Wet Monday

 Up at 9. It rained overnight and it's still wet now so I might do things in an odd order today. Yesterday was so unremarkable it wasn't even worth posting anything about. 

Since it was puddly before noon I didn't go to the post office but went to Nijiya where I got a lot of things from sake to soba (I love soba) with tempura and some fish cakes half of which had a shi'itake mushroom on top and half has a slice of lotus root. So, sort of holiday foods. 

Lotus root is a special food for me because not only does the lotus grow a beautiful flower from the mud, but another thing. It was maybe 1979. My father had gotten us a "winter rental" on Balboa Island and I and one of my younger sisters were there. We went to Corona del Mar high school and things were OK but my father was not good at keeping food in the house. It was around Xmas time when my oldest sister, back in Hawaii, sent us a big box - it must have been something like 10 pounds - of candied ginger, carrots, maybe some chestnuts, and slices of lotus root. 

My father made sure *he* never missed a meal, and my sister there was good at going off with her friends and mooching food off of them (they were rich kids and thought nothing of it) but for me, there was that box. Dad had a few pieces but for me that was what I lived off of for a week or two. After the chestnuts and carrots were gone and it's hard to live off of candied ginger, I had to take on the lotus root; those strange holey things. And of all of them, they were the best. Not the sweetest or the tastiest, but by far the most wholesome. 

And so, lotus root was my friend in a time of need. Those were hungry times. If the mainland was so great, how come I was only able to eat because my older sister, far from wealthy at the time, sent over that box of candied lotus root? It's as paradoxical a situation as the one a lot of immigrants find themselves in, here in the "land of milk and honey", having to have their relatives back in Mexico or wherever, send them money so they can keep going here. 

I "staged" 22 things by which I mean, found the things, found a box or bubble mailer to fit them, and printed labels, so only the final touches would be needed to ship them. 

By this time it was 8 or 9 in the evening so I cooked up a pork miso soup that turned out a little too salty, and drank sake and watched YouTube. I got wound up in watching a lot of different reviews/critiques of a story/anime called "Japan Sinks".