Two weeks after the earthquake

Yesterday my children's school finished. They are going to have a spring vacation for 11 days.

By the way, my children brought a letter from school a few days ago.

It's title was "school policy on the nuclear power plant's accident".

The contents of the letter was how and when the school releases children when indoor evacuation in this area should be published by the government.

At this moment people in the area of 20km from the reactors were already evacuated and indoor evacuation has been adopted inside of 30km area after the first explosion of the reactor just after the earthquake.

It is over 200km away here and I haven't taken the situation so seriously so far so I had a little shock to read the letter.

Thank God, time passed without happening such a case and my children are now at home to wait until school starts again in April when they become older grade.

Since the earthquake many sports event were cancelled which affected my son's daily life, too. My son is in a dodge ball team and he practices in the evenings 3 or 4 days every weak at school gym. First, after the earthquake the gym was not available to use for dodge ball practice and games on weekends were cancelled. Because of electric power shortages all the public facilities are going to be closed during the evening at least until the end of April. For the time being they are forced to practice outside during daytime. I will write about my son's dodge-ball later in this blog.

In serious situation I found a little joy in my garden on March 16.

My tulips which I planted last November started to come out. Still just a few of them.

But later more and more buds came out!

The following photo was taken today 25th March. All Tulips came out.

When we came back from Holland I purchased a lot of Tulip bulbs at the airport souvenir shop. I bought too much that I could not plant all of them in my garden because of the space. I don't have an idea when they going to bloom here in Japan but I look forward to it.

Now I am going to introduce some plants in full bloom in my garden and around my house.

My Christmas roses in full bloom. There are several other Christmas roses around the house. These are my favorite plants.

According to Wiki this is called 'daphne odora'. I like it's flagrance.

I didn't expect that this Muscari bloom. Originally my daughter grew in this pot at school and brought it home before we left for Holland in 2009. Since we forgot about this Muscari we didn't take care of it after that. We have never watered. This is life. Life is beautiful!