My first amigurumi. Coming soon: more crocheted Japanese produce!

The fact that dietary fiber chocolate exists in Japan is not so strange. Most of the candy-like items sold near the registers of my local supermarket are some sort of fiber or vitamin supplement disguised as fudge or cookies. What is odd is that I found this particular candy displayed with the normal, bad-for-you candy on the shelves of a convenience store.

...Okay, it's not actually all that odd. It's probably more strange that this box of fourteen individually-wrapped chocolates has 12 grams of fiber. Stranger still is the bitter, aspirin-like aftertaste the chocolates had, especially the piece I let melt on my tongue instead of chewing. Strangest of all was my desire, as soon as the bitter taste had left my mouth, to eat another piece. This is most likely attributable to my mild chocolate addiction rather than the appeal of this candy, as I tried this while at school, a barren, chocolate-less place where even fiber chocolate seems better than nothing.

Every time I look at the pink-and-white package, I have the brief impression I bought something that somehow benefited breast cancer research. But in actuality I just bought something geared toward fiber-deprived Japanese women trying to get a little nutrition in this fast-paced world. Or trying not to feel so guilty about their chocolate consumption -- which may be why it was displayed with the bad-for-you candy in the first place. Mystery solved!

A special salute to the candy-package-design person who decided to print the words "dietary fiber chocolate" all over the box in loopy font. Dietary fiber has never looked so appealingly girly.

Another thing I'm going to have too many of at the end of all this is t-shirts.

In other t-shirt news, I was walking through the mall across the street from my apartment and saw the following shirts (which will only be amazing for people who live in the Echo Park/Silverlake/Los Feliz part of LA):

They had shirts for the foot clinic on Sunset, Club Los Globos and Jumbo's Clown Room! I was most amazed by the foot clinic and thought about buying a shirt, but they were all in men's sizes. Also, I HAVE TOO MANY T-SHIRTS.

If you want me to buy you one, I will. But only in exchange for a guava tart from Cafe Tropical.

Above are Texan goodies from Lori, including lots of Mexican candy, spices and soap, salsas and hot sauce, a Texas cookbook and newspapers from Austin. Not pictured: a Moonpie, because I ate it almost immediately.

Below are Australian treats from Rikki, including a multitude of koala-themed candies, rum raisin chocolate (we'll see how it stands up to Rummy), a Vegemite snack pack and a food magazine.

I'm really happy with the swaps and hope Lori and Rikki like what I sent them, too. Hooray for Gimme Your Stuff!

Any self-respecting Southern Californian living in Japan will tell you one of the things she misses most is Mexican food. She'll inform you that the Tex-Mex restaurant two train stops away makes pretty good steak fajitas and clue you in on the Brazilian supermarket in her town, which stocks all manner of beans. But mostly she'll daydream of late-night taco trucks glittering under portable fluorescent lights, plastic cups of chopped cilantro and onions, grilled fish plates. She will have actual dreams, more than once, about finding a secret taco window behind a sushi shop. She will wake crushed every time.

So when a lovely Texan sends her a giant box of Mexican candy and other things, one of the first thing she will eat is the hot watermelon straws, because they remind her of the fruitseller who always stood outside the Echo Park post office, the one who chopped a mean mango, then sprinkled it with chili and salt. Sweet and salty and spicy, scooped out of a clear plastic bag with a flimsy plastic fork.

She will underestimate the power of this candy to exactly hit the spot. She will remember there are flavors she forgot. She won't especially like the packet of tamarind sauce, which makes it too salty, but she will polish off the straws in record time, then wish she had savored it a little more. But then she'll remember: no one saves a taco. The joy of the taco truck is standing on the street, wolfing down a dripping taco that just moments ago was thrust out of the window, hot from the grill. Even though they're gone in minutes, they're still savored.

She'll then wish she was eating a taco.

Lovely Sonya, dressed in a traditional Thai outfit, jubilant about being released from high school.

In July 2003, my mom, stepdad and youngest sister moved to a hill station in the foothills of the Himalayas. A year later, my middle sister joined them. Before coming to Japan, I visited them and had some interesting experiences, saw some one-of-a-kind sights and took a lot of pictures.

And now it's all over.

Last week Sonya graduated from high school and this week my mom and stepdad are visiting me on their way back to the U.S. Sonya is currently traveling around Thailand with our dad and his new wife, Joanna is spending her last two weeks in India trekking around with her friends, and my mom, stepdad and I just returned from three days in Kyoto.

It's hard to believe we are the same family who spent over twenty years in the sleepy San Gabriel Valley, dreaming of adventures in far-off places. Now my mom mostly gets excited about public toilets with toilet paper and hand dryers. I guess that's what three years in India does to you.

You might not know it from looking at me, but I am a total nerd about planning and productivity.

I love reconciling my Quicken. A clean inbox makes me swoon. And almost every day, I make a prioritized to-do list in my planner, as I learned to do at a company-sponsored Franklin-Covey seminar two years ago.

My friend Robert recently introduced me to the new, hip world of GTD (Getting Things Done), which provides the thrill of productivity without a lot of the nauseating, overly-cheerleading self-help lingo. So after a few weeks of browsing 43 Folders and Lifehacker, I finally decided to try out the oft-mentioned OmniOutliner program.

And, um, I love it.

