Sunday, March 24, 2013

My hero

I thought I'd post about Tetsu though come to think of it I don't have a great recent picture of him. 

I suppose basically Tetsu is a "carer".  He just likes taking care of people and things.  If there's a problem he figures he can solve it (except for computer problems.  He stays away from computers.)  I don't know how many times during the winter he will find a car stranded and stop and offer to help.  He keeps some sort of snow ramp in the back of the car so he can help the non-snow tire drivers out of a snow drift.  In his younger days he's stopped to help drivers LIFT cars from ditches.  (He figured he was big for Japanese standards and had all the judo background.)  He's finally realized that he's not so young anymore so that practice has stopped.


But he hasn't given up completely!  Recently he has been going over to the community center to put some time in on the treadmills and gain some stamina.  And you can see that I've been trapped into joining him.  He says at his age he'd hate to have a heart attack while on the treadmill so he "needs" me there to watch over him.  I read my Kindle while on the exercise bike.


You all know Tetsu as my wonky carpenter.  He has been up to it again this weekend. One or two of the cats have gotten into the habit of raiding the garbage basket and strewing fresh garbage all over the kitchen floor every morning.  There is no door to the kitchen but we have put up a wooden screen that had kept the felines from entering the kitchen.  We THOUGHT.  They figured out how to get past the screen.  So every morning, no matter how we'd arrange the screen, no matter how we'd tie up the garbage and weight it down... there it would be all over the floor with cats innocently looking up at us mewing for their morning milk.  Why do we keep these animals!!!?


So Tetsu and I bought a covered wastebasket this weekend and then he decided that the wastebasket needed a stand so that I could put things above it (as I'd done with the old uncovered wastebasket).  Here Tetsu is "measuring" his wood placement.... with my... lipgloss, which was lying on the table.  That is true WONKINESS!  (It's not that we don't have a dozen quilter's measuring tools in both inches and metric.)


Tetsu's finished wastebasket shelf.


The other day as we drove home through the long tunnel separating our town from the next one over, there were three or four pieces of lumber that had probably fallen off some truck and they were spanning the lanes making cars swerve and veer.  Again, when debris is endangering drivers Tetsu will often pull over and draw whatever to the side of the road.  In this case he left me with my Kindle and then walked back through the tunnel to to pull what he could aside.  A slightly dangerous practice and I kept my eyes on the tunnel entrance for about 20 minutes hoping he knew what he was doing.  There's my hero doing his good deed for the day.


And another regular "Tetsu" activity is our Saturday morning forest cleanup.  It is amazing how much stuff gets thrown to the side of the road during the week and so we devote our morning walk with Choco on Saturdays to picking up litter.  Well, I hold onto Choco's leash...  Tetsu picks up litter.


This morning Tetsu was eager to see how well the new wastebasket and shelf had fooled the cats.  We pulled aside the screen to find THIS!

Dumb cats!  They just have to find something to destroy.  There was a bag of plastic bottle caps hanging by the shelf.  What interest could a cat have in a bag of bottle caps?  I think they do it just to keep us on our toes.  Tetsu will have to figure something else out.

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