Yes. That IS Obama sushi.

Oh, Japan. Even after all this time, you can still make me laugh.

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Share with your fellow reader friends.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - Yes
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - Yes
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - Yes
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - Yes
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - Yes
6 The Bible - Yes
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - Yes
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - Yes
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - Yes
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - No
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - Yes
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - Yes
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - No
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - ? Probably? Most of them, anyway.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - Yes
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - Yes
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk - No
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger -Yes
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - Yes
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot - No
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - Yes
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - Yes
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - No
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - No
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams -Yes
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - No
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - No
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - No
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - Yes
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - No
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - Yes
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - No
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - Yes
34 Emma - Jane Austen - Yes
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - Yes
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - Yes
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - Yes
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres Mais - Yes
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - Yes
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - Yes
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - Yes
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - Yes
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Yes
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving - Yes
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - Yes
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - Yes
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - No
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - Yes
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - Yes
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - Yes
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - Yes
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - No
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - No
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - Yes
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - Yes
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - Yes
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - No
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - No
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Yes
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Yes
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - No
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - No
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt - No
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - Yes
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - No
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - No
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - No
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - Yes
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - No
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - No
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - Yes
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - Yes
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - Yes
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - No
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - No
76 The Inferno - Dante - No
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - No
78 Germinal - Emile Zola - No
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - No
80 Possession - AS Byattn - No
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - Yes
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - No
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker - Yes
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - Yes
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - Yes
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - Yes
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White -Yes
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - No
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Yes
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton - No
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - No
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - Yes
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - No
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -Yes
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - No
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -No
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - Yes
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - Yes
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - Yes
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - Yes


61/100

And here I was beginning to think I might have to go the whole winter without a single sinus infection. Silly me. Here it is, right on schedule. Huzzah!

Peach and/or strawberry kitkats to the first person to Priority Post me some Sudafed.

I watched a documentary last night about why some people are just naturally slim and don't seem to gain weight. Turns out, among other things, that there is a gene we all have that, in some people, prevents them from overeating. Once full, they lose interest in more food. It's not a case of having excessive willpower, it's a case of genuinely not being interested in the plate of cookies being waved in front of your nose.

Yeah, I don't have that particular gene. (Or rather, it's not switched on, or it's slightly different and ok, I don't really remember that part of the story. End of the line, you offer me a cookie, I'm probably going to go "oooh! Cookie!")

The experiment involved getting a bunch of naturally slim people to eat double their recommended amount of calories for four weeks while getting no exercise. It was interesting to see how their bodies reacted to and, in some cases, actively resisted the fat gain. One man didn't gain any visible weight, and it turned out that his body had somehow turned it into extra muscle. Despite not working out. We might hate him a little bit. Or a whole lot.

It was pretty hard watching these people choke down entire cakes and tubs of clotted cream in a desperate attempt to force calories on themselves. I'm not sure about the rules for what they had to eat, but if I was in this experiment (in an alternate universe where I was a) naturally slim and b) content to not graze after becoming actually full) I would definitely have developed a two-avocado-a-day habit and started liberally sprinkling cashews on everything I ate.

One of the more interesting throwaway bits was a reference to a study in the 60s where a 450 pound man, under strict medical supervision, stopped eating for one year and two weeks, at the end of which he had lost 275 pounds. Water and vitamins for one year and two weeks. The mind boggles.

Changing the subject altogether, did you know that Japanese people sneeze differently than English people? Well, not really, but the way they perceive the sound is different than our "achoo!" The Japanese version is "hakshun!" Many of my students are afflicted with hayfever, so I've been teaching them to sneeze in English.

It was twenty-four degrees on Saturday. Twenty! Four! In mid-February! Of course, I was miserable and laid low with an allergy attack, but I did appreciate the fact that I was able to wallow in my misery in relative comfort.

Then winter came back. Unfortunately, the cold doesn't really affect the pollen (only rain does that), so now I'm wearing gloves indoors AND working my way through yet another box of tissue.

In conclusion: February can bite me.

*waggles eyebrows*

Well, I enjoyed my little respite from the pollen. Today's count is back up in the "medication is useless, kill me now" range. Fun!

I found a new tea at the import store yesterday, and it was love at first sip.



It's dessert inna cup!

Oh thank God. I don't know why - did it rain on the cedars? are the little blue allergy pills that much more effective than the little white ones? is the neti-ing paying off? is it all that time spent at work with the air filter on?* - but my allergies subsided a lot yesterday afternoon. I can function like a normal human being again shutupcheveda!

