MOLD

Hey, guess what! It didn't rain yesterday OR today! I saw the sun, blue sky and I could hang some laundry outside! What a great two days.

It's rainy season in Japan and Nagasaki has one of the highest yearly rainfall averages in the country at 2 meters. I haven't seen the sun in weeks and have stopped checking the weather, assuming I need my umbrella whenever I leave the house. These last couple of days, however, are somewhat of an anomaly if you couldn't judge my excitement. While I did see the sun, it was still hidden by 70% cloud cover or more and not to mention the humidity, OH, THE HUMIDITY! When it's not raining it's still around 90+% humidity, and don't let me forget, it's been in the high 80s/ low 90s the past few days. Personally, I don't mind the humidity so much, at least when I'm outside. But I've come across a new sworn enemy: MOLD. I hate mold.

There really is no escaping it. It's not just in my kitchen. It's not just in the shower. It's on the hard wood, it's on the spot on the rug where something spilled months ago (and was apparently not properly cleaned up...), it's all over the tatami mats. Tatami is notoriously troublesome when it comes to cleaning, because... you need to clean it and they get moldy. Not that my tatami rooms were dirty, I'd vacuum fairly regularly, I never spilled liquid on it, I made sure the rain doesn't get on it. But the mold is there. Well, it's not there currently, I've spent at least an hour in my house the past few days cleaning the tatami, the hardwood floors, the bathroom walls, you name it, with vinegar-water to kill the mold. I've been turning on my dehumidifier on the air-conditioner everyday and stocked-up on little air-vapor-collecting- boxes to try to keep things under control but just when I think I've killed it all... I find more.

Some people are lucky and don't have much mold, but I'm an not one of those people. Maybe it has to do with my wallpaper that soaks up water so it's a little sticky and smelly if you touch it, maybe it's because I live next to a forest. I don't know, but it sucks.