Thursday, January 8, 2009

Moving in

First of all, huge thanks to VegetableJ for reminding me about her amazing cornmeal pancake recipe that I can now dig out of my collection of recipies!!  Our "STUFF" finally arrived -- literally SIX months after we had it all packed up in Israel, and after shelling out an additional $900(!) to US Customs authorities so that they could X-Ray it and rifle through it at their leisure.  What a wonderful country!

So, needless to say, we've been knee deep (literally) in unpacking, though thanks to Sweetie's errr, encouragement, I managed to get my tea room set up for all intents and purposes, adorned now with an amazing scroll sent to me by one of my unbelievably kind and generous friends in Kyushu.  I will photograph it soon.

Winter has arrived with a vengeance here, and any illusions I had about this part of the US being considerably less-wintry than where I grew up have been handily shattered by the two ice storms we've had recently.

The fruits of our Christmas Day excursion to our favorite neighborhood are above.  Sweetie and I often take evening drives to a nearby neighborhood that tends to have deer out and about.  We did that Christmas Day.  No deer this time, but plenty of peace and quiet and gorgeous ice formations.

2 comments:

vegetablej said...

Oh, it's fun looking through all your stuff again, half of which you forget until you see it again, isn't it? Though I can't believe it took so long and was so expensive. I didn't have that much big stuff so I mailed it and no duties or much rifling that I was aware of. I got it in about a month, by surface mail.

I am so jealous of your tea room, and waiting to see the picture. Guess you got some good tea in Japan, too?

Found a nice local Japanese restaurant with good sushi, soba, and great genmai-cha over the holidays, so I'm happy. They even have a scroll. :)

Cha-chan said...

We often wish we didn't have much stuff:-) We're looking at houses and it's appalling that we require so much space for two of us!

That's funny that you mention good tea. I do have a generous supply of the powdered stuff for the ceremony, but while in Morioka, I decided to scrimp on looseleaf tea and bought some packages of sencha at Jusco and now completely regret it! It has virtually no taste whatsover. Lesson learned and next time I will find a little local tea shop.

How great that you've found a nice Japanese restaurant (genmai cha -- yummy!). It's sooo important to have those little hangouts.

Enjoy your sushi and soba!