Happy New Year people of the internet! I hope 2018 brings you some wondrous and awesome things and alleviates some of the crap that may have been dealt to you in years previous. Whoever you are, I wish this for you.
For us, it has meant one day of hanging with my in-laws at their home, with me catching more of the conversation than usual, but most of that was about my father-in-law correcting his father-in-law's word choice for fear of Julia using weird old words at kindergarten and getting laughed at. Now I know another (weird, old) word for using the bathroom. Huzzah!
I did take some time scouring the advert section in the newspaper, searching for a good washing machine. Our old one is semi-functional. Still an upgrade from the first one I had in Japan, which was so old and small that the load had to be transferred by hand from the soaking area to the spin dry, which would also be rendered noisily ineffective by the slightest variation on weight. I called it a communist washing machine as it so earnestly believed in the redistribution of filth.
Har har. No really, I still think that's a little funny.
Anyway, the current machine is six years old and past its warranty and we've been looking to upgrade to a fully functioning model for a few months. First, we were waiting for our anniversary, so we could save up for it. Then it was put off for the New Years Sales.
New Years in Japan is sales time. Many shops put together grab-bags of the previous season's goods and shell them out cheap. Others just offer a discount on certain models in-store. Others now offer the same sales online, which is new to me. In any case, I had been waiting months for this opportunity and we had even gone out to 3 shops the other week to check our options and get an idea of what is available in our price range.
To replace our previous model exactly with its new variation would cost twice what we can afford, so we were planning to scale down on size and ability. The current machine has more than a dozen options, and I have only ever used 3 of them. What we know we need is a 5 year warranty and free delivery with a drying option. It may sound impressive to say our washing machine is also our dryer, but the drying function is not 100%, even on a brand new, top-of-the-line model. The best I have seen or experienced is a 70% drying rate, meaning you could fill 70% of a full load to wash and dry and have it come out dry. On our machine, it was closer to 50%, which still isn't bad. It seems you are meant to hang up most large things, drying mostly underwear, towels and socks. Fine by me.
I found an ad for a machine with better capacity in both washing and drying, 5 year warranty and free delivery at one of the electronic stores we had checked out before. The ad said they only had five machines offered per store. I suggested we might go early to my husband, who blew me off, saying it wasn't necessary.
These things always seem like Black Friday to me and I forget that our largest close city, Sendai, has about the same population as Dallas and Fort Worth averaged out according to recent google data. that said, we're not shopping in Sendai, and there are several of these stores around the area.
Still I was surprised today when we got to the store, were ushered to a parking spot by friendly parking attendants, found the machine with 4 sales slips still attached, waiting to be taken. Tomo snatched one before talking to the staff about the various machines and their performance factors. I caught more of it than I thought I would, but Tomo clarified anything I didn't get afterward. Then we bought the nice cheap one I saw in the advert and we headed off to lunch. We wound up having a curry buffet at Namaskar near Sendai station followed by The Last Jedi at the movie theater in the same building and a little bit of game center mischief to pass the time between the two.
There are so many more modes to things like Tekken and basic racing games now and my lack of Japanese ability means I inevitably panic and pick the wrong thing, leading my husband and I to have to waste some extra coins and time trying to play together. I am bad at this thing.
At the end, we raced and had fun and enjoyed the movie and all else.
This year, I am going to get better at Japanese and actually try to study on a regular basis, whatever that looks like. It would be different if the payoff were more obvious or easy or if there were normalized steps between where I am and the complete fluency expected of me. I get why most people with Japanese spouses speak Japanese well. Most of them needed that to get their foot in the door with their intended. Mine sounds fancy in English. I have no interest in speaking to my husband in Japanese. So instead of wanting to show off that I learned a little, I feel more like my Japanese ability and my Japanese husband have nothing to do with each other.
This is lame and I am going to fix it, but not today.
In the meantime, my husband actually really helped punch my depression in the face today, and for that I am grateful.
Happy 2018 everyone!!
