 degrees in here, but I like the smell of the air enough to just wear a coat and double socks.

Socks have been my latest quest at the clothing store. Socks and carpets. I used to hate socks, as you might if you lived in a place where the best state of feet was bare, and socks just meant you were wearing shoes. But if your apartment isn't heated and your floors are made of tatami mat or linoleum-wood, well..

At some point in the past (Kansas) I had bought some long socks to reach above the knee. I kind of wish I had done this sooner; I might have been more comfortable in Tennessee had I not continued daily to venture out in thin or ankle-cut socks. Alas.

But my long socks are thin, and many of them are made of synthetic material. You might not think this is a big deal, and maybe it's not, but if your feet have to spend exactly all day long (excepting only the time you are darting to/standing in the shower) inside of socks, you might find that cotton socks make your feet sweat less, or breathe better, or something. So I developed the habit of wearing double socks (along with the rest of my double clothing habits). I would put on a pair of the old cotton ankle-socks, and over that don a longer pair.

But when you're wearing under-pants (leggings under your pants), you don't need knee-length socks, because you can just tuck your under-pants into shorter (though not ankle-cut) socks! so I started longing for good old regular cotton thick-woven things that were not threadbare excuses for white socks I had owned in some other life.

So I went to the damn store. I didn't know the kanji for cotton (though I figured it out), but words like "acrylic" and "polyester" are written in katakana, so I avoided socks in which those were the first listed ingredients. I had seen the kanji for "wool" before (羊毛) and the last part with the hook is recognizeable, and finally found cotton (綿) socks. I bought many pairs in many patterns and colors.. a few with the familiar "Wrangler" logo on them. And so I was made happier.


I also wanted to find a decent-sized carpet to put under my kotatsu. The one I had was about the same size as the kotatsu, so anytime I wanted to slide the table over a little, the rug just got bunched up underneath it. I wanted a big, nearly room-sized, soft thing that would tempt me to lie down on it. I stared for a long time at the furnishings, finally deducing that the 'rugs' I wanted were actually bedcovers (wtf?) and eventually picked a white-ish (hahahaha) one of large proportions.


I also saw a runner that looks like this:

Baa.

I had to get it because I could use a rug in front of the kitchen sink, and it says "The character of the sheep is quiet and gentle." I like to have ridiculous things. It too is soft, though the sheepy parts are greying a bit.


But the final coup occurred at Setsubun on Thursday night. Setsubun is the beginning of the end of winter.. whereas the solstice is the turnaround point for the light but the start of winter, setsubun is kind of the midwinter time halfway between the winter solstice and spring equinox. The light is halfway back! I went up to Iwa Jinja with E-Love to partake in the festivities. I was hoping to see more of my favorite kids, but instead we ended up standing by the giant fire eating tai-yaki and choco-bananas until a drunkish man came along to talk with us at length. We also bought a bunch of lottery-esque tickets which won us a great deal of Qoo (a sort of orange-juice drink), snacks (caramel corn! I'm eating it now.. it's kind of like cheesy poofs, only caramel), and soda. Oh, and I won a denki carpet.

Choco-bananas!

The lottery thing was set up so that you pulled little flags out of bundles in the hands of shrine guys. Out of five times, I got "ku".. ku was the lowest you could get, or level 7 (hence the juice and snack prizes to choose from.. someone snagged the last dishsoap before I could get any of that). E-Love got some 7s, but also some 6s, which is one step up. But one of my pulls was "wo" which was level 3! Amongst the choices were wheelbarrows, and weed whckers. "What can I get?" I asked the guy at the window. He named the stuff I had seen, and gestured to some cardboard boxes, "oh and denki carpet."


"Denki-carpet?!"


"Also we have kerosene tanks. Do you want one of those?"


"Denki carpet."


Denki means "electric." Think of an electric blanket. Yeeeeaaaaah. Osaki-san has a denki-carpet under the dining room table, but it's the sort of thing I would never buy myself, assuming as I do that they are expensive and that I have nowhere to put such a thing. They belong in real houses, not my apartment. But of course I gleefully took my denki-carpet home and found a place. Right under my feet where I currently sit. Munchin on caramel corn and contemplating

Hot Danger II: Jermaine

When I told people I'd "burned my foot" they again naturally assumed it to be the fault of that cute little kerosene device which has so many safety features, I'd be hard-put to injure myself if that were my intent. (It even turns itself off after three hours, just for good measure)

But no, something much more innocuous-looking was the culprit this time. And I consider this instance to be more severe because injury was done to my person.

Don't I just look like I would burn a bitch?

I have a hot water bottle, because as I may have mentioned, we don't have central heating, I don't want to fall asleep with my kerosene heater on (CO poisoning), blah blah blah. Long story short, to prevent my feet from getting frostbite overnight (exaggeration), I fill this cute little sheep with scalding water and stick it under the blanket.

