There has been a great deal going on during the past couple of weeks. We have returned from Japan and must say as much as I wanted to post everything we did it was so impossibly busy we collapsed into bed quite early each night. We were exhausted.

I will still pop in the odd photo maybe. The cherry blossoms were a spectacle and were bursting everywhere. Very pretty. We ended up having made sushi, learning how to make Saki, everything you need to know about preparing a kimono for wear and got to wear them a couple of hours one afternoon shopping. We went through museums, shrines, temples. Rode fast trains, slow trains and trains that went backwards. We wrestled Sumo wresters and learned there is a great deal more to their sport than it seems.  We even made paper and brought three of our home made post cards home.

We participated in meals that made some of us feel like the Sumo wrestlers. One meal after another and sometimes several in the same day. We walked for miles, shopped in the souvenir stores and department stores. We learned more history than I will ever remember. It was fun. Great friendships were made, hotel life was great and when it was time to come home I got sick.

I must have caught it from two others on the tour that also fell foul.  Not just sick as in mild cold. My journey home on the plane was wracked with deep chesty coughs, a high temperature and enough germs to spread across everyone who was on the plane that day. I lost my hearing almost completely between two of the flights. I especially hope I contaminated that wayward mother with the four squealing girls who never slept and bothered everyone in the extreme. Of course the food on the plane wasn’t good enough for them. Of course they had to butt in front of everyone at the toilet. If the windows had opened they would have all been gone. There is rude and then there is ‘rude on a plane.’  I’m sure my surrounding seat mates couldn’t wait to get me off the plane. We were exhausted.

I came home and went to bed. The next day Mr. Penguin made an appointment with the GP and I am now, one week later still filled with antibiotics. Today was the first day out of the house. I took the dogs for a 30 minute walk and I was stoked to get out and breathe real air. So good to be home.

Reading? Bits and pieces here and there. Now what does one download and attempt to read on a Japanese trip? Shogun by James Clavell.  I have read about 9 percent of this very violent, interesting, heavy (both literally and physically) novel. I want to read it. I really do. But I don’t have the stamina to keep going with this book. I think it may be the book that stays on my phone for waiting rooms. I always have a book, that generally moves slowly to read while I wait for people, sit in cafes or ignore the old magazines in the doctor’s office.

Carson McCuller’s book The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is ridiculously short. I should have finished it by now.  I did soak in a hot bath with it one day since I returned but woke up just before I drowned. I only have a tiny bit left.

I think my goal for the next month will be mopping up all the half read books and magazines around the house. You really do get sick of them if you don’t finish them and file them away.  I think it will be released to the wild by the Book Phantom once I finish. (more on that later).

So nothing planned right now except a possible photo shoot with some camera club members on Saturday of an old insane asylum north of here, about to be bulldozed and the land developed. That’s another story too. But for now I need to just get better, enjoy some walks with the dogs and enjoy the wonderful Tassie air and sun. (I didn’t say heat… I said ‘sun’).

So until the next time…happy travelling and happy reading.