The Crazy Last Day I woke up at 6am on Wednesday, August 1. Today is departure day. First thing is to feed the cats and hope they use the kitty litter box before we leave the house. They get to fly in the cabin with us again so puh-leeeze kitties, no mess on the airplane! Other last things on today’s to do list: Osaka Gas will come to shut off the gas and give us our final bill – between 9-10 am. It’s a relief to close our account before we leave. Our friend Chiharu will come at 9:15 am to pick up Halyard’s twin mattress so that it can be thrown away at her house – she has “big…
Avalon’s NC Pen Pals
Avalon has made some new friends in Japan… even though they live over 7,000 miles apart and have never met! Recently she received a packet of 15 letters sent by a 4th grade class from Ballentine Elementary School in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina. They are Avalon’s new pen pals and they have an interest in learning about Japan! Each student wrote Avalon a letter and she answered all of their questions in this blog post. Before they wrote, they read some of our blog posts, namely the ones about the Cat Cafe, rice fields, trash and shoe rules. So they had a lot of questions about those topics. Avalon also hand wrote a letter to the class, telling them a little…
Cat Cafe – for Cat Lovers
Today, Sunday, October 23, Avalon said her dream came true. John and I took her and Kaiyo to find a Cat Cafe. What is a Cat Cafe anyway? It is a place where you can pay an outrageous amount of money by the hour just to sit in a place with a lot of cats wandering around and have a drink of coffee, tea, juice or cocoa. You can’t even have a fun cocktail or champagne while you pet the furry felines crawling all around. Actually at least half of them are sleeping soundly like lumps on logs. I now want to open my own Cat Cafe in my house and charge by the hour and guests can come over…
Japanese Cats
I have been meaning to write the story of how we brought our cats to Japan. Today is Friday, October 14, and it is already exactly two months since we arrived. The kids seemed like they really needed to have their fur balls in Japan. We adopted sibling kitties Pickles and Maneki from the OC Humane Society when they were around 3 months old. I thought if any of the kids (or maybe John and I) needed extra comfort in Japan it was best to have the cats along. And after all, Maneki’s name is Japanese so he needed to see his namesake home country. The following is how they immigrated to Japan with us. At the very beginning of…
Taking Our Cats With Us
This is a long saga that starts our whole story off in motion. I’ll be adding to this story over time until the whole thing is complete. Basically it starts in February 2016 and goes until we step on the airplane with them on August 13, 2016.Here is one part of the story: Yesterday (Tuesday, August 9) I found out, from the USDA, that because I used one form A and one form C for both cats that the forms would be invalid. It didn’t matter that Animal Quarantine Services (AQS) in Japan said it was okay to use one form for both cats. The USDA requires 2 forms for 2 cats. So I had to get up very early…