Carpet Cleaning Day

First thing yesterday morning before I had time to reconsider, I shoved the furniture out of the living room to get at the carpet; the poor thing was in desperate need of a shampoo.

This is the view from the kitchen. A motivating factor was that Saturday night family dinners would come to a halt until order was restored.

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Ta da! This was the first job  I intended to tackle last winter. but then it was a mild winter and since I wasn't snowed in, there was no need to rush the job.

Now it's out of my mind until next winter.

A view of Hiroshima

My granddaughter Elise is in Hiroshima as an exchange student. She is undaunted by the fact that she knows no one and her Japanese is a tad short of basic.

This is her temporary home . She lives with a dentist, his wife and three children

the kitchen

Another view of the kitchen

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This is the Japanese version of a toilet flusher.   No Japanese required to understand the basic uses

Already she loves her new sisters and brother.

Elise got herself lost the first time she travelled on the subway. She wandered around looking for a landmark and finally located a pay phone  to call her temporary mother, who drove over the two- stations- past- her- stop to rescue her.

She'll  cherish these memories all her life

Spring

This time of year has its own miracles; the peach tree is slowly coming unfurled after waiting out the premature hot spell last month

The Flowering Almond is still tightly wrapped but ready for the next warm spell--the one that might be the real precursor of summer.

Today I Skyped my granddaughter in Hiroshima. She`s there as an exchange student and here she is with her temporary brother and sisters.

When I was a kid my world was in a small neighborhood in a still-small city where we our outside contact was by radio   and today I communicated on line with my grand kid way over in another part of the world.

Truly a time of miracles