Purple Kappa

Hiragana Blocks

I have been coveting this set of hiragana blocks Moonstitches found at a thrift shop in Japan ever since she posted about it. I found a similar set on Ebay, only not nearl as nice and with the cost of shipping it was a little more than I wanted to spend. Last week while at Pat Catan's I spotted flat wooden tiles about 3" square. At 14 cents apiece, I picked up enough to make a set of my own.

It's really not quite the same, the wood is cheap pine and the tiles are rather thin. I outlined everything with a thin black sharpie and colored them with watercolors, then polished them with linseed oil and beeswax. I think it's just that I want the set Moonstitches found, and nothing else is going to quite measure up, haha.

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Hiragana is a set of phonetic symbols used to write Japanese in combination with kanji. Children learn hiragana first, any word can be written entirely in hiragana. They then spend pretty much the first 8 years of school learning kanji.

Cute Book Characters

The translations in The Cute Book are interesting to me, but keep in mind that my Japanese is still pretty basic so I could be wrong about any of these (except the Kappa, that one I know is correct). Most of the differences pertain to subtle nuances--probably one of the most difficult things in translation, I would think.

The Sprite is a Kappa, a sort of water-creature who used to be more fearsome--he dragged swimmers underneath the water and was used to warn children to stay away from rivers. Now he is often portrayed as being much cuter. The kappa is one of my favorite creatures from Japanese folklore, hence the name of my blog.

Bad Guy is Warumono, which seems to be more like rascal or scoundrel and doesn't sound quite as bad to me.

The kidnapper in Japanese is Kotori, a child-taker demon but also apparently a game which seems a little less ominous!

I'm not trying to find fault with the translation of this book, it's just that as I learn more and more Japanese it is fascinating to me to be able to look at the original language of something and see if I can get a different meaning of it, the same way as often a novel will be somewhat different in its translated form.

All scans are from The Cute Book ISBN 1932234683

Hot hot hot

Man, it's hot today. Just as I knew better than to be fooled by the mild weather we had last December, I've been trying to be realistic about the sunny but breezy days we've been having. Today we made a sticky slide into true summer weather in Cleveland. Hot, hazy and really quite horrid. This new house has ceiling fans, which help a bit but not much. At least we were able to fix the air conditioning in the car finally--the driver's side window doesn't roll down either and the last two summers have been miserable. I took the girls to the grocery store, which has a daycare for shoppers--kids ages 3-8 can go play, color, and watch movies for up to an hour and half. I know some people feel shopping can be a good learning experience, but honestly--they love going and I love leisurely walking around the store.

I finished Ivy's Little Red Rodent dress.

I still have the flowered dress to finish, it just needs a bit of detail on the hem but the thought of a pile of fabric in my lap seems just too hot.

Kaki goori

A few weeks ago while shopping at the Asian market, we spotted this:

You can probably tell it's snowcone maker. Across the top it says "mukashi natsu kashi". Mukashi means long ago, natsu is summer and kashi seems to translate as pastry, so I think it might be something like old-fashioned summer dessert.

There is the kanji for ice on the side

It's a bit dangerous to my eyes--or maybe all snocone makes are like this: there is a razor blade on a slant inside, you place the block of ice in and turn it with the handle, the blade shaves the ice. I had a hard time finding flavored syrup, and lucked upon this at the small local grocery store in my old neighborhood

In one of episode of Trick, Naoko makes her own shaved ice treat by pouring syrup on the ice, and then cracking a raw egg over it, eating the whole thing with enjoyment. What is that? I know raw eggs are consumed quite a bit in Japanese cuisine, but I think I will have my shaved ice minus that particular ingredient

Squire's Castle

It was a beautiful day today and we took the girls out to Squire's Castle for a picnic

As with any proper castle, there is a ghost. And guess who showed up to investigate?

There were some strange characters roaming about

which proved to be a little too much for Scooby and the gang to handle. Fortunately, Sailor Moon and Sailor Mercury showed up just in time

Spinny Dresses and Pony Camp

These are two more dresses for Ivy. I think she is well set now! These can also be worn as Autumn dresses with a shirt or blouse underneath. Neither was supposed to have the band of solid color at the bottom, but when I pinned them up to hem them, I realized the skirts were both too short.  The result of once again rushing through a project, I suspect. Fortunately, it was an easy mistake to rectify, I and like the way they turned out. I just need to hand sew the hems--fortunately I have a new episode of the Japanese dorama I've been watching, Watashitachi no Kyokasho

Miranda's been going to Pony Camp for an hour each Saturday morning. Originally she was supposed to go Wednesday's at 4:30 PM, but not enough kids signed up for that time slot, so she was moved to Saturday mornings at 9AM. The place is nearly 30 minutes away, so you can imagine my suppressed groan when Brian told me. Most mornings I am working to get her out of bed before noon (and honestly, I can't blame her, I'd be right next to her if it weren't for Ivy springing out of bed much earlier). But we've both been doing great, getting up and coffeed (milky coffee for her) and out the door on time (pretty much).

Summer Nature Table

I've really been getting lax with observing seasonal cycles. We usually change the nature table on the Equinoxes and the Solstices, so I am a day late

Our nature table never looks like the ones in the Waldorf books, with lovely felted creatures and silk cloths in different colors. There is a sort of lumpy mouse with pink hair in the back corner--a collaboration between me and Ivy, very late one night when I just wanted to go to bed and she was wide awake. There is a collection of fimo rats and snakes, a bowl of pine cones, and a gnome family. The fresh flowers are from the front garden and Junebug is next to the vase. It looks rather nice and summery right now but in a few weeks it will be a jumbled mess again. But I suppose that shows they are enthusiastic about contributing things (even though the items don't always represent nature by my standards) and that's really the whole reason behind having it. Although I wouldn't mind some of these sweet flower child dolls

Proving I know nothing of Wallaby anatomy

I took the girls to the zoo today. Standing in front of the wallaby enclosure, I said to Miranda, "hey, I think that one wallaby might have a baby in it's pouch! See, it looks as though something is poking out!"

She took a look at it and said "uh, Mom, I think that's its testicles"

"But isn't that a pouch? Do males have pouches?"  as I tried to duck down and get a closer look. Until the wallaby in question hopped on a nearby female and began enthusisastically mating. Well, the unschooling philosphy is "learning all the time"...

I took the girls to the zoo today. Standing in front of the wallaby enclosure, I said to Miranda, "hey, I think that one wallaby might have a baby in it's pouch! See, it looks as though something is poking out!"

She took a look at it and said "uh, Mom, I think that's its testicles"

"But isn't that a pouch? Do males have pouches?"  as I tried to duck down and get a closer look. Until the wallaby in question hopped on a nearby female and began enthusisastically mating. Well, the unschooling philosphy is "learning all the time"...

Working out the kinks

Still not sure about Typepad. Took me a while to figure out the site last night--I taught myself HTML almost 10 years ago and still prefer to write code by hand, so when websites try to make things easier for people it often takes me ages to understand what they want you to do. Also, it appears I can't customize my banner unless I upgade? I didn't have a customized banner on Blogger either so it's not that big a deal, but the blog looks rather boring right now. And it's oddly intimidating to essentially start over.

First Post!

After checking around other blogs, I've decided to switch over to Typepad. Mostly because I wanted to be able to reply to comments--Blogger doesn't offer such a feature and often people ask questions in their comments. So, we'll see how this works.