Nami's Visit

Debe's cousin Nami (and her new baby) lives on the mainland, so we don't get to see her much.

So it was nice to have them come for dinner.

I love the way Japanese baby hair stands up!


Lisa, Nami, Nina, Hiroko, Mika, Junko, and Emi

Dan, alas, was teaching at W2, so he didn't get to see them. Next time, though.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Well, this Thanksgiving was a little different this year.
Both Debe and I worked. I usually am supposed to work, but take the day off.

I didn't this year because I took off two days last week when Emi had a bad cold.



So, we were not able to cook a turkey this year (the turkey on top is not ours).
But even if we had the time available we wouldn't be able to fit the turkey in our current oven.
Our last apartment had an American style oven (think: Big!).

So we ended up making Kalua Chicken in the crockpot.



Well, the party at church started at 4 and would last until 10 or 11.
As you can see, we packed the place out. I would guess there were probably 75 or 80 people there.

We came a little late (6:00) and left a little early (9:00), since we also work tomorrow. But it was a great night of food, folks and fun!

Thanksgiving Party

At Debe's preschool they had a Thanksgiving party on Wednesday.
Although they are open on Thanksgiving, they had the party early because the American students would not be coming on Thursday.

Well they didn't serve turkey or anything, however they did have a Thanksgiving cake.

This was a first for us; we usually enjoy pie.

文化祭・Culture Day

I had to work this past Sunday due to Bunkasai, or culture day.

I really enjoy attending Culture Day, but I wish it were not on Sunday.
Not only do I miss church, but Debe and girls miss as well.

Well, at least it is only once every two years.

There were a lot of individual projects in art, music, English and Japanese. Oh yeah, they had some cool science things too (think "Slushie made from dry ice!).

The 2nd year students (8th graders) worked for 2 months on this huge Mosaic (pictured above).

They took a class photo (of 262 students) and blew it up to the size of 10 X 17 meters! They cut and glued each pixel by hand.

It was a lot of work -- I remember several times where some students got in trouble. Their punishment was to sit in seiza and cut out pixels.

Anyway, it made the newspaper.

Pumpkin Carving

While I am not a huge fan of Halloween (especially the scary stuff), it is a part of American culture and thus I am called upon to teach about it at school.


Here we are getting ready to carve some pumpkins.

This was their first time, so we took it slow.

These are "wakanatsu", Special Ed students.

Anyways, they seemed to enjoy it.