The volunteer lady from the shelter had told us that putting the kittens in a laundry net had a calming effect on them that would make it a lot easier to give them a shampoo…
A detail I should definitely have started with, when I asked the lady at the store if she thought that laundry net would fit a kitten.
Good news: our five-week old kitten is very athletic and can effortlessly scale the 2m high cupboard outside our bedroom (the curtains help).
Less good news: she has, however, not yet figured a way to climb down from it, other than by meowing at the top of her surprisingly capacious lungs, at 7 in the morning until a (sleepy) human elevator shows up.
On cold rainy days like this where I nonetheless must head out to work, my cats need not mastering any human language to convey their message loud and clear: “your life sucks”.
These days, our household entertainment program has added the TV dorama version of Great Teacher Onizuka to the rotation. This 2012 remake of a much older series, itself adapted from a popular manga/anime running in the late 90s, follows the adventure of a barely-reformed yanki/bosozoku type (the titular Onizuka) who, through great feats of suspension of disbelief, gets hired by a private high-school principal to teach a particularly difficult class. Difficult, in that the usual troubled, broken home, violent kids are the good ones: the bad ones are an assortment of sociopath damien-like monsters constantly plotting to get rid of the teaching staff through increasingly deadly means.
Like most Japanese TV fare, this one offers a mildly entertaining serialised story with mediocre acting, pathetically cheap production values and implausible plot reveals that would shame a Mexican telenovela. The point being: it is fairly simple Japanese and good language training when you are too tired to exercise the rest of your brain.
Of course, this would not be a Japanese drama, without its share of gratuitous sexual innuendoes, heavy on female objectification and wildly inappropriate1from a tame Western standpoint behaviours by male characters. With the latter presented as light comic relief and therefore never worthy of onscreen reprimand, unlike whatever other amoral behaviours (stealing, loitering, failing to properly sort their rubbish…) the bad guys engage in. Lack of (Western) political correctness on Japanese TV is par for the course and somewhat refreshing (if you don’t think too much about what it says of Japanese society).