My Musician

I posted my first YouTube video. It is a short video of Collin practicing for his upcoming piano solo in church. My idea was to video/record him playing a handful of his songs so I can listen to it on the road. I miss his music whenever I am gone. He's very talented, and we are proud of his hard work!

So I haven't blogged in a while, largely because I haven't gone anywhere. It is when I am away from my family that I seem to have the time/make the time to document what is going on. With that being said, I somehow never posted any pictures from my August trip to OKA. That is probably because Heather went with me, so I had a welcome distraction the whole time. Anyway, here are a few pics of us in Okinawa.

This is the standard pose in front of the pineapple guy. Your hands are supposed to be like pineapple leaves. Get it? There is a picture of me to, but I like the model in this picture better.

He's everywhere!! Ahhh!!

These carts were amazing. They were just modified golf carts with half a plastic pineapple on the roof, but they had little bilingual speaker boxes and they drove themselves down a windy path while the speaker told you all about pineapples! It was cool. There wasn't any track or other connection that we could see, but they accelerated, braked and steered themselves. Very ingenious. My best guess was that they had buried a tracking cable in the ground below the track or something...

Here we are.

Heather was awesome. She struck out on her own each day while I was at work and made friends and saw stuff and took goofy pictures. She is cute. And that mannequin loves shima bananas.

Of course, now that I think about it, I also spent a week in New Jersey that didn't get blogged. Maybe I just need to catch up...

Ryukyu

Yep. So much for not going back to Okinawa. I found myself on that muggy, humid island once again this week. I am already on my way home, but thought I would post the few pics I have.

This is the eternal red light. The green arrows below the red go off and on, but the red one stays lit no matter what, even if you have a straight green arrow. Hilarious.

I stayed in Mark's house and discovered how cool moving walls are. Those dividers can all slide out of the way, so that make this a 1, 2 or 3 bedroom apartment. Sweet.

Finally, we found this awesome Korean bbq place. Well, Mark found it. $20 - All you can eat raw meet (to cook at your table), soda and ice cream. Nice.

Well, I have to go get on a plane, so more later.

Oh yeah, the title. Ryukyu is the name of the chain of island of which Okinawa is one. FYI.

Okinawa, AGAIN

So I will be honest. I don't know what to do with my blog. As this type of blogging evolves I am feeling more and more out of place. It is like I am sitting in one of my wife's scrap booking parties.

Nevertheless, here I am. I have pictures I want to share, and sometimes I just like to write. Maybe I should try writing in my journal? But where is the fun in that. No one leaves comments in my journal. Of course, no one leaves comments here either.

ANYWAY... So I went to Okinawa again, presumably for the last time. I have a bunch of pictures I thought I would share from that, so here goes.

This is a cup of cold fizzy green goodness called Melon Soda. I will admit that I got melon soda every chance I got. I highly recommend it.

And what is this? Oh it was my dinner. And what am I holding in my chopsticks? (check out my chopstick skills by the way!!) Oh that is just a little chunk of squid tentacle. Did I eat it? Yes I did. Was it good? No it was not. It was like trying to chew on a chunk of rubber bike tire. A slightly fishy bike tire. So I avoided the rest of those little guys. The soup was still good.

So we went to the beach at sunset one day, not because we thought the beach would be nice at sunset, but because it was the only one-hour break we took in a 16 hour+ workday. There were these little white crabs skittering all over the beach. You couldn't even walk 10 feet without them scattering underneath your flip flops. Rex had a nice strategy for catching them. He threw sand on one of the bigger one and then picked up the handful of sand, then the crab crawled out of the sand and onto him. It was dark, so the pictures weren't that great, but this is one of the better ones.

Yes. I am a dork.

I have a cheap, low-quality camera that I have been trying to squeeze every bit of value out of, and part of that effort is playing with the different pre-set shooting modes. This one didn't turn out to bad I think.
This one as well.

So as we left the beach we found this very eloquent sign. I hope you can read it.

This was my sweet ride while in OKA. A Nissan March. I would totally buy one of these. It is a fun little car with a 1000 cc engine and a decent stereo. Too bad they don't sell them in the US.

This is the decent stereo. It is awesome because it also has built in GPS AND a digital TV tuner. So why can't you see it? Because everytime I changed environments everything fogs up, thanks to the humidity. This is called my camera lens fogged up!

Phew. That's better. This is my unfogged sweet in-dash TV. The bad news: all of the options were in Japanese so we had a hard time working it. In the end I think I accidently erased all of the music that was stored on it. Whoops. It also had this annoying feature where the screen turned off if I went more than 5 Kph. It made stop lights a lot more fun though.

