Lindsay the Human Washing Machine and Other Fantastic Tales from Old Japan

Hi again, thank you all for your very kind responses to my poll. I am still in the process of tabulating the results and conducting a statistical analysis. In the meantime, the medicine wrappers will remain in a pile on my kitchen table.

Since it has been a while since my last post, I will take this opportunity to provide you with updates on several ongoing situations:

-- Population of Toon-shi (my town): 34,643.
Gaijin (foreigner) population of Toon-shi: 3 (Yes, Tyler, the other English teacher, and I have sighted one other foreigner living in our city. Based on this sudden 50% increase in the gaijin population, we are beginning to worry that foreigners will soon over-run the town. More on this critical situation later.)

-- My Japanese softball debut was cancelled this Tuesday due to rain. I'm projected to get my first start in the beginning of October, so stay tuned.

-- Despite my best efforts to become a Real Woman over the past three weeks, my Marriageability Rating has steadily declined this week to an embarrassing 7.2%. (See Fig 1)

Fig 1.

At the beginning of the week, an encouraging streak of cooking success caused my rating to plateau at around 40%. However, Thursday's omelette incident (in which I completely decimated my omelette and settled for scrambled eggs instead) and an unfortunate episode of washing machine incompetence* this weekend eventually caused the rating to plunge to a record low.

-- It appears that the submission deadlines for several English medical journals are coming up, because Tyler (the other English teacher) and I have been swamped with papers to edit. Doctors from all over the hospital apparently rely on us to make sure that their English makes sense. The only problem with this is that since I'm not a doctor, I have not the foggiest idea whether "spondylosis" is spelled correctly or what in the world "LVH is cause the in hypertrophic myopathy condition, however, result condition was unfavorable" is supposed to mean. Soooo I've had to do quite a bit of research to make sure that my corrections are actually...well...correct. Happily, I am now quite the expert on spinal cord compression injuries, glycogen storage disease type IIIa, and Alzheimer's disease. Also, this whole paper editing process has been quite entertaining because of sentences like these.

The title of an article about new criteria to determine whether a patient with dementia is still capable of driving safely:

Brief criteria for the revocation of demented driver’s licenses

An explanation of a scale used to evaluate motor function in rats and mice:

The BBB scale is one of the most famous hind-limbs motor function evaluating methods for rats and mousse.

mmm....rats and mousse.

And finally, my favorite sentence. One group of doctors wanted to resubmit their article to a journal after making corrections, so they asked me to edit their letter to the editor. After explaining the corrections they had made, they wrote:

We hope new version is better for understand.

Fortunately, I fixed this sentence for them. :)


* In an attempt to wash my whites this morning, I threw them in my washing machine, turned it on and went off to make breakfast. Twenty minutes later, I heard the washing machine stop and started to take my laundry out. As I hung the clothes out to dry, I noticed that they were a bit wetter than usual. To be more precise, they were dripping. Finally realizing that my rather old and finicky washing machine must have turned off before the spin cycle, I proceeded to ring out about fifty-seven pairs of underwear and one very absorbent (and very aggravating) bath towel. This whole process took me about one hour. Only after I was finished did I realize that it is possible to manually set the washing machine to skip the wash and rinse cycles and simply spin the clothes.