Monday, November 5, 2012

November Rituals

Well, I thought the summer would last forever, but it is yet again freezing cold. It happens so suddenly here. As a friend put it, "who turned on the cold?!?!" That pretty much sums it up. The summers here are so hot you forget you could ever be cold and the winters are so cold you forget it could ever be warm. Such is life.

There are several things we do in November. First, our visas expire in December, so we have to go back and forth from Matsuyama, a larger city about an hour away to visit the visa office and get our paperwork sorted. This year is a tad more stressful because we have to drop off our passports in Osaka for 2-8 days at the Indian consulate so that we can go on our trip in December. We worked out the timing with everything, but there's a very small margin of error allowance, so things are tense :)

Next, we try to do a little fall/pre-winter cleaning and block off all the windows with heavy curtains or blankets. We are super cheap and don't like to waste money on heating a 10 room house, so we try to close it off to only the areas we use.

We've decided over the years that in the winter only the upstairs (which is the newer part of the house) and the computer room and the shower/bathroom area are necessary. So we move our bed from the bedroom/clothesroom area to the upstairs living room and pretty much hole up in there for the season.

I guess that's all. We go to the hot spring onsen more and generally have a "wake up and put 5 layers on immediately" protocol, but that's about it. I thought we did more stuff in November but I guess not, haha.  

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