Dealing with Winter Again

We had a wonderful vacation to Kyoto and Okinawa.  We left 70 degree F Okinawa Thursday afternoon and headed for home.

Unfortunately, we arrived home much later than we anticipated because of a snow storm in Hokkaido Thursday.  We caught the express train at the airport, but were stopped for a couple of hours in Sapporo before that train was put out of service.  With only minutes to spare we switched to a local train that was still running in the direction of our town.  That train was also stopped by the snow and we switched to another local, finally getting to our town after midnight.  We were tired and the snow was falling hard at that point so we decided to take a taxi from the train station to our apartment.  The driver was hard of hearing and the roads treacherous, but we finally made it home to our 41 degree F apartment. We were glad we didn’t spend the night in Sapporo Thursday night because we wouldn’t have made it back yesterday.  This is what it looked like out our windows yesterday morning.

On the back railing

Those big white blobs are snow covered  cars

It continued to snow all day and stayed in the 15-20 F temperature range outside.  It didn’t seem to get very warm in our apartment and we started smelling kerosene burning.  Later in the afternoon, smoke started pouring out of the toyu heater!  It was scary for me, but Ted didn’t seem to think it was so bad.  He opened the windows to let out the smoke and got out our two electric heaters.  The heaters tripped the circuit breaker and shut down the power, but Ted was able to fix that.  As a result, I didn’t get to look through the nearly 1300 pictures I took to show you anything about our vacation.  I’m hoping Ted will be able to figure out what to do about the heat and that I will start getting the pictures organized and have something to show tomorrow. I'm having a hard time getting the photos loaded and hope that problem will resolve itself because I can't figure it out.

We were very busy the whole time we were gone and I didn’t get much stitching done.  The little bit that I did get done on this counted thread project was done at the airport and while in the air.

I’m sorry for the delay on the vacation report.  Please stay tuned.