Happy New Year everyone! I’m sitting here at 7:00 AM watching the Oregon Ducks decimate their opponents in the Sun Bowl. It must be around 3:00 PM on Dec 31 there. It still strikes me peculiar that I’m one day ahead of the states most of the time. Christmas was not typical here, but it was fun. Gina and I are finally over our colds and Graycie is settling in quite nicely. Her separation anxiety issues are starting to settle down. Thank goodness because she was a terror to herself and the house when we left her the first few times, but we’ve been working diligently to desensitize her to the issues that cause her to be anxious.

 

We haven’t done anyhing really touristy as I had hoped due to the colds, but we have been getting out and enjoying some menial adventures. Yesterday we found the Japanese equivilant of a Home Depot or Lowes. That was entertaining. We’ve also been looking for Japanese furniture at several different stores. We both really like a specific style of japanese furniture, but the one place we’ve found it so far has it priced pretty high. So, we are trying to find othr examples of it. The cool thing about it for Gina is that it is sized to fit her as she is likely average height for a Japanese woman. For the first time, we’ve found couches and chairs that she can sit in and touch the floor with her feet.

 

Here are some random pics from the week (mouse over for a short description of each pic):

Merry Christmas everyone. As you can tell, it has been a busy month since the last time I put in a blog entry. The typical band director’s busy December life combined with continued colds and the arrival of Gina has combined to leave me little time or energy for blogging. I’ll try to cover as much as I can remember from the last month.

 

I moved into my house over Thanksgiving and then get very sick with an intense cold. I ended up missing Monday of school and felt like I’d been beat up for the rest of the week. I thought it was the final big blow of a head cold I had been dealing with for a couple of weeks already. However, I had a deep chest cough for another two weeks aftwerward and finally felt normal for the final week of school last week. Unfortunately, I gave my cold to Gina and in the meantime I got another one just in time for the Christmas break. Go figure.

 

Gina and Graycie arrived late Friday night on December 7th after about 26 hours of travel time. Graycie was anxious to get out of her crate after that much time and Gina was anxious to sleep. The plane was a total of 5 hours late by the time I saw them and it took a couple of days for Gina to recover. She did better than I did because I felt jet lagged for over a week.

 

A week later our household goods shipment arrived.  Gina packed up the bulk of our possessions back in September and they arrived here last week. It’s like Christams because every box you open has something in it that you want and love. So, we slowly have been putting objects away and getting the house situated. It’s a slow process when you both have colds.

 

Graycie is doing well, except that her ‘separation anxiety’ issues that she is prone to are intensified here. She broke a tooth one day when we were gone by pulling her blanket through the grate in her kennel door. Pretty amazing that she was so anxious that she broke a tooth pulling on a blanket. So, we’ve begun a series of ‘desensitization’ excercises to get her to relax when we leave. When we are home, she just sleeps. We need her to do the same when we’re gone.

 

Many of you should’ve received our Christmas Card by now. We wanted to do a picture of the family at a beach in shorts and we did do that photo shoot, but none of the shots turned out very well. Here are the bloopers:

The last picture is the original that became our Xmas card. Sorry about the poor quality of the print, I didn’t have my equipment yet and the one hour photo place butchered it.

 

The last three days our air conditioner has been running a lot. It’s been in the low 80s every day and cools down to 75 at night. This is unseasonably warm weather for Okinawa. Typcially it is 58 – 75 this time of year but we have some kind of warm wave weather system that also brought about 8 inches of rain two days ago. It rained hard for about 20 hours. I’ve seen it rain hard here, but never for that long.

 

I took Gina to Jusco a few days ago. It’s a large department start similar to Macy’s. We found a place in it that sells bulk teas and they offered Gina a sample of freshly brewed tea. It had seaweed in it. We ended up buying the tea pot they used for brewing and two types of tea. We have no idea what’s in them, but it was fun to go through the process of miming our intentions to the very pleasant Japanese sales lady. The tea pot has a screen in it so you just put the tea leaves into the pot and then when you pour, the leaves stay back. After purchasing, she wrapped everything up and put it in a bag. It was done so beautifully, I had to take a picture:

 

Riding has been great. You can’t beat 65 degrees and sunny for riding weather. Here are some random shots from last weekend’s ride. Most of these guys are marines that I meet up with on the weekends:

 

The jazz, concert, and pep bands have been busy and we are looking forward the next set of concerts as well as preparing for the Far East Honor Music Festival in Tokyo in April. More details to come.

 

Merry Christmas everyone!