New Chairs

People have been clamoring for pictures of our house.  Notice our nice, new chairs?  Aren't they cool?  See that wonderful piece of pre-fab board conglomeration that we thought would make a wonderful DVD storage unit?  See the engineer modifying the unit that Caroline bought on sale so that it will hopefully work?  No measuring was done by a measuring tape.  Caroline asked the HOMES store attendant if it was for DVDs.  That sent the man scurrying to find a DVD, and a hasty fit measure was done.  Unfortunately, we didn't check to see if the front rolling shelves would roll past the DVDs in the back shelf.  Perhaps Japanese DVD cases are smaller, but our large collection of DVDs are 1.5 centimeters too big.  Consequently, Caroline's SECOND foray into the prefab world would be a near miss if it weren't for Tim's determination to make it work.  Or, it could be that Caroline says she bought it, therefore Tim must take it back and explain in Japanese why we want to return it.  :)  Desperate times require desperate measures.

Today the gardeners finally came.  It has been nice all of last week when they were supposed to show.  Today, it was a bit rainy in the morning.  It was muggy and a bit misty this afternoon.  The place looks much better than it did, and they carried away all the bits and pieces.  It took 3 men a very long day to get it weeded, chopped back and cleared out, so I'm feeling pretty good about waiting out the realtor on this one.  I don't have the time, inclination or energy to get the weed fest under control.  But, now it's our job until next spring to keep it looking nice.

We have been solving many of our storage and other issues at HOMES.  It is kind of like Home Depot on the ground floor, but you can buy cases of alcohol on one end.  From the prices, I guess you need a bit of lubrication before you go pay.  On the second floor there's furniture.  It has everything from funky Ikea look to handmade authentic Japanese wood tables.  Most of the furniture is 3/4 scale.  If you look closely at those chairs, they're none too tall.  The third floor is covered parking, and the roof is also parking.  William loves to go park on the roof.  If he does really well while we're wending our way through the aisles, he gets a 100 yen coin to put in the gum ball machine where the gum balls go through this intricate track with drops and lifts.  It's pretty cool.

And for those of you who have been waiting for this to happen (I KNEW it would):  The other day in HOMES William proclaimed that he had to go poo.  Tim always gets this deer in headlights look because William is now old enough that he wants to go into the men's room, which gives me the automatic pass.  I proceeded with our purchase, and soon (too soon) William and Tim returned.  The look on Tim's face told the tale.  He didn't even need to tell me, I KNEW what happened.  The toilet seats in HOMES are not heated like our ones at home that William has gotten used to.  He just couldn't 'do it' on non-heated seats.  Camping in America when we go home is going to be a rude awakening for the child.