Winter solstice and greetings for the season

The garden is still asleep in this cold snap. It has been freezing every morning for the past few days. They have had much snow in the mountain area near by which has disturbed traffic on the high ways.

In such a season, there is something getting ready for the next spring. One of them is flower buds on the magnolia tree. The buds are wrapped with fluffy coat. They will turn to be gorgeous flowers in 3 or 4 months. 

In a close up view.

It will be the winter solstice this year in 3 days. As always said, time is flying so fast. In Christianity, needless to say, it will the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ in a week.

I am not attracted by Christmas songs but am rather going to listen to Matthews Passion in this season, even though I left Christianity itself long time ago. But this Passion by great Bach always touches me a lot whenever listening to it. The famous dirigent as well as organist, Karl Richter, has recorded this work for 4 times in his life so far as I know. He has made debut for Matthews Passion in 1958, which are  performed in relatively fast tempo and in light touch, which has been welcomed by most music fans. It has shown the original architecture of this music and was thought to be closer to the original performance in Bach's era. The last one recorded 2 years before his death in 1979 is a kind of romantic expression. So was the recording in 1971. Some critics denounce he has returned to the old romanticism in Passion performance. It might be against the movement of authentic performance of Baroque or of Bach. But this 1979 version still could not help moving us living in this modern era. The 1st piece of overture progresses with the repeatition of ever lasting motif, which stands for the walk in slogging pace of Christ on the Gorgotha Hill. It seems to tell Christ accompanies those who are in anxiety and suffering in their lives. Accompaniment is the most powerful encouragement to them. In this context, Richter's last recording in rather slow and slogging pace touches me a lot.

Richter's Matthews Passion recorded in 1971;

https://youtu.be/Xdl0m1v5el8

Wishing every visitor to this blog relief from life load and suffering if you have any. Season's Greetings to you. 

Pork miso soup

 In this season, cold and dark, something hot is needed for a dish/soup.

This is pork miso soup, which people enjoy at this time in a year. It will warm up our body from its core. Taro harvested in the garden farm this fall was used as a material.

Pork roll of pumpkin will be also served in addition to this soup. Fresh salad will be ready as well.

Rice boiled with red beans takes the position of bread in the westernized dishes. This is also very good. 

Another walk and a memory of Christmas in '79

It was a warm breezy day today. In the afternoon with no clouds in the sky and sun was shining warmly, I went for a walk over to the rice farm area west of here. It took only 15 minutes to walk down there. Vast rice paddies spread. No one there. There were occasionally cars coming and going. A quiet place.

Northwest of here, we could see the mountains in Nikko. Clouds have covered the range and could not be seen. 

In a harvested paddy, pruned or cut branches of trees were piled high. I remembered it would be for a fire festival named Dondo Yaki which would be held in the mid January next year. They will burn all the ornaments or the religious tags given at shrines for the New Year's days. 

Some dishes and rice cakes will be served as well. I have never attended such a meeting. One reason was because I had been pretty busy around New Year's days for my work. My father or my wife used to join it when we were responsible for that. 

Looking up about this common festival in the season, I knew the same event had been held all over our country with different names. It seems to pray for good health and fortune in the new year. Another old religious tradition.

A road is running north and south between this rice farm area and the residential area east of it. Along that road, my mother's birth place is located. There used to be a spouse lady of my uncle, that is, my mother's elder brother, living there. My mother used to tell us the family was wealthy with a lot of properties. After the WWII, it has fallen to a common family. Now a daughter of a cousin and her family are living there. All of them, except for the cousin's daughter and her family, have already died. 

In the Christmasn of 1979, when we were newly married and started residency, we visited there for a Christmas event. An old aunt has brought Christianity to this country side when she suffered from tuberculosis and was well cared for by an American missionary lady in her student days in Sendai. I might have already told in this blog about her and her sanatorium having been started during WWII. She has advocated Christianity in conjunction with that small sanatorium. The sanatorium was for tuberculosis patients who had no aid from their families etc. Of course, it was a illness with absolutely poor prognosis those days. I bet it was a kind of private hospice welcoming those without any help in the society. I was born at that sanatorium. I have also written about that story elsewhere. 

I can't remember if we were invited to or were willing to. We came to this aunt's home for a Christmas event in the late Dec. Without own car, we came here on train and bus. It took us almost 2 hours. We didn't care for that. I was pleased to introduce my wife to the people there. Taking off a bus from the railway station nearby, 30 or 40 minutes ride, we were walking on this street. It was not paved. It was much colder than today. Hard wind was blowing from the Nikko mountains. Nostalgic enough. My wife did not complain of the long journey at that time. who knows how she reacts to such a proposal of trip in the cold wind. We both were young and ambitious for the future at that time. 

I had least idea to be settled down in this area those days. Sometimes ideas for another choice in life comes up in my mind. It is, however, no use to recollect old things like that. It has been the only choice for me and I should be grateful for that. 

A CW family

 I have met Ellen W1YL on 40m late in the afternoon yesterday. After 1.5 months absence. She sounded like a teen age girl finally operating W7RN via remote control. She told me Luis W4LT had done all the job for her. Luis has mother with almost the same age as Ellen. It was the reason, as Luis told to her, why he had worked setting the remote control for her. His bio. in QRZ.com sure tells he has mother aged 97 years, a bit older than Ellen. He was amazed how proficient on CW Ellen was. He might know operating CW was like breathing freely for Ellen. It must be another reason why he has eagerly worked for her. I don't know if he is reading this blog or not but would like to express my gratitude to his efforts for her. It was really important for her and for her friends all over the world including myself.

We have talked a lot while I was sipping cold lager as usual. Her ankle issue turned out to be cellulitis but not gout. It is even a good news. If cared for well, it won't recur like gout acute attack. Without CW fix, she has spent lonely days with Oreo, her company cat. He must be a bit happy to have been able to occupy her all day. With improvement of cellulitis, she could go for the doctor driving her car. Most emphasis was that she was more than happiest to operate CW like before with the aid of Luis. She asked about us and our kitten. Hearing out kitten is running all around and even climbing the curtain, she looked pleased and told me kittens always behaved in that way.

Listening to her story, I have remembered of Mike WB4ZKA I mentioned in this blog before.

http://nuttycellist-unknown.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-borderless-world-and-ham-radio-as.html

His motto was "Tell me your story". I felt both Ellen and I were realizing that motto in the QSO. We are sure in the same community or even in a family in a sense.

I would go on joining that community from now on. May I hear not only the big signal of Ellen operating W7RN but also Mike operating with K1 4W and a wire antenna. I haven't heard him for several years.

Go on, Ellen. I will keep ears open to you!

 

Some vegetables are budding/growing Re Long COVID

As told before, silk pods are budding despite of frosty weather. They were covered with cold proof sheets. It is still amazing they are getting born from seeds. As a pediatrician who has sometimes attended risky delivery at the hospital to save the baby, I am still amazed at it. Getting birth, whether it is human, animal or even plant like this, is marvelous. They will slowly grown in the winter and will yield beans early in the next spring.  

Cabbages are also growing producing "balls". Hopefully, there will be no bugs inside the ball. Fresh cabbage is a good material for soup, salad, boiled dish and so on.

Garlic is also slowly growing in this cold weather. It might be ripe in the spring.  

For the last harvest of the lasts, several tomatoes were taken from almost dying tomato plants. Again, amazing they are still bearing fruits like this. They are destined to live in this way in order to leave their descendants.

 While pulling the weeds, a sweet potatoe was digged out. It will be cooked in a bonfire with fallen magnolia/chestnut leaves. Nothing is sweeter than that. It was my mother's favorite. Whenever I made bonfire in the garden, she, in her lastest years of live came close to me and asked if there was any sweet potato in it.

 

It seems the outbreak of COVID19 is getting worse everywhere in the world. It is getting a bit settled down in the region where strict outing ban was ordered like in France. Our government is still promoting travel with subsidiary. It is told to help the travel related industries. But more than a half of the budget for this promotion of travelling is spent for the contractors of the official work. No wonder there is a rotten connection between those companies and the politicians/administrative officers. 

I could not imagine what this would result in. One factor the government is playing down is that there is a problem of long term sequelle, that is called as Long COVID lately. It includes a variety of complications lasting long of pulmonary, cardiac and neurological pathological conditions. I am concerned about myocarditis which occurs in over a half of the cases, whether it is mild or serious, and could result in myocardiopathy later. Those Long COVID could be a burden to the society for social welfare and medical care in the future.    

Fourteen years have passed

It was the day on 27th this month when I started a blog in Japanese elsewhere. Long before beginning this blog. 

It had been several years since I started own private practice. Luckily, I could refund the debt to a bank little by little on regular basis. I could not help being concerned to me since the amount of the debt was out of common sense in my life. I finally could prospect for the future financially by that time. 

I needed a place where which I could express own view about the issues in medical care system. At that time, there have been a lot of "malpractice" suits going on. The mass media have been agitating against the medical personnel to the public. For example, there were lack of the emergency medicine facilities and the staff those days. And the doctors involved in emergency medicine have become more cautious not to serve for cases in the other specialities than their own in fear of being charged for suit in case their practice turned out not successful. In that situation, the mass media denounced the medical staff, mainly doctors, to be "too lazy" in their profession. Like most other doctors, I could hardly consent to them. That blog in Japanese was a stage where I could discuss such problems in medical care system.

Around that time, quite a number of doctors have started the same media in the internet all over our country. It was the days when the internet was spreading all over the country. They have found it a handy media to express their opinion. I have got acquaintance with a few doctors through the blog activity, who mostly have ceased their blog in a few years. I don't know why they have quit keeping their blogs. Maybe, the other media in the internet like SNS have replaced them in those doctors' activity. Or they have become too busy. Or, more likely, they have given up appealing the problem to the public since the problem could not be easily understood by people.  

I have also written about ham radio, cooking, travelling, gardening or music etc. It was really a canvas which I freely drew paintings for various objects. In the lunch break or after the work in the evening at the office, I often made new pages in the blog.   

In recent years, I have been concerned about the politics/economy. I don't know if it was due to my changing concern or to changes in the politics/economy. In my subjective view, I suspect it is going toward the aberrant direction. Being summarized, toward the globalism based on market fundamentalism which results in exploitation and destruction of the common social capital, the reactionism to the prewar regime which is associated with historical revisionism, the economical disparity and most importantly the apparent deterioration of people's ethos which brings forth the populism politics. I have written about my view on these problems in the Japanese blog as well as, less frequently, in this blog. In order to leave the better world to the next generation, even though it is only a very small effort with least effect in the society, I would go on keeping the blogs.

Whenever thinking of keeping blogs, I recall my father who used to write letters to his friends and family members quite often in his retirement. He also left a lot of diaries he had kept for decades. When he passed away, I read some of them. His concerns were, I was surprised, quite similar to mine. His experience as a soldier in WWII might urge him to write down on his thoughts on the history and politics. In the ecclesia of Christianity, he also enjoyed a lot conversing with friends as well. He was like a young man in the letters to those people, who had also passed away by the time when I read them. His writing and content were really touchy to me. But I believed they won't deserve being left to the family. I have abandoned them a few years ago.  I feel it is comparable to writing letters/diary for my father to keeping these blogs for me.

It will be a time when I should delete all the contents in the blogs. It won't be worth of being preserved at all. I am happy that these blog articles will disappear in the emptiness while I pass away. I am so happy there are some people who read my posts with sympathy or sometimes with repulsion. That's good enough for me.

I only appreciate you visiting my blogs. So, until I say farewell to you, please kindly go on visiting here and leave some message if you want. 

The office in 2008. My room was on the 2nd floor.

My room at the office before the internet age. There was a thick text of pediatrics of Nelson at the right edge of the desk. The cello was beforehand on the right side of this picture. A big book shelf on the right side as well. 

The winter garden

While the garden is getting quieter, there are some fall/winter vegetables ripened in it. Broccolis and cabbages are such examples. Spinaches and silk pods are budding on the ground. It is amazing they are growing and getting ripe in this chillness of early winter.

One of broccolis was harvested and was featured for chicken stew of tomato soup. Not well visible on this photo. It is a valuable kind of vegetable in winter.

Most flowers are dying. But this rose is still blooming. It has enjoyed good amount of sunray. That may help it to survive this early winter.

In a close up view.

Camellia trees are expected to bloom by this time in a year. This camellia was bitten by bugs in the summer, which we have not noticed until the gardener told us that. I have almost given up its flowers. However, at the tips of branches, some flowers are coming out. I was amazed at how vividly they grow despite of bugs' attack.  

In a close up view.

Magnolia trees are budding tiny buds covered with fluffy coat. 

As a whole, the garden is still finally falling deeply asleep until next spring.

Feeling grateful to it for letting me work there from spring to now, I am doing some works like raking fallen leaves. I may spend the free time for listening to music, playing cello and a bit of ham radio operation if there is anyone to converse with. 

Peaceful time in life.