They're still there, though. I can feel the symptoms lurking just behind me, waiting to jump at the first opportunity. Sadly, this means that I will be watching this week's Battlestar Galactica with a nice hot cuppa tea instead of a glass of wine. Boo.

*I have GOT to get one of these for my apartment. 15 000 - 20 000 yen is a small price to pay for pollen-free air.

By the way, now is a good time to tell me if you want me to bring you anything from Japan. I make no promises, but the sooner you put in your (reasonable) requests, the better your chances. And no, Cat, I'm sorry, but the couch does not count as a reasonable request. I will, however, hug it for you the next time I'm in Tokyo.

Cleaning day did not happen today. Before you start smirking and saying things along the lines of "I knew you couldn't keep it up!", let me tell you about what did happen today.

Woke up feeling pretty good. Still itchy, but much less sneezy, and very well rested. A bit muffle-headed and dehydrated thanks to the strong allergy/cold meds I've started taking, but overall, ok.

Went to work, where I only had one student. Andrew's daughter was, as ever, an utter delight, and she was pretty pleased to be getting all of teacher's attention, so that was fun.

Went to the post office. Remembered as I was mailing off a couple of letters that I'd meant to bring some money to send to Canada. Oops.

Went to supermarket, got stuff for soup, came home to start soup-and-cake making, followed by cleaning.

Realized I'd forgotten to get canned tomatoes for the soup. Also, I'm out of flour.

Decide to swing by the post office again on my way back to the supermarket. Somehow agree to send 97 500 yen home instead of 100 000 plus the 2500 yen handling fee. It wasn't just a matter of mishearing the clerk, it was a matter of looking at the paper she printed out for me that quite clearly stated I was sending home 97 500 yen and not finding anything wrong with it until two minutes later.

By this point I was starting to suspect that I was not having the best day ever.

Got home. Started soup. Started sneezing so took more life-draining meds. Promptly forgot about soup simmering on the stove for what I think was just over an hour. Tried to empty the flour into the sugar canister. Gave serious thought to calling Andrew and explaining that I couldn't come in to work because I was having a serious attack of dumb.

Luckily I managed to make it through the rest of the day without doing anything else remarkable, but I'm not in bed yet.

I suspect that if I'd managed to get around to cleaning, I would have doused my computer in bleach, tossed my passport and travel funds, and lovingly preserved any old pizza fliers I might have found.

If there's a moral to this story at all, I think it's "don't mix strong medication and full moons".

(The soup, by the way, is fine. I'll probably have to leave the pot to soak overnight, and it's definitely more stew-like than soupy, but at least it still tastes good.)

There are times during particularly vicious allergy attacks that I become seriously afraid that this is how I will die...sneezing. Generally speaking, being put out of my misery sounds appealing, but what a way to go. What would the obituary say?

Also, how in the hell can allergy season start in February? Here's hoping that it's just sporadic until March. Also that whatever triggers my allergies won't be around in Canada in April, so that I can have a respite.

I hope I feel better tomorrow...I have a lot of cleaning and soup making to do, and I'd like to throw in some cake making too.

Yeah, I'm back at it with the baking. I thought Christmas had gotten the worst of it out of my system, but unfortunately I discovered the Smitten Kitchen site and it's all been downhill from there. It's not even a matter of just wanting cake...if that was all, I'd just pick up a beautifully presented slice from one of the many bakeries around here. I just see a new recipe and think "Oooh, I wonder how that would turn out?"

Andrew said he is going to include a clause in my next contract that requires me to keep baking.

Message from SkyMail

Oh God. Early onset of allergies. Kill me now.

Baby Ewan is here! Actually, he got here Wednesday night, I've just been slack. I went to visit Masami today and peer through the glass at him. I can safely say he is cute as all get out and I can't wait to meet him properly.

In other news, I'm going to Canada! For a month! Yes, that is finally happening, although I haven't begun to make any arrangements yet. I'm looking into tickets now. Thankfully, prices seem to have gone down a bit, although they're still not as good as they were in January, back when this was all still hypothetical and I couldn't have safely bought a ticket. Why did I even bother checking ticket prices then, you ask? Because apparently I enjoy torturing myself. So far I'm pretty sure I'll leave here on April 7th and return on May 7th, so that's a nice long holiday that will no doubt speed by and leave me utterly, utterly broke at the end of it.

Now it's time for an exciting Saturday night of watching Battlestar Galactica and eating fresh cinnamon buns. And no, that is not sarcasm. I cannot think of a better way to spend the night. I leave you with baby pictures:

Oh. My. God. I need to make these, like, yesterday.