Domestic blog.

Something short for this Saturday, which turned out to be fairly busy. Of course, we're still working on settling into the house. For example:

• Most of my books, and Yuriko's and Lilly's significant collections too, have been liberated from their boxes, but not all have found a spot on a bookshelf. Magazines, files and other papers are also loose.

• An amazing number of videotapes, mostly Japanese dramas or cartoons, have more or less found a home downstairs. So have buckets of toys, which have a way of creeping onto the floor when your back is turned.

• The kitchen is up and functioning, but the arrangement of the eating area -- not the dining area, which is a different place and without a dinning table at this juncture -- annoys me. Mainly because sometimes I have to move chairs around to cross the room. That was one of problems with the old house, so little space that I had to move things to walk around, and I don't want it again in this bigger house.

• Both the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms are in good shape. The upstairs bathroom has that woman's touch, with various bits of nonfunctioning decor; the downstairs one has a utilitarian vibe, courtesy the man of the house. Only lately did I toss the old toothbrushes, razors and other unusable debris left by the previous owners in the medicine cabinet.

• The garage is cluttered already, as a good garage ought to be. Sometime before the snows fall, we have to see to it that two cars can actually go into our two-car garage.

• Yuriko cleaned the empty boxes off the deck on Thursday, and today we took both breakfast and dinner out there. A number of bees took a serious interest in our strawberry jam at breakfast, calling their bee friends to come have a buzz in the vicinity, too.