Dear Santa
Dear Santa,
Takeshi and I have been pretty good this year. I paid off my student loans, which has to count for a few hundred "goodness" bonus points, right?
...please feel free to ignore the fact that I missed, well pretty much everyone's birthday and sent lame 'happy belated' emails, and sometimes only Facebook Wall comments, to them instead of presents.
So I am writing you, Mr Claus, to plead the case for new household appliances.
1) Refrigerator.
Our refrigerator's main compartment is on the brink and is about as warm as the rest of the house. You are probably thinking this is not a problem as Japanese apartments are, for some reason that escapes me, not insulated and therefore pretty cold.
But let me assure you, the milk and eggs seem to disagree. Let's not even go into the smell of raw fish coming from a malfunctioning refrigerator.
2) (Clothes) drying machine.
Yes, we do not have one. No, it is not common to have one here. Yes, that is very strange that in a country where it rains perhaps twice a week, and sometimes nonstop for a whole two months, they have not discovered the marvelous invention that is the drying machine.
As I'm working now and can't rescue the clothes when the aforementioned rain starts to fall, we have been trying to dry our clothes in the house, by hanging it on the door frame of our bedroom. Please, Santy, we have to duck under wet clothes to get into the bedroom. Every time! And clothes take 2 days to dry in the house.
Can you see my tears? Can't ya?
3) Dishwasher.
While not perhaps *strictly* neccessary, in households where there are two workers, it becomes a battle of wills as to who has to do chores. We have taken to sneakily stacking them unwashed in the sink, hoping the other person will do them. These dishes stay unwashed sometimes days at a time.
They have sometimes even been known to evolve into the dread Mountain of Dirty Dishes. This mountain's peak is yet uncharted, but jaded mountain climbers who are sick of Mount Everest are hungrily eyeing the top as a worthy opponent.
4) New mattress.
Although I blogged with pride only two years ago about our new mattress from Ikea (one of the years we were in New York, not even using it), our mattress has developed a large sinking depression in the middle. Like an annoying relative, no matter how often and creatively we try to get rid of it, it keeps returning to cause a pain in the neck.
As a very late afterthought, I checked for consumer reviews of Ikea mattresses.
Damn. 10 reviews, and
every review gave the SULTAN mattress 1/10!!
Woops.
So as you can see, the case is dire. Please give us stuff from the list and we'll give you lots and lots of milk and cookies!
Love, Kyra and Takeshi.
Dear K&T,
While I would love to deliver the above-mentioned gifts, have you seen the size of my sled lately? There's barely enough room for a couple of my elves, let alone three large appliances and a mattress.
By the way, have you taken into consideration that I am both elderly and overweight?It would take WAAAAY more than milk and cookies to get me to haul that stuff from the North Pole.
Best of Luck,
Santa Claus
Well, I guess there's always Yamada Denki.
posted by Kyra at 8:10 PM
5 Comments:
Time for a visit to the Costco in Iruma (Saitama-shi)...
When R. and I moved into our new place in Shinagawa Seaside, we sprung for all new stuff. It is all really great stuff. I especially love the refrigerator that is bigger than me (this is the first fridge I've had in Japan where I couldn't intimidate it into submission, or look down upon it in disappointment, berating it for its small stature and lack of ambition.) We also got an excellent Sealy mattress (which I flip and/or rotate every three months as directed in the instructions to avoid sinkholes) and R. was insistent that we get a dishwasher. The dishwasher tries hard, but it is only slightly bigger than the width between my thumb and pinky stretched out - and I can't even palm a basketball. It is an anemic, model-like thing that I fear moonlights on runways in Milan and has a nasty coke habit, but it does clean the dishes well. It was also, like a Milan runway model with a nasty coke habit, fiendishly expensive.
You really should look into the hybrid washing machines / dryers. We've got one of those and I love it: put the clothes in, put in the detergent, set it up for the full course, and a few hours later, dry clothes. R. doesn't like how some clothes come out wrinkled though, so we still end up hanging stuff inside the apartment (but there are poles in our bathtub for this, and some sort of de-humidifier in that room specifically for that purpose.)
So, all this great stuff, right?
Yeah, but we are totally in massive debt to R.'s parents now... And her mom demands expensive monthly sushi dinners as interest! :)
Where did you get your Sealy? The only mattress option I'm seeing here besides Ikea is Francebed. which, semi-ironically, is a Japanese company.
I don't think Costco would be the way to go with appliances, would they?
(also they don't have the awesome 10% store-credit per purchase point system there like you get at all the major denki-yas here. :) )
Actually, I just checked with the missus and the bed is actually a Simmons bed, so I was wrong. It is a really nice bed though. It was, according to her, "expensive". We got it from Isetan. (which is "expensive" generally.)
It is a *damn* good thing I got this new job a few months back. Women are *expensive*! I never faced these kinds of expenses as a bachelor. (Then again, I never had nice stuff either, and was lonely...)
Heheheh, excuse me while I chuckle at your comment. Normally when you hear "women are *expensive*!" it applies to , you know, things like Prada bags and fancy jewelry, not... washing machines.
I would more file that under "home ownership is exensive!"
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