There is a little warning label that comes attached when you buy one of these things. I can't read, but the picture of a little girl with pain zig-zags coming out of her head and a bright red foot was unmistakable. The instructions were, put this thing in the blankets to warm up the blankets, then don't leave it by your feet overnight.

Bah! Who ever heard of such waste of warmth? Certainly not I. And so, night after night I left that cute little thing in the sheets, and I never suffered the worse.

Until...

Last Friday I attended a certain Alice-in-Wonderland party (as Tweedledum, no less). After imbibing, I biked home to sleep. As usual, I filled the water bottle and went to bed. When I woke up, my foot hurt, and I couldn't remember harming myself at the birthday party (goodness, was I really like that..?). And the more I considered it, the more I was convinced I would have noticed the scrape or burn or whatever when I crammed my feet into shoes for the bike ride home.

No no, what happened was much more sinister. Overnight, while my foot rested against yutanpo for eight hours, it slowly cooked my skin.

Gross.

I went to the store and bought burn cream and bandages large enough to accommodate the freaking thing, which was too wide for band-aids. I bundled it up Saturday evening and spent Sunday running errands. When I took off the bandage at the end of the day, the creepy burn had turned into the biggest blister I have ever seen.

I'll spare you the pictures, although I did take some, just because I was fascinated with horror at the whole thing. The blister is now named Jermaine because it is too large and has been with me too long; it has almost taken on a life of its own as it proceeded to alter mine all week.

For one thing, it's about a half centimeter tall. Not long, not wide. Tall. Which made wearing shoes (at least correctly) out of the question. I went to work on Monday hoping to show our school nurse, but she was out that day. I was at this point a bit nervous because a friend mentioned having to have a burn 'drained' to prevent 'infection.'

Noooo, infection! No! But I also couldn't bring myself to do it myself. And I wanted someone who knew their stuff to look at it and tell me what to do with it.

On Tuesday, still wearing my regular tennis shoes and tromping all over the back of the right one, I went to the middle school after elementary time and showed it to her. She took one look at it and said "Oh! Keep! Keep!" and then explained to me in Japanese (which I am proud to have gotten) that new skin is growing underneath so I should basically keep the bubble as long as I can.

I promptly went to Jusco and bought backless shoes. I've been wearing the guest slippers at work all week (except that one day I brought my Jelly Belly slippers instead), which only made me feel strange in front of the kids' parents on Thursday. Otherwise I really wanted the kids to ask me why I was wearing them so I could tell them the story of my BADASS blister experience.

But by Tuesday night, the novelty had worn off; I haven't been able to really go for a walk or jog (or swim, either) all week, and now I'm sitting here, contemplating Jermaine's murder so I can wear real shoes tomorrow for my Kobe expedition.

Hot Danger

I'm adding a new tag to the mix, "stupidity," which I will use to tag all the entries about stuff that happens wherein one of my first thoughts was "Whoa. I really need to not tell my mom about this because she'll worry unnecessarily." Having thought that, I still end up telling her about them, so there's no reason not to write about them here. Don't worry, dear readers, I've survived so far. Maybe the sharing of my stupidity will help others later scouring the net for answers to the same problem.

Today I will speak on the dangers of winter. Only dangerous when mixed with a good little does of stupid.

First: once upon a time, I almost started a fire in my house.

I may have mentioned before now that Japan is kind of cold. And that it has no insulation in the walls of buildings. Okay. Well to prevent death and hypothermia, there are heaters. They come in many shapes and sizes for many different uses.

There are huge round towers about two or three feet high, kerosene burners, which are installed in each room in the school. The halls are frigid, but the rooms can be pretty warm. I think when I told my fellow JETs I was getting a kerosene heater, they pictured one like this.

photo borrowed from a fellow JET's blog - she's a great insight into Japan and JET things! Check it out at http://yamaninjo.wordpress.com/

They expressed fears about open flames in my house. Little did they know... the real danger lurked not with my kerosene heater (although I did spill freaking kerosene ALL OVER the kitchen floor that one time...)

Compact, effective, and almost cute!

This thing, like all kerosenes, makes a pretty bad smell upon startup and turn-off, so I am always sure to ventilate well. And, it you so much as tap it accidentally, it shuts itself off immediately.

No, when I tried to burn the house down, I had to use more elementary measures.

Smaller electric heaters, called "stove"s are also to be found easily. I bought one when I was still searching for the perfect kerosene unit, and use it only rarely anymore. It's just a little space heater. Two wires that get hot and a grille to shield it from wayward material.

But the grille does nothing. Nothing I say! When you unseeingly kick a blanket onto the space heater. No really, I even smelled it and thought by way of a little joke, "it's funny that they call it a stove since it kind of smells like something is cooking."

Something WAS cooking.

Victim and culprit.

That blanket is super flame retardant, or the amount of time it spent on that heater should have set a lot more shit ablaze.


Second: once upon a time, I burned my foot so badly I had to buy new shoes to accomodate the blister that resulted.

To be continued...