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Low End Cuts

The penultimate day of the year 2022 meant Big Cleaning.

It's taken me a long time to give up the idea of spring cleaning and fully embrace the Japanese cultural virtue of end of the year house cleaning. In the end, whenever you decide to do a full cleaning of parts of your house you don't normally clean, both inside and outside, you are going to feel that combination of exhaustion and satisfaction whether its new year's eve or not.

So says the clean freak. For most of my life I have had this thing where I cannot do anything, whether it's watching TV or cooking scrambled eggs, until the environment is clean and, most importantly, in order. In my single days this was easy to manage, obsessive as it is under any circumstance. When you're with three other people, two of whom are relatively new to being, the environment you live in has more variables. Way more. It has been one of the biggest challenges of my life to adjust to a lifestyle where sometimes things are just a mess and you have to deal with the fact that nothing can be done about it right now.

This morning Kenzo and Osamu helped me with the big outside cleaning jobs - the inside of the car and all the downstairs windows and screens. It took over two hours.


I had my Thermos coffee mug with me all morning, though I ran out of coffee about 10:30 and wanted to take a break to make more but I thought I'd lose my inertia. I'd go inside, make more coffee, and just stay there. So I powered through. The boys did too. They were great helpers, and super enthusiastic the entire time. They love wearing work gloves and doing things with papa. They also knew they were going to get paid for their efforts.

We got done just before noon. Mama was busy doing big cleaning inside and also getting an amazing lunch ready.


Eri made us the most delicious seafood rice bowls from the maguro and shrimp we got at the Shiogama Port yesterday. It wasn't the super fancy otoro tuna cuts, just the cheap pack of maguro suji, but that's plenty good for us, especially with two little guys who don't need high end cuts of fish.


I figure there will come a day when the boys are off having their own adventures somewhere, probably abroad and probably in a similarly irresponsible way to their papa, and Eri and I will take an occasional drive over to Shiogama or maybe even the fish market at the Sendai Port and pick up some otoro. We'll have a leisurely drive home, maybe stop off at a bakery, and hopefully by that time I'll be the one who can prepare a seafood bowl for an early dinner for two.

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