Its now about 18 months since I was diagnosed with cancer and I’ve done the surgury thing and the chemo to get rid of it. The climb back to life after here in Tokyo was something I really don’t care to repeat and without reading all the blogs entries before not entirely sure I’ve totally revealed just how hard that was getting back to a normal life.
I can say now after the full memories of surgury and chemo are over the worst bit about it all now is the bloody constant testing! You just can’t forget! I’ve been on a schedule of approx monthly testing, even with the chemo. I guess I should really shut up and be grateful that the health care system here is so good. But wow, its a pain.
I was really naughty and didn’t see them for 4 months as I just hated the whole, prepare to goto hospital have the test and then wait a week to go back again for the results. You know what, you see everything that feels wrong as a possible spread of cancer.
They let me off with about a 45 day period. um like thats big. Now my last blood test results are not quite that good. The CAT scans are fine, so great news there, but the blood tumer results are still higher than they should be. So guess what, wait until the next test and CAT scan. AGAIN.
I have been faced the last few months with a challedge I never really expected. (well that and how to produce the perfect soggy British Chip from oven baked ones – another story).
Now back to my issue. In the last few months I’ve been able to help facilitate the transfer of an old team member from the UK to Australia, and more recently another very old team member as well. When this whole thing came up i thought it was brillant for all of them. The chance to come and live downunder, how wonderful.
Now in hindsight I realise how hard this can be. For me down under is just normal, its obviously a bit different from being away for so long, but its an old glove that slips on fairly easily, okay, minus a couple of fingers fitting perfectly, but you get my drift.
For them coming down it a whole new pice of clothing. I realised this when I thought about the adjustments I had to make living in the UK. Its not as easy as you think. After moving to Japan, wow. I want the very best for my old team. If this all works out then great, but it must be a move they and there families all make. Its not like moving suberbs!
The worms have been in place a couple of weeks now and seem very settled! They are not quite chowing through all the organic matter I produce, which is rather a scary thought of just how much we do produce/throw away and here it all gets incinerated.
As I’m generally away on the weekends it does give them some time to catch up and I’ve been rather bad with the heat and eat, nothing crap, but not much for worms.
I’ve been using the worm water to feed the baby tomatoe plant I got a few weeks ago and its going balistic! I’ve had to redirect it across the blacony now and I suspect with its planted cutting on the other side I’ll have a deck of tomatoe plants. Yummy.
Whats cool is that after its finishes fruiting etc it will be ripped out on join me on a trip down to the beach and turn into soil for the garden. Thats the one drawback of the worming thing here is that there is now real clear way to dispose of the worm castings. Maybe some ninja attacks on the pack next door at midnight. Now that could be interesting to explain to the police if caught!
No house stuff this time. Something about me now. Yesterday I got a wonderful email from a very dear uncle. It contained alot of family stuff which was wonderful, but not part of this blog. My memory after the chemo is not that good now, but I when someone reminds me I do remember. After my Uncles email alot of memories came back. more below.
I’ve just taken delivery of 1000 worms to assist me with my organic waste. Now that may seem odd, but I was so lucky to find a company in Japan that sells the Can of Worms, along with a load of other cool organic products.
Actually there are a lot of places now in Japan that have gone organic and sell via the efficent mail order system here. I found one site a few months ago that sold can of worms, and the site was in English so wow, lets get one. But they didn’t deliver. Now on my whole organic kick and juicing I really wanted to dispose of my organic waste without sendng it out to be burnt so I could just breath it down again.
I searched again for Can of Worms in Japan and found this site
I guess I just got a little better at working out Japanese site since living here so I gave it a crack and ordered one via their Japanese only site. The order went through and then I found out there were closed for a few days (via Japanese langauage email).
I then wrote back in English and told them no probem with the delay in delivery. To my total delight and amazement they wrote back to me in English. Then when they sent what would have been the standard email reply of delivery instructions someone had kindly translated each paragraph into english for me.
I have lived here long enough not to expect that and was just so thrilled that Noah Green did that for me. I was stoked, and really really wanted to make this work. Well it did. My worm farm arrive on Friday night and someone had taken the effort to write on notepaper to me that included were instructions in English and Japanese.
They never needed to do this and I was so happy about this I felt I needed to really make Noah Green something that non japanese speakers should take a closer look at. When I have a bit of time I’ll try and write something about how to work through their website in English.
What really has made me so happy about http://noah-green.com/ is that they do care about us who can’t speak Japanese. There was a small issue with my worm delivery, but it was all sorted out and now, well 1000 worms are eating away at my vegetable was. And that has got to be good.!
I got this from one of my Uncles the other day. Seemed a good idea to repeat.
A water bearer in China had two large pots, each hung on the ends of a pole which he carried across his neck. One of the pots had a crack in it, while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water. At the end of the long walk from the stream to the House, the cracked pot arrived only half full. For a full two years this went on daily, with the bearer delivering
only one and a half pots full of water to his house. Of course, the
perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments, perfect for which it was
made. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of it’s own imperfection.
And miserable that it was able to accomplise only half of what it had
been made to do.
After two years of what it perceived
to be a bitter failure, it spoke to the water bearer one day by the
stream. "I am ashamed of myself, and I want to apologize to you. I have
been able to deliver only half my load because this crack in my side
causes water to leak out all the way back to your house. Because of my flaws, you have to do all of this work, and you don’t get full value from your efforts," the pot said.
The
bearer said to the pot, "Did you notice that there were flowers only on
your side of the path, but not on the other pot’s side? That’s because
I have always known about your flaw. So I planted flower seeds on your
side of the path, and every day while we walk back, you’ve watered
them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to
decorate the table. Without you being just the way you are, there would
not be this beauty to grace the house?
Moral:
Each of us has our own unique flaws. We’re all cracked pots. But it’s
the cracks and flaws we each have that make our lives together so very
interesting and rewarding. You’ve just got to take each person for what
they are, and look for the good in them. Blessed are the flexible, for
they shall not be bent out of shape.
Remember to appreciate all the different people in your life.
I’ve downloaded the pics now and found that the camera lens I was using is not the problem, I appear to have a spot of dust on the camera (again), there is a lot to be said for not changing lenses at all!!!
The new lenses is a Sigma 18-200ml lense on sale at Amazon for $300 less than normal retail. Oddly its rotation for zoom is the opposite from the Pentax lense I’ve had, but you do get used to it. Pics are here.
Okay the pics aren’t there yet. I have to clean them up before posting!!
If any of the reader of this work in IT, then this will be so appropriate! I know exactly what it feels like to be herding those kitties! I don’t normally post You Tube Pics, but this is a total classic and well worth watching.
I’ve been doing alot of reading the last few weeks about raw food diet’s. There is so much to learn, and its really caught my attention. So I’m going to give it a try. Will be interesting as I’m already gluten free (or as close as I can get in Japan), so this is going to be interesting. Today was a lead in as I still had some milk frozen from before going to China, therefore the morning smoothy was milk based and some left over rice went into the cabbage wraps. The almound ‘cheese’ for lunch was fantastic and tommorows lunch is a Gazpacho soup I made last week.
A water bearer in China had two large pots, each hung on the ends of a pole which he carried across his neck. One of the pots had a crack in it, while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water. At the end of the long walk from the stream to the House, the cracked pot arrived only half
After two years of what it perceived
Moral: