Vegetarian!?

I am not a vegetarian. I am not willing to become a vegetarian.

...Never.

I love meat, and I love fish even more than meat.
So I don't want to give up these delicious ingredients.


Still I believe eating lots of vegetables is healthy, so I sometimes cook vegetarian meals.


The menu of today's VEGETARIAN supper was:
1. rice with green beans
2. cucumber and pepper salad with coriander leaves
3. mushroom burger

As the ingredients of all, I used:
rice, green beans, cucumbers, bell peppers, coriander leaves, mushrooms, sesame seeds, green onions, ginger, eggs, some starch and seasonings...

I used quite a variety of vegetables, didn't I?



As we ate this meal this evening, I realized that my husband was not eating as fast as usual. Although he usually eats so fast that he can not digest food well...


Probably this was the sign to say "I don't want to eat vegetarian meals any more! Give me meat!!!!!", since he is so much meat lover and I have not cooked neither meat or fish last three days...




So....,I will cook some non-vegetarian food tomorrow.


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on the desk

When I was a school girl, I used to make a cup of green tea with pickled plum "umeboshi" in it before I started studying. It was a kind of ritual to get myself ready for my daily study.

Usually I forgot to drink the tea as I focused on my work. Then after some time I always found the cup on the desk with full of cold tea....

I always forget, but it is still nice to have some drink on the desk when I work at the desk.


Recently I often have a glass of beer or wine on the desk. :D


I am not a teenager any more, so it is all right. Nobody can complain about it.

Also a few glasses of alcohol doesn't make me drunk, so it does not affect my study much. If it affects me, it would be in a positive way. By drinking some beer, I feel better and relaxed. So that makes me more focused on my study!

Is it just an excuse?


It doesn't matter. I enjoy it. That's the best thing.







Today's drink is an Austrian white wine called "Gruner Veltlener". This is one of our best regular wine.


Ummm, I am so happy that I can drink my favorite wine as I study... and write this blog.


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English jokes

English loves joking. But their jokes are not funny. I can hardly laugh at their jokes.

It's not because I am deadly serious person with no humor.(Actually I am though...:D)It is because their jokes are not funny!!!



When I was looking at an English learning web site "EnglishClub.com",I found the lists of English jokes.

I was curious to see the jokes, but my face twitched as I read one joke after another.

They are silly.
I can't laugh at all!!

For example,

Question:
What is the longest word in the English language?

Answer:
"Smiles". Because there is a mile between its first and last letters!



It is not funny at all, is it?


Next one is not so bad.

Question:
What starts with "P", ends with "E", and has millions of letters?

Answer:
The "Post Office"!

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Steam railway

Today it was a nice day, we had a beautiful clear blue sky above us! It has been awful weather since the school broke up. So I felt like today was the first day of our real break!!!

How can we stay at home on a day like this?

So we went off to the south of our town to Kidderminster. There is a steam train station in Kidderminster which the trains travel from Kidderminster to Bridgenorth along the liver Severn.



We went there with our sons, telling them, we can see the train but we won't get in the train. Because they don't want people in nappies in the train.

Of course it is not true. :D


This is just a strategy to encourage them to go to toilet....
Yes, now our sons are in serious and intensive toilet training.


Anyway, we went to the station and saw the engine of the steam train.


As I looked at the train and the people working there, shovelling coals into the fire, I got bored. That's a boy's stuff. Generally girls don't have interest in trains. Neither do I....


However, I seemed to be wrong.

As soon as it got started making big noise, the power of the mechanic and the movement of the wheels attracted me. It's so mechanical that we can see how it works.

Wow! It's so coooooooooooool.






Our sons kept talking about the train all day after the visit to the station.


So, we promised our sons that we would travel by the steam train to Bridgenorth and back to K'minster when they stop peeing or pooping in their underwear....

When would we be able to go there again?



I hope ... soon.



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gardening

Now I am in the middle of the Easter break!

I am very pleased to be able to focus on my own study during the break, but it is also good to work physically outside.

It is getting a nice season even in this dark England, although it hailed on the last three days. Now it is a time to prepare for beautiful flower season!

Yes, I need to work in my garden now if I want to enjoy beautiful garden this summer!


In the back of my house, there is one big plant bed, which is about 2.5m by 12m. It is on the north side of the building, also there is a tall fur tree nearby that gives big shadow over the bed. So half of the bed can get only a little bit of sunlight for a few hours a day and the other half can have no sunlight at all. The problem is not only the shade but rain. Because of the tall tree by the bed, the tree branches block a third of the bed from the rain.....

It is a tough place for a gardener.

What can I do with this waste land!?
Do you have any ideas for this poor beginner gardener?

Anyway I dug the bed today, transplanted some plants there, and planted some roots of bush that will have nice pink flowers...if it grow well. The instruction said this bush is suitable for shady place, so I hope it will grow all right.


I felt good after I worked outside in the garden. It is very important to have a balance between physical work and intellectual work. Each work stimulate each other.

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memorize

How do you memorize new English vocabularies?

Since I was 12 years old, I have hated studying English. Because memorizing is unavoidable to improve English skills, and memorizing was something I could not love.

For university entrance exams in Japan, I took maths, physics, geography, Japanese, and English exams. I chose physics because there are not much to memorize. I just need to understand it, then I can always remember the formulas to use.

Now I have to memorize lots and lots of biological terms..... They look very very unfamiliar to me and almost impossible to memorize.... Especially the words that came from Latin are difficult to remember...

Maybe I am too old to just memorize these academic words.....

Now I want to ask you the question again...or please give me some advises.
How do you memorize vocabularies?

Of course it is more difficult to memorize the words that have no relation to the words I have already known.
So... how do you memorize it, when you find something totally new for you?
I guess the people who are visiting this blog like to learn English. So I assume you are good at memorizing.

So....

Please give me advise!!!

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Easter Eggs

We went out for the Easter egg hunting with my sons this morning.
Since we live on a school campus and now we are in Easter break, we can dominate this campus! So my husband placed several Lindt chocolate eggs and natural dyed eggs on the front lawn, under the trees and by the bush on campus. So it was a big hunt for the boys!

My sons enjoyed looking for the eggs. Of course they know they are chocolate. And the boiled eggs are something they love.

Look at this! They've got this much!!



Bigger eggs are the ones I wrote about in this blog yesterday.

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White Easter!?

Yesterday was Good Friday, which is a national holiday in the UK.
Tomorrow will be Easter Sunday.

Everything will be closed tomorrow, and children will hunt eggs.


We bought several packages of lindt chocolate eggs for our children. We will hide them somewhere in the house or in our court yard so that our sons can find the eggs.

Also my husband dyed white eggs with natural dyes.

It was not easy to find the white eggs. At one supermarket I went eggs were completely out of stock... And today my husband found half dozen of white eggs at another supermarket.

But they are not chicken eggs but DUCK eggs.


I have never had duck eggs before, so I have no idea how they taste like....




So... with these duck eggs my husband dyed three of them pink using beetroots. Do you know beetroot? They are similar to round radish but they are harder and have very strong reddish colour.

And... he dyed three eggs with onion skins. Since I sometimes dye fabrics and canes with plant dye, onion skins are always ready to be used for dyeing.

....He used the onion skins I have collected, and the eggs turned out to be brown, which is just like normal brown eggs..... Of course he meant to make three golden yellow eggs though.....

Ummm..., he used too many onion skins.




But it's all right.
The effort he made for our children is important.

Our sons will hut these eggs and eat the boiled duck eggs.


I'm very curious how they taste.. really.




By the way, it has been snowy these two days. It is not snowing much, but somebody said we would have a "white Easter"....

This is not because of the cold weather in England, but because of the global warming. Actually we have not had any snow laid on the ground in this winter.


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Easter Break began

Today is the first day of our Easter Break. I have been waiting for this day to start studying for the exams!

In the morning I had a meeting with a science teacher, and he lent me several revision guides for the science GCSEs.



All of them are quite old, some of them are from 90's and one is from 80's.

I have already got bought one biology book and two English books myself. They disappointed me a lot. The academic level of the contents is very low, and the contents are just lists of important points. There are not much explanations there.

So I started studying physics using the old books.

The educational books' quality is rapidly getting worse. It seems to be happening all over the world. It is no wonder that pupils' academic ability is getting lower and lower, if they can only get these boring textbooks. These books wouldn't appeal to children at all!!

Since I grew up in Japan, and I studied at a highly academic high school, I have learnt almost everything in the books. (I'm afraid it doesn't mean I remember everything......) Problem is that many of the scientific terms are new to me. Because they are English, of course! So, this is rather studying English than studying science.

But I think this is the best way to learn new foreign vocabularies.

Now I am enjoying studying science a lot as an English language study!


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Pay it forward

"Pay it Forward"
This is the book I read today. Of course this is the original novel for the American famous film "Pay it forward."

As I read this book, I could not stop thinking about using this story to teach the "exponential function" and the "Logarithm." This story would attract pupils and they would learn a lot about both the world and maths. And they would learn to use Algebra as a tool to understand the world...

This could be a great material for pupils!!



I knew this story because I loved this film and saw the DVD several times.

Still I could not help crying at the end of the story. Tears just came out of my eyes and dropped down my cheeks.




By the way, When I was crying as I kept reading this book, my two-year-old son came to me, and asked,
"Is it spicy?"

And he pointed my cheek covered with tears, and said,
"It's dirty."

I just burst into laugh, and said,
"No, I am just sad."
then, my boy,
"Are you sad? Are you going to a hospital?"




Ummm, Children's senses are precious and wonderful!!!




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Reference books

I have printed out a photo my friend has updated on her blog.

That is a photo of the piles of reference books, revision guides, hand-outs, notebooks and textbooks that her son used for the preparation for university entrance exams.

Isn't it amazing?

I thought I want to show this picture to my pupils. My pupils are as old as he, but they don't study much --- they study much less than him. Actually it is no comparison!!!

I printed this out because this encourages myself.

I decided to aim entering university again, so I have to study for the exams. And furthermore, the study at a uni in England is much harder than that in Japan.

So this photo would encourage me whole my uni life!!

I posted this photo on a wall in front of my desk so that I can keep my enthusiasm for my goal! I will meditate on this photo!!!!

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Two more days

I've got two more days to go till the end of this term!

Then....,Easter BREAK!!


When I went to a classroom to teach this morning, one pupil was away. And her friend said,"She is in California now!"

She misses lessons so often, and often she leaves the school earlier than breaking up. It is because she goes on a trip for vacation!!

Unbelievable!



But generally speaking, English misses their school or work so easily. They are absent because it is snowing just a little bit. They are absent because it is cold....

Also the school has to be closed when the classroom heaters are broken, according to the regulation. It is not that cold in England recently because of the global warming. If they are cold, make them run, run, run!! They will be soon warm! Or they need to put on warmer clothes!! That's how I survived Japanese schools without any heating system...... I remember I couldn't hold a pencil on the first lesson in the morning in the middle of winter, because my hands were too cold to move. I guess we can not do this anymore, because parents start complaining about it...... What a shame.

When the heaters are on in the classroom, some of the teenage pupils are in no sleeve shirts, showing off their chubby tammy.

We are not heating the building to be half naked in winter!!!!

Oh, this journal seems to have got lost.....

Anyway what I wanted to say in this journal is....

"happy Easter break!!!!!!"






I really need a break now.


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whole salmon!!!

Yesterday I bought a fresh whole salmon at Waitrose.

The salmon I got was about 60cm length and 4kg weight. After cleaning, I sliced the fish and marinated some pieces with some salt and white wine. That makes the salmon quite similar to Japanese "shio-shake", which is salted salmon.

It is amazingly tasty when you get the whole salmon and cook it. It is no comparison to the fillet we buy at a shop.

The salmon we had yesterday was delicious. The salmon itself simply became a feast. We didn't need to have any fancy sauce with the fish. Only a bit of soy sauce added the great taste for the fish.


It is not only about the taste, but the price.

I got quite many slices and fillets from the whole salmon that gave us fish for 7 meals... It is more reasonable than buying some slices of fish for each meal.


Anyway, we were all satisfied with the supper last night.


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possibility

I have decided to aim going back to a uni as I wrote in this blog a few days ago.

I need to take several exams to be qualified to apply for the uni. It is quite troublesome that I have to take those exams. But I've got a good idea!

Since I need to take the exams, it can be a great chance to study something interesting. The more subjects I get, the more qualified I would be. It's not just about qualifications. It is an opportunity to study!!

So what shall I study besides sciences, maths and English that are necessary?

Great thing about English exam system is the wide variety of the subjects you can choose. You can take an exam of Japanese as a foreign language as well....It would be boring for me to take Japanese exam though.

So I checked exam board website, and searched what possibilities I have.

Maybe psychology, or environmental science?

I have to take the exams anyway, why not enjoy the exams!??
Let's make use of it. And turn the stressful exams into a big opportunity!!



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pasta making

I often make pasta from scratch.
Some pasta flour, which is a mixture of semolina and wheat, and water and salt are mixed in a large bowl and I knead the dough strongly with my feet. So I can knead it with all my weight! ....Of course the dough is in a plastic bag when I step on it.

My sons love the pasta making process. They always jump on the dough in the plastic bag. They can not help me much because their weight are not heavy enough to knead it. But it is fun to work with children. Jumping on the dough, and dancing as we sing a song!

Then I use a pasta machine. First the dough needs to be cut into smaller pieces and flattened by a rolling pin. The pasta machine stretches the small dough to a thin paper-like rectangle pasta. We can use it for lasagna, but usually I cut the sheet into a thin noodle shape. Like this↓.

The pasta machine is so convenient. I use it for making udon, soba, and ramen. Also I use it for making gyoza wrappers.

And ..., of course freshly made pasta tastes great!!



By the way, when I was making pasta, my son asked me.
"What are you making?"
then I answered,
"I am making pasta from scratch."
"Oh, mama is making scratch pasta!........then, what is scratch?"
(We usually speak English.)

hahaha.

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main lesson SURVIVAL

In Waldorf Steiner school, we have block lessons called "main lessons." That is two-hour lesson, and we all start the day with the main lesson. This is a block lesson, that means pupils study mathematics for two hours every morning for three or four weeks. After three-week maths main lesson, they have other main lessons, such as English, History, Geography, Biology ...etc ... every day for three weeks.

Now I teach only main lessons, because my sons are still little and they are at home, and I need to be an almost full time mother. Since my husband teach at the same school and he does not teach main lessons, he can look after our sons when I am on the main lesson. As soon as my main lesson is over, I quickly go home and change my face from a teacher to a mother.


So when I am on the main lesson, our lives become stormy. As the name "main lesson" indicates, the main lesson is a core lesson of the school life. In the intensive lesson block, they focus on one topic and learn it very deeply. This main lesson teaching must be one of the most interesting work in a Steiner School.

But on the other hand, main lesson is the hardest one to teach. Teaching main lesson is like a survival.

Now I am in the middle of the main lesson, teaching Geometry to high school pupils.
I will have 7 more days to go, then we will have an Easter break.


I hope I can keep my enthusiasm all through the main lesson, and survive well...



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Goal

Now I have set a goal. The goal seems to be quite tough.

To achieve the goal I have to get into a university, and study full-time for five years. Before I will be accepted by the university, I have to take several exams. Because of the exam system in the UK, it would take at least two years to finish taking all the exams I need for my application.

So... first, two years of study and then five years at the uni, total of seven years of study will be necessary to achieve the goal.....


The exams I have to take before entering the uni would not be so difficult. I need to take chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics and English. I have studied all of them, not just studied, I have taught all the subjects when I was in Japan.

Problem is, of course, English.

I understand all the contents for the exams, though I still need to learn the English scientific terms.. a lot of them... And English exam would be the hardest one for me, since "English" exam is an exam for native English speakers...

So it will be the study of English, not study of science....

"Can I do it?"
I have been asking myself so many times.
"Can I really do it? I have to work, do housework, take care of 3years and 4 years boys. Besides them, can I really study them?"


After these exams, I can stand at the "start line" finally, if I perform well at the exams and I am lucky.....

I don't know if I can really survive all the tough trials and achieve the goal successfully.

But I decided to start preparing for the exams.
Because I believe this is the right thing to do.


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Diet week

Now I am on diet. I am not doing this deliberately. I just don't eat enough when I am busy or when I have something interesting to do.

A week ago I lost my weight, I guess. I am not consciously checking my weight, so I don't know how much I have lost. But I feel I have lost some fat around my belly...

It was because I was reading a novel that was a quite a page turner. It was hard to stop reading in the middle of the story. Of course I have to feed my sons and my husband, so I cook three meals everyday. But I don't stop reading to eat when I am into a novel.

After I finished reading two novels, now I am in the troublesome weeks at work. It is like a storm...

Whenever I am busy at work, I forget to eat, and lose my weight.

This time, again.

So this is a natural diet....
I am not making an effort to lose weight at all.


But this is not healthy way to lose my weight, so maybe I should not call it a "diet."

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Hair Cut

I got hair cut this weekend.
It has been three years since my last hair cut by a professional hair stylist.

...Surprised?

A lot of my Japanese friends have terrible experiences with their hair cut in England. Generally English hair stylists can not deal with Asian hair quality. They say our hair is too thick and too many.... Their work is incredibly rough. They cut customer's hair as they like without following the customer's order... Often they can not cut the hair straight. And....their sense of fashion/hair style is awful.

Some Japanese ladies go to London to get their hair cut by a Japanese hair stylist, even if they have to make three-hour trip to get to London. I live near Birmingham which is about three hours away from London. I could go to a hair salon in London but I am not that eager for my hair style.

Recently I and my local Japanese friends have found a Japanese hair stylist in Birmingham. She is currently studying English but she was a professional hair stylist in Osaka. She says she can visit our house and give us hair cut!

How can we miss this chance!?

So we asked her to come to our town, and seven Japanese ladies got hair cut very nicely.

My hair is now about 15cm shorter than before. The new hair style make me so happy and I feel like being in a new fashion.


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Anniversary

It seems something strange for me that this month is our 5th anniversary month after we started dating.

I don't know if it is ALREADY 5 years or STILL 5 years.

Since I have got a feeling that I have known him for a long long time, much more tha five years...probably from my previous lives, it is surprising that we have been together ONLY for five years.

On the other hand, these five years seem to be too short to have gone through so many things together.

Anyway, the most important thing is that we are still happy together after these chaotic years. I can tell that we are even happier than the beginning of our history. I am sure that we have been developing ourselves and our relationship.

Happy Anniversary for us!
And cheers for our beautiful lives!

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