I woke up a bit before the 7.00 chimes this morning, but relaxed in bed for a bit.  A few problems on the Inflatable World server, fixed by a simple restart of the MySQL service, and it was time for breakfast.

We pottered around the house for a while.  I got the second UFO configured back in the old main house, so there was good coverage around both houses and the entire property.  Then we went to their garden field.  I had gone there last time I was here, with Kenichi, Kozue, Mio and the kids – that time we were just cutting the baby bamboo to eat.  This time Kaoru and I started by filling watering cans from the stream to water the vegies, and then we had to cut down the tall bamboo trees that were too bushy, and overgrown, which were preventing new ones from getting enough light to grow.  They were much easier to cut than I was expecting.  The saw we used went through them very easily.  We then had to trim the branches and cut them to length.  I’m not sure what was going to happen from there.

We cleaned up and went to lunch.  This was at a pancake place that Ottosan likes.  We had to wait about half an hour to get a table but they were worth the wait!  I had a Danish pancake, which was more like shoe pastry, with banana, cream, cinnamon sugar and lemon.  Kaoru had a cheese fondou dish, which had 2 layers of buttermilk pancakes, a layer of meatloaf (very thin though), and another pancake.  It was surrounded with salad, and a nice dressing.  The drive through the countryside to these places was beautiful.  The mountains were topped with snow, and the mountain that we hiked through a few trips ago was visible.

On the way home from lunch we went to a grocery store to buy some supplies.  The sushi platters were as amazing as always to look at!  We stocked up on sake as well as some more food.  Then it was back to the house for a siesta.  We slept for an hour or so.  I got the fire going as it was starting to cool down, and did a bit of studying while we watched sumo wrestling.  Dinner tonight was sukiyaki, with sake, and some more conversation.

Kaoru and I watched some TV while Okasan and Ottosan tidied up and had a bath.  Then we had a bath and crashed.  This mountain air is really making me tired!