This is Jason and I waiting for an awesome dinner at the Four Seasons. The entertaining chefs weren't that entertaining, but the steak was totally awesome!

This is Mark and I at an authentic Japanese restaurant. Yes I am not wearing any shoes because we had to take them off at the door, and I am sitting on a hardwood floor so I can eat at a table that is all of 16 inches off the floor. We couldn't read the menu and there weren't any pictures, so we were lucky that Rex and Haekyung were there to help us order. I learned that in most places like this I can ask for tankatsu, which you can see in front of me. It is like Kentucky Fried Greasy Pork with a yummy oriental BBQ sauce. It usually comes with a cabbage salad on the side and, of course, rice.

So that is all I have at the moment. A few fun pics. There are a few other posts coming up, so come back soon!

Ranking Pixar

Recently IGN ranked the work of Pixar, the industry-dominating animated film company. (Link to article:http://movies.ign.com/articles/986/986660p1.html) I found it as I was reviewing my RSS feeds from my favorite Disney sites, something I should blog about some time. Any way, my thanks to http://www.mickeynews.com for picking this story up and bringing it to my attention.

Their rankings went like this (1 being the best):

9. Cars
8. Monsters, Inc.
7. A Bug's Life
6. Ratatouille
5. Finding Nemo
4. The Incredibles
3. Toy Story 2
2. WALL-E
1. Toy Story

Of course, they caveat the whole list at least once per page with the fact that the worst Pixar film beats the competition hands down, and I would echo that. This is also a list of the 9 best films to come out over the last 9 years, and I would go on to say that in many cases this isn't just in the animated category. I'm talking about the best out of all genres. Except for WALL-E.

OK, I've said too much. So what do I think? Of course, being a critical mind, I disagree with their rankings, thus the post. To get straight to the point, here is MY assessment:

9. WALL-E
8. Ratatouille
7. Finding Nemo
6. Monsters, Inc.
5. Cars
4. A Bug's Life
3. Toy Story 2
2. The Incredibles
1. Toy Story

The only thing we agreed on is that Toy Story deserves the top spot. I guess it also shows that I prefer action oriented movies more than the IGN folks, and that I despise wordless environmentalist films about robots. So what do you think?

I'm Lucky

OK, so first click play above. I'm not a fan of music always playing on blogs,so I am making you click on it. Now, I have to dedicate this song to my wife of almost 11 years (wow I am old:) I am missing her terribly right now, and when I heard this song I wanted nothing more than for her to hear it too, even though it isn't a new song.

I just wanted to tell everyone that I am a very lucky man. I have a beautiful wife who takes care of our kids and best of all, takes care of me. She is creative and talented and people like to be around her. She makes friends easily and misses her old friends terribly when we are scattered by time and trials. When I get stressed out or otherwise harried by this existence we call life, she is always there to rub my back, say nice things to me and make me some cookies (yum). She endures the hard times with me and we celebrate the good times together when they come. Our kids love their mom more than anybody, and she loves them right back, in a way that I don't think anyone else on earth could. She is irreplaceable.

Yes, I love her dearly, and I have loved her ever since I met her. When we were dating I used to write her all kinds of notes and cards, and there have probably been too few of those since we started our family, but I am saying it here, right out in front of the whole entire everybody (OK, I think there are only like 3 people who read my blog, but it is the idea that counts)

Thanks for being my best friend and most of all, I love you.

I'm lucky that you chose me.

Okinawa Quick Update

Yesterday was Saturday, and I found a Japanese shopping center and went in and wandered around. It was fun. They have 100 Yen stores, which is the equivalent of a Dollar Store. Same crap for sale, too. Their grocery store was mostly fish (fresh fish, frozen fish, live fish, canned fish), dried noodles, and seasoning, as well as a produce section full of stuff I didn't recognize. I stopped by McDonalds and KFC that day instead of buying much at the store, although I did snag a few snacks. Their bakery is just a little corner of the store, but the baked goods are tasty. They are very fresh, with little preservatives. You buy stuff out of baskets while it is still warm and if you don't eat it in 24 hrs it is hard as a rock.

We had to pick someone up from the airport which is 30-40 minutes away, and we got to see a new road that we haven't been on before. It is funny because similar businesses seem to cluster together in the same areas. On one section of the street there much have been a dozen barbarshops in the same half mile. Weird.

Well, that is my little story for the day. I will post some more tomorrow.

