Rie is still sick everyday, all day. The sickness intensifies and abates throughout the day so we never know how sick she is going to be from one minute to the next. Because of this, we have been forced to remain locked up inside our apartment for the past three weeks. My only reprieve comes in the form of going to work, but as of next week I’ll be on vacation until April. Rie, however, has opted to keep working even though she feels so bad. We’re hoping that there will be only a couple of more weeks of this before her hormones level out and she starts feeling better.

The doctor set our due date for August 12. That also happens to be Rie’s brother’s birthday. He said that he hopes the baby is late, because if they both have the same birthday, then nobody will remember his. I told him that he should be glad to have the same birthday, because before the baby, I never knew when his birthday was. Now I’ll never forget. This doesn’t mean that I’m going to be buying him anything though because, well, I’ve got a baby to buy presents for at that time of year. Too bad for him, I guess.

Yesterday was a national holiday, “Seijin no hi“. This is the day that they celebrate all Japanese who turn twenty years old this year. Twenty is the legal age of adulthood here. They have big ceremonies throughout the country and all the “new” adults attend wearing kimonos and register themselves at city hall. Since it was a holiday, I wasn’t sure if the garbage was going to be collected (Mondays and Thursdays are our pick-up days). I took the garbage down, and about an hour later, heard the truck go by. Japanese garbage trucks play little songs like an ice cream truck to let people know to get their garbage ready.

Later, I went down and noticed that there were four or five bags of garbage that had not been collected. There were bright yellow labels on them. Anyway, this morning after Rie left for work, I got a call from her saying that our garbage was one of the ones that didn’t get picked up, so I had to go down and bring it back up until Thursday. Apparently, they are no longer collecting garbage in brown or black bags. From now on, we have to use clear bags so they can see what it is we’re throwing away. Whatever, just another red-tape problem to deal with.

Note: A friend commented that when the guy got out of the truck, the truck pulled away and kept going without a driver. This is because they drive on the other side here. No runaway tragedies here.