Break Ins and Japanese Gardens....

As many of you know, I work at Japan House, a Japanese teaching facility with Japanese gardens surrounding us. Sunday night we were broken into. I had somehow left my phone on airplane mode so I didn't get the call from the alarm company. Oops. I raced in as soon as I heard the next morning and really, we were incredibly lucky...only some cash from donation boxes was taken. If the tea rooms had been vandalized it would have been devastating. Still, all of us that work here felt so unsettled and vulnerable all day. Japan House is a place that promotes peace and tranquility, the joining of different cultures, and the four spirits of the Way of Tea: harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility, so to have the space violated did shake us a bit.

Our apartment in Chicago got broken into years and years ago. I remember being somewhat insulted at what they took. They rifled through my underwear drawer and dumped things on the floor, looking for jewelry no doubt, but of course I'm not really a jewelry kind of girl. It's just an unsettling feeling even if the actual loss is slight.

So, on a grey day, I will cheer myself up with pictures from our weekend. I have long wanted to visit Anderson Japanese Gardens. It was an utterly glorious day on Sunday and the colors of the leaves glowed almost unbelievably. It was relatively crowded which made me not really able to take time with the pictures. These really don't begin the capture the place.