After playing around with it for a bit, writing out an outline for the basic Japanese cookbook I'm planning on making for the incoming Ogaki JETs, I decided to get serious today and organize all my Gimme Your Stuff swaps. I don't know if you've looked at the post lately, but it's gotten pretty crazy. I was tired of searching through my emails to find out what I promised to whom and where I need to send all this stuff, not to mention tracking the people who have emailed me who I haven't had time to email back. So I came up with this outline:

It keeps track of everyone who has contacted me, their address and website, what I'm sending them and the things I requested from them (so I don't end up with 50 pounds of cumin) and when I sent the package. Plus, it's super-cute. In OmniOutliner, the outline style is completely flexible, so I was able to make something very fun and very pink.

And who doesn't feel more productive in pink?

(For all you crafters, this would be a great way to track all your projects. You can easily embed pictures and other media into the outlines, so it would be simple to make a kind of cool scrapbook of ideas, works in progress and finished crafts. Perhaps in a nice green....)

Summer is here and the shelves are stocked with a new season of baffling and intriguing candy flavors. This week I picked up a couple different Kokage no Chocolat flavors, including Iced Lemon Tea. Not only are these filled with lemon-tea-flavored chocolate, they're also studded with bits of ceylon tea leaves. It's double the tea and double the weird!

When I bit into my first piece, I thought, "Tree. I'm eating a tree." The lemony center mixed with the herbalness of the ceylon gave the overwhelming impression of a mouthful of leaves. Eucalyptus, perhaps. My next thought was of Lemon Pledge and other fake-lemon scents, and I set the box aside for awhile. But when I came back to it, the sharpness of the flavors were gone and I enjoyed the herb-and-chocolate combination. I definitely couldn't down a whole box in one sitting, but I've been eating these periodically for the past couple days and will undoubtedly finish them off. Which is more than I can say for most of the candy I buy.

See the little penguin on the front of the package? He's saying this candy tastes good chilled. He's right, but it tastes better at summer room temperature, I think, because the milk chocolate on the outside gets a little bit soft and everything is all creamy and good.

Kokage no chocolat means "arbor chocolate." If you're like me, you'll look that up in your Japanese dictionary and still not be entirely sure what "arbor" means, so you'll look that up in your English dictionary and see it is "a shady garden alcove with sides and a roof formed by trees or climbing plants trained over a wooden framework." And that will make sense. This is the kind of candy you should eat on a blanket in the shade on a warm summer afternoon.

I bought two more t-shirts this weekend. I was cursing the store even as I walked toward the display of 1000-yen shirts (that's less than $10), especially because it was Aberdeen and they usually have ridiculously cute things. Sure enough....

I showed Captain T the pig shirt today during our video chat (ah, the glamorous world of the long-distance relationship) and he said, "How sad. Poor pig."

I had assumed it was the pig who was in love and was the one talking. I told Captain T that.

"But why would a pig say that?" he asked.

"Exactly," I said.

Because really, the joy that comes from reading of 90% of the Japanese t-shirts and stationery in the world is pondering questions like that. Why WOULD a pig say that? I don't know, but all possible explanations make me smile.

Ajisai at the Kyoto Botanical Garden.

It's my birthday! And, according to the giant poster hanging on the wall of the teachers' room, my official birthday flower is the ajisai, or hydrangea. I always hear little sighs of envy when Japanese people find out my birthday flower. Hydrangeas are big here.

It's strange to think that a year ago I was procrastinating about packing for Japan, getting nostalgic for the flora of Los Angeles, eating fried fish in Malibu and feeling completely terrified about the year ahead. (You can read about all that here.)

I'm not planning anything huge this year, just a movie tonight (Inside Man, the only English-language movie besides Transporter 2 playing at the theater by my apartment) and Thai food with a bunch of people on Saturday at one of the two Thai restaurants in Nagoya. And I'll be looking for my first yukata (summer kimono) as a gift to myself.

A year from now I'll probably be procrastinating about packing, getting nostalgic for the ajisai, eating conveyor-belt sushi in South Ogaki and feeling completely terrified about my life post-JET, so I think I'll enjoy this, my one terror-free birthday.

Umeshu, or plum wine, is made by steeping green ume in sugar and alcohol, producing a sweet, sour and entirely yummy drink, especially when served over lots of ice. This is what Choya, one of the leading producers of umeshu, has to say on the subject:

On those nights you feel a bit tired or after a hot shower.
While eating an elegant meal in a classy restaurant or while you're on an airplane or train during an excursion.
And, of course, for a sweet engagement just the two of you....
It will turn any occasion into a relaxing, soothing moment.

Who can resist that kind of sales pitch? And now, with umeshu in chocolate form, you can also enjoy it while riding your bicycle through a rice paddy, while sitting at your desk at school (hiding the box, which trumpets the candy's alcohol content), while standing in line at the supermarket, and so many more moments when it would be inappropriate to stand there sipping an icy glass of umeshu. Japan, you've done it again.

The alcohol is barely discernible, actually, and just lends a fruity taste, similar to a raspberry chocolate. For an alcoholic Japanese candy, it's pretty great: flavorful dark chocolate, smooth texture, subtle taste. It almost makes me forget the horror of Rummy. Almost.

The last thing I want to talk about is this: why is every new chocolate in Japan calling itself "chocolat"? (The usual way of writing chocolate is "chokoretto" and now it's being written "shokora." Not that either way looks particularly true to its language of origin.) Is France replacing America as the center of cool in Japan? Should we start panicking and dropping DVDs of The OC and Desperate Housewives from planes flying over urban centers? I don't know. All I know is when I asked a student yesterday, "What's your dream for the future?" she said, "I want to marry a Frenchman." Uh oh. We need 600cc of Seth Cohen, STAT!