Tsukuba in the news, life WILL be okay

Today the Daily Yomiuri Newspaper has an article about Tsukuba. It explains how many research centers were damaged or had trouble because of the electricity cuts.

You can read the article here: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T110401005103.htm

Many, many people have told me their stories about their offices and laboratories. I was also at a research center when the earthquake struck, so I understand.

It IS tough, and there are no easy answers. Equipment is broken, months or years of work was lost, buildings are dangerous. But please, please don't give up!

I didn't talk about it to anyone, not even to my husband, but I had so much stress after the earthquake. The aftershocks continued many times a day. We are very, very lucky that personally nothing was broken, but when I looked at the destruction here and there, I thought "How can Japan recover?" Then the stupid foreign media got into a panicked frenzy and I was so angry. I just wanted to cry but many other people needed my help, and thousands more people have lost everything. I had no time to cry and in fact, no good reason. Then I thought, "One tiny thing at a time."

That is what we can do. Pick up one book and put it back on the shelf, then another book, then another. Help one friend, then go together and help another friend. Go and buy vegetables from your local farm-shop, that helps the shop, the farmers and their families. Go to the bigger shops you usually go to - as I wrote a few weeks ago, Starbucks doesn't need my money for 2 cups of coffee, but those young women who made my coffee that day DO need a job. When they get a salary, they will go shopping somewhere else.

I'm trying hard to be optimistic and think, "If it is broken or lost, how can I fix it or start again in a better way? Is this a chance for me to find new ideas?"

Coincidentally, I saw something on the Internet this morning about Briton in the war years. Their motto was "Make do and mend." This is exactly the Japanese "mottainai" - waste not, want not.

I don't mean to be flippant, or to hurt anyone's feelings, but all our ancestors (in all countries in the world) faced really hard lives. Modern people have really good lives and we CAN start again. Even from the very beginning.

Just one tiny thing at a time ....

Rice cooker cake

Lemon Cake

Do you want to make a cake but you don't have an oven? Here is a recipe for a super-easy cake that you can make in the rice cooker!

Ingredients:
1 small packet of hotcake mix
1 egg, at room temperature is best
100ml of milk, at room temperature is best
1 teaspoon of sugar
1cm of butter
Plus - flavor of the kind of cake you want.

Lemon and Honey Cake
Slices of lemon on the bottom
of the bowl before the mixture.

Method
1. Heat a 1cm slice of butter in the microwave oven until it is completely melted.
2. Beat the egg and milk together. Add the sugar. Add the hotcake mix. Finally add the melted butter and beat well.
3. Rub some butter around the inside of the rice cooker bowl, up to about 4cm deep.
4. Add the mixture into the bowl.
5. Press "On" on the rice cooker. Just the regular course is ok

Flavors

Ginger Honey Cake

   - Ginger Cake (my favorite).
   Mix 2 teaspoons of ginger  
   powder with the dry
   hotcake mix. Exchange
   2 teaspoons of honey for
   the sugar.

   - Lemon Cake
   Add the finely grated rind of
   1 organic lemon. For Orange Cake, use the rind of 1 orange. Yuzu is okay too! Add to the dry hotcake mix. You can put slices of lemon in the bottom of the rice cooker bowl before you add in the mixture.

- Chocolate Cake
Add about 1 to 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder to the dry hotcake mix.

- Banana Chocolate Chip Cake
Mash 1 or 1 1/2 soft bananas and mix them with the egg and milk mix. Put the finished mixture in the rice cooker bowl, and put some big chocolate chips ON TOP of the mixture. They will sink. DO NOT put them on the bottom because they will touch the metal of the bowl and burn.

- Herb "Cake"
Don't put any sugar, but add a pinch of salt. Add dry herbs or fresh herbs as you like.

Other ideas: vanilla, blueberries, dried fruit of any kind, canned peaches that you drained carefully, peanut butter instead of butter, grated apple and cinnamon, apple slices in the bottom of the bowl + cinnamon, etc.

Points:
- Please use the butter because it makes the cake rich and moist.
- For the flavor, dry things should be mixed with the dry hotcake mix first.
- Don't use things that are too wet, or reduce the milk to 80ml.
- If you want a lighter cake, add 1 teaspoon of baking powder
- You can make 2 cakes and after they are cool, you can join them together with cream to make a shortcake :)

Banana with big chocolate chips.
This is a heavy-type cake.