Okinawa- Trip 1 pics

So a few months ago I made it to Okinawa. I think I mentioned it. Well, I made it back for a 2nd visit and decided to post some pictures, but since I never posted the pics from the last visit I will do those first. I will lower your expectations right off the bat by saying that I am often interested by odd little every day items. So did I take awesome panoramic vistas of mountains and beaches? No. McDonalds bags and Dr Pepper bottles? Yes.

I like to do Sudoku during plane rides. It is compact (one sheet of paper and a pen), free in newspapers and plane magazines, and takes me a long time to finish. Also featured here is roughly one cup of Haagen Daas Ice Cream, which set me back 300 Yen, or approximately $3. I would never pay $3 for a cup of ice cream, but for some reason I didn't mind parting with 300 Yen. I was leaving Japan that day, and for some reason those coins didn't seem so valuable when heading back to the states, even though I knew I would be going back.

Yes, this is as nasty as the name is. It has a kind of grapefruity taste at first that ends in a kind of salty, bitter aftertaste. I tried it. Then I recycled the bottle with most of the liquid still in it. There went another 150 Yen.

You might be thinking, "what's with the fireworks store?" Or perhaps "nice flower shop." Wrong on both accounts. This is a used car lot. And, yes, they all look like this. I think they are trying to shock you so bad that you wreck your car as you drive by, thereby creating business.

This picture isn't the greatest, but it is the sign at the main entrance to the base, by the flagpole where they raise/lower the colors and play the national anthems. I say anthemS because they play both the Japanese and US anthems every morning. This picture was just as they were about to lower the colors.

This was my hotel room on base. I was impressed by how much furniture they were able to squeeze into my little living room/kitchenette.

Coffee is a huge thing in Japan. It is everywhere, in everything. I thought I had seen it all until this showed up on the menu. Coffee Jelly for 180 Yen. What a deal.


Anyway, that is all for now. Maybe tomorrow I will post some pics from my more recent trip.

A Windfall

Have you ever found a $10 bill in the back pocket of an old pair of jeans or in the jacket you haven't worn in over a year? Or have you ever rediscovered an old movie that used to be your favorite, and is just as good now as it was back then? These are similar to the way I felt when I popped the SD card from my camera into my computer.

I had shelved this camera a while back, since the picture quality wasn't what I had hoped it would be. Every once in a while we grab it on the way out the door somewhere, and in the meantime the kids love to take pictures and movies with it. Well, I plugged in the card to retrieve a picture I had just taken, and I was rewarded with all kinds of pictures that I hadn't seen before, strung out over the last year or so. It was so awesome that I decided to share some of them.

(If you think any of them need captions, let me know and I'll add them)

Quarantined? Are you serious?

Today's topic is over-reacting. Our example of over-reacting? The government of Japan.

Here is the scenario: I am on a Boeing 747 en route to Okinawa, via the Narita airport in Tokyo. I like to make "tight" connections, since I generally don't check any baggage, and I just flat move faster than most air travelers. Anyway, we touch down at Narita and taxi to our gate. This is where it starts to get crazy.

Along with our obligatory customs declarations, every passenger got a medical survey. It was a pointless piece of paper because half of it was filled with identifying information which was the exactly same information required on the other two forms I had to fill out. The rest of it was making sure that I didn't have a vacation home in Mexico.

So back to the story: Our plane was quarantined. Every plane is quarantined. We were "boarded" by Health Officials (10 humanoid-shaped beings) completely protected by blue hospital gowns, gloves, masks and goggles. I was given a mask by the flight attendant so that in the event I had to speak to one of the Health Officials (HOs) they would be protected from my bacteria-filled spittle which would undoubtedly fly at the first fumbled consonant.

The first HO approached me with an oversized polaroid camera that took my temperature from 3 feet away. And good thing too. I hadn't put on my mask yet and we all know how hard it is to control that spittle. Apparently my heat profile was within acceptable limits because the HO shuffled down the aisle, being careful not to get close to anyone that hadn't been measured yet.

Next came a pair of HOs. The first one had the important job of making sure that I had filled in all of the blank lines on my survey. You may be wondering how you can get an education that will let you fill such an important position in society, but don't forget about the second HO of the pair. His job was to hand me the yellow paper saying that I had been screened. If only I had gone to Health Official school.

Yep, that was the end of the screening. An hour later, after they had hand counted over 400 forms (Our plane was missing two forms so they had to come through and verify that we all had our yellow paper) we were allowed to deplane. Now, I am not a Health Official or anything, but from what I understand, most people who get the Swine Flu actually recover. And we lose thousands to the regular flu every year. I am thinking that they are slightly over-reacting.

