Life Post: An Odd, and Surprisingly Stressful, Obon Week

This week is Obon, a Buddhist holiday here in Japan where people often visit their hometowns. Many people, including me, get the whole week off work, so it's one of the biggest weeks for traveling in Japan. This year, though, most of us are staying home, including me.

Since things are getting worse, the advice to stay home is getting more and more strongly worded, though nothing has been made a "rule" yet because Japan is reluctant to do that. Either way, I was planning to stay home out of a sense of self-preservation if nothing else, so I'm looking forward to a week filled with writing and reading.

However, the week has not gotten off to a great start. My stove has been giving me some difficulties for a while, but now that back burner seems to have completely stopped working. On the same day, my washing machine (which has also been causing trouble for a while) decided to completely stop working in between the wash and rinse cycles.

I let the laundry sit over night (because it was late and I could not find the energy to do it last night) and then handwashed everything in there this morning. It's now taking ages to dry because of how wet it was. Meanwhile, I still have water in the washing machine that didn't drain, but I can't do anything about that at the moment.

I'd been putting off doing anything about the stove or the washing machine because, you know, there's a pandemic. Having someone inside my apartment to fix it didn't feel like the greatest of ideas, but now the issue is a bit more pressing. I know I need to figure something out, but at the moment, I'm so stressed by it all that I need to take a step back. I at least want to let the laundry finish drying and get it put away before I have to deal with anything else. (And I'm trying not to think about the fact that I had multiple other loads I needed to do too.)

I'll get it figured out. Hopefully. But it is a holiday, even if it's a holiday spent at home, so I'm trying (and mostly failing) to forget about the water in the washing machine and the clothes now hanging around my apartment and relax just a little bit.