For more recipes, please go to the cooking blog with this link: http://eating-easy.blogspot.com/

A silver ball

For some very strange reason, Dusty loves aluminium foil. If I unroll some foil to use for cooking, he immediately comes running, no matter where he is or what he was doing. He also comes if we open a bar of chocolate wrapped in foil :)

I don't want him to have a sheet of foil but sometimes as a treat I carefully fold in the edges and create a ball. He'll play with it for hours until he loses it under something, or until Kuro steals it. Sometimes he runs around with it in his mouth, growling at Kuro.

 Above I wrote 'aluminium' which is British English. Americans use 'aluminum' which is simpler.

Gasoline, at last!

Since last Thursday, many gasoline stands are open and don't have any long lines. I could get gas this morning at about 8:15am and I was the only person at the pumps. After the disaster, people were waiting up to 3 hours to get even 20 liters. (Most stands had restrictions and 20L was the maximum.)

Of course, gas has become more expensive, now 148yen per liter. A few weeks ago it was in the 130 to 135yen range. I heard that in Tokyo, it is about 160yen. I was a bit surprised when I checked the internet and found out that the average price of gas in Sydney (Australia) is $1.48. That's about 123yen, so not so much different to around January this year in Japan.

By the way, in British English gasoline is called petroleum, or petrol for short. That is why BP is b + p = British Petroleum :)  In Australia, if you ask for gas for your car, people will think you mean LPG!

The kinds of petrol in Australia are:
regular unleaded petrol = regular = regular in Japan
premium unleaded petrol = premium = hi-oc in Japan (from high octane)
diesel = diesel in Japan :)

There are other types of ethanol or other biofuels, too. You can find a link here.

Luckily, I had filled my tank just 3 days before the earthquake hit so I didn't need to worry about gas. But it was a good lesson to me that I should always keep a full tank, not let the gas run down to the last marker on the digital fuel indicator.

Oh, and if you go to Australia and if you find a true service station (not self-serve) you can say to the attendant "Fill 'er up".  (er = her = the car!)  But if you want to use proper English instead of slang, just say "A full tank of regular, please."


Finally, you might be surprised as some petrol stations in Australia. Many are like convenience stores - they sell EVERYTHING and are open 24 hours a day.

Group nouns

Very often I hear something like:

"I couldn't find what I was looking for so a staff helped me."

'a staff' is incorrect because "staff" is a group noun. It means ALL the people who work somewhere.

"Staff at the Imperial Hotel are very professional."

If you want to count them one by one, please use a counting word. Almost always we use 'member'.

"I couldn't find what I was looking for so a staff member helped me."

Or you can use other nouns that are the names of the things in a group:

staff = president, vice president, department manager, section manager, secretary, office workers, cleaners -- 10 staff members

furniture = shelf/shelves, desks, chairs -- 10 pieces of furniture

money = notes, coins

work = jobs, projects, tasks

homework = projects, essays, reports


It is okay to use plural for the things in the group, so "S" is okay. But please don't use plural for the group nouns: furnitures

Earthquake map

Dots representing the quakes

Tonight I received this link to an earthquake map. It shows all the earthquakes from 12:00am of March 11, up to when you open the link. Up to 10pm tonight (March 27) there have been 798 quakes. Each one is represented by a circle showing the magnitude and different colors for depth.

I will warn you before you open the link, it is horrible to watch the animation of the first quakes and the aftershocks. It made me feel sick again. Watching it is like watching fireworks and the only good thing is the number of aftershocks is decreasing - the ones we feel in Ibaraki are becoming less.

LINK -->
http://www.japanquakemap.com/

If you want to watch individual quakes, put your mouse over the list on the right-hand side of the page.

Map showing Tsukuba
Mito is the capital city of this prefecture

Area map

Hay fever

A few days ago I wrote about the yellow pollen that is everywhere. And of course, pollen means ....

HAY FEVER!

Itchy and red eyes
Itchy nose
Stuffy nose
Runny nose
Headache
Feeling lethargic

Luckily I have no true 'fever' which means we have a high body temperature. In "hay fever" the word is kind of like 病 in Japanese.

I wish Golden Week would hurry up and arrive because that is just about when hay fever is gone :)