And what was the cost? Not much compared to the massive health risk averted by such close and careful screening. I only missed the last flight of the day to Okinawa from Narita and had to buy a $30 bus ticket to get to the Haneda airport in time to catch the last plane to Okinawa. That has to be worth it, right? And the fact that this must happen to multiple travelers on every flight (they have special quarantine delay fliers for you when you miss your connection) wouldn't add up to a cost greater than the benefit. Or would it?

Taryn and the Ice Cream Cone

I made ice cream cones the other night and Taryn wanted one too, so I let her have her own little one. I couldn't help but post this. She is so funny!

Disneyland April 2009 Slideshow

All of the lost stories

So I have pretty much let this blog go. Things have just been so busy! I am going to do the Catch-Up-On-Everything-In-One-Post post. This is going to be a fast, action-packed posting, so hold on to your hats and glasses!

I went on my first campout as a Scout Leader. I survived, the boys survived, so it was a success. We only had one kid who threw up, and the food was good (it is all about marshmallows over a camp fire in both cases). We completed our 5-mile hike the next day, with the only down side being that these two grandmas out-hiked our little troop of 11 year olds. Neither the boys or the grandmas seemed to mind, so I don't either, I guess.

After 1 year, 5 months and 17 days, I made my triumphant return to Disneyland. I don't know what I was triumphing over, but that is how it felt. It was tons of fun, not the least due to the fact that we got to go with some family that we hadn't been there with, as well as some family that we had. The fastpass acquisition went well, and we had teenagers along that stayed from dawn to dusk with me in the park. Yes, it was a success.

My boys have a new favorite card game: Killer Bunnies. It is time for the next expansion pack.

Looking over my previous posts, there was one more trip to Japan in there, but to Okinawa this time. In case you are like me and assume that since Okinawa is a part of Japan that it is physically close to Japan, you are wrong, just as I was. It is instead a little island in the middle of the ocean about 2 hours south of the main Japanese island (by air). I had high moments, like when I felt true patriotism in every person around me as we stopped in the middle of the street at 8AM to show respect for the Stars and Stripes. I had low moments, like on my final day I read an article in my daily copy of the appropriately named Marine newspaper, Stars and Stripes. The article talked about the gang culture in the military and how this guy was acquitted on a technicality even though he contributed to the death of a comrade. Overall it was a good experience and I have some goofy pictures to prove it.

We got new evidence that life isn't fair. My mother-in-law has been diagnosed with lung cancer although she has never smoked a day in her life, and while I can line up a hundred people who don't deserve this kind of experience, she is at the front of that line. We are asking that you add your prayers to ours that her fight will be successful.

So over the last few months a lot has happened, and I often find myself thinking, "I need to write about that on my blog" but time being the limiting factor, it hasn't happened very often. So rather than waiting for time to write up each of these into its own posting, we will see if this opens the floodgates. I'll try to post some pictures about all of this a little later.

Scouting has become a part of my life again

Yes, I was a Boy Scout once. A mildly successful one. I got the badges, heck I even got THE badge, but soon afterwards I got married (sounds weird to put it in perspective like that) and I dropped teenagerishness like a hot potato and moved on, or so I like to think. Anyway, it has been fun to get re-involved with Scouting. I am a leader for a group of 11-year old scouts, and Collin is now a Bear Cub Scout. Logan is just dying to be a scout and wants to do all of the cool stuff that Collin gets to do, so I see scouting pretty solidly in my future. And so far it has been nothing but fun.

So here are a few pictures from some recent scout hikes.

My first caveat: I shot all of these pictures with my G1 (cellphone.) Thus the acceptable, not exemplary, quality. So obviously we went and found some petroglyphs on our first hike. There were hundreds of them in this canyon, which made us wonder what was so special about this canyon? I think it was a sign yard. You know, the place where your local city or county construction crews keep their construction signs? When the prehistoric business owner needed to leave a message for passersby, why spend weeks chiseling it out of rock, when he/she could just run for a day through the desert barefoot, and come back the next day with a 200 pound rock already engraved with their message. Brilliant. Not to make light of a different culture, but I dare you to comment with your best guesses as to what these prehistoric billboards say. What about the picture above? Obviously it means Help Wanted: Dancer with Maracas and Fringy Outfit. Duh.

This is the popular holiday warning sign: Don't Use Christmas Tree for Ashtray. These are so intuitive. I bet they put the best-sellers right down by the trail. Trenton and Logan got to come on this hike because it was a family hike. Heather educated me on the fact that "Family Hike" and "Father/Son Hike" are in fact synonymous, so she stayed home with Taryn. The boys were true to their personalities. Logan was only happy if he was in front of EVERYBODY, and Trenton was tired and wanted to go home and watch TV as soon as we got to the trailhead sign 100 feet from the car.

Lizard Roadkill Ahead? This one is slightly less obvious.

Tie Your Goat To A Tree By The Tail Only? Don't Pee on the Cacti? Bighorn Sheep Should Use the Second Port-a-Potty From The End? Ok, I give up on this one.

And here are the boys. Collin in the uniform, Logan up on the rock, Trenton with the hat. Nice. That is all for that hike.

So this was a different hike. Again I'm shooting with my camera phone. The sun is so harsh in the desert that pretty much all of these pictures are washed out. Oh well. This one is a natural arch. The cool thing is that the arch is only about 8 inches tall. You could totally put miniature people on it and make a believable scene. It was cool.

Here is Collin sitting on another natural arch. I let him come on this hike even though it was for my 11-year old Scouts. He was hyper the whole time for some reason and was all over the rocks. He was the youngest one there and the first one back to the car.

Well, this has been another make-up posting. Another one bites the dust.

More weird pics

So I am cheating on this posting. How? I am posting a few last shots from my trip to Japan and I am going to date this blog as if I had come right home and posted them like I intended. Only I can't do it without fessing up. Counter-productive, right? Right.

These people sure love their Pokemon. This was a big Pokemon store in the middle of their swanky mall. Notice how the picture looks like I shot it from my waist. That is because I was totally trying to hide the fact I was taking pictures in their store. By this point in the week I was tired of the funny looks every time I pulled out my phone.


This was my favorite sign of the week. For those of you who are viewing this on your iPhone, I'll read it for you: "Foodiun Bar. Quiteness---it is the summit of the clouds that can be seen at the bottom of the lake." Classic. Needless to say, this is my desktop image on my laptop now.

So on my last night there Justin, who I unfairly referred to as my tour guide in the previous post, took me to a more authentic place to eat. We met up with his girlfriend for the meal, but I try not to post other people's pictures without their permission, so I will focus on the food rather than them. It was cool. We sat down and there was a big round hole in the table. Then the little 5'2" waitress came out lugging a big iron pot of burning coals that fit right down into the hole. The menu consisted of individual plates of vegetables and different cuts of raw meat. I let Justin and Miho do the ordering. Anyway they brought out the raw meet, which we then cooked ourselves at the table. Near as I could tell they were ripping off the American backyard BBQ concept. (Yes, that was a joke.) Anyway, Justin did most of the cooking. So, just to impress my mother who threatened me with a mission to Japan my entire growing up years, here is a short list of what I ate: fried mushroom, fried onion, kimchi (sp?-- it is spicy pickled cabbage), cow's tongue, tofu, and rice. For the record I wouldn't have eaten any of that when I was younger. No, I didn't even like rice.



My hosts were kind enough to ask the waitress for a fork for the white guy, and after a couple of exchanges in Japanese they brought me out a fork. The only problem is that the only fork they had was a toddler's fork (pictured above.) My favorite features of the fork: Pretty pastel pictures of animals to look at when I got bored during my meal, extra large non-sharp tines so that when I slipped going for a chunk of cow-tongue I wouldn't impale myself.


Actually, I thought that the chopsticks were half the fun of the meal. I had practiced on and off throughout the week, but these were a real challenge because they were metal and especially slippery. In the end I mastered them, err, well, I got through the meal. Here is a picture of me showing off my chop-sticking skills. (Hint: When in doubt the shish-kabob maneuver is a great fall-back move with the chop-sticks.)

Since I spent a substantial amount of time on trains, I thought I would get a picture of one. Notice the spy-angle of my shot again. Yep, I casually took this shot with my phone while looking the other direction. I could have been James Bond, except I don't own a tux.

This is funny. That apartment building is mostly vacant (it turns out they are still in a recession, although it is hard to tell sometime.) Anyway, I hope that whoever thought up this trick with the lights got a bonus or something. Very creative.

MMmmm. I was waiting in the airport, enjoying a DP and decided to get one last shot of an American icon with a Japanese twist. Dr. Pepper with Japanese on it is cool, but over there it had Coca-Cola branding marks too. Weird.

Well, that was all I had from this trip. A lot of the other cool stuff I saw and learned about was military in nature, so I'm not sure how much I should comment on. Nothing secret of course, but being on a military base got me thinking a little more about national security. I did get to see an aircraft carrier though (from the street). Those things are crazy big. Anyway, I have a couple of make-up posts to do, and then I will have a posting about Okinawa.

Ciao.