Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Happy Birthday to me and my wife for 2012

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

Well, they come every year, if you’re lucky, and so far I’ve been pretty lucky. For a lot of years I have been very, very lucky.

So, another year and another birthday survived. Quite an accomplishment for me this time.

As usual we celebrated our birthday together (it is the same day after all ;-))

This time around I decided to try something a little different for the cake. Sulseob has been trying out making square cakes, and I decided to throw in a little extra on the decorations this time.

I claimed that there wasn’t enough space on the cake for both our names like I usually write on the cake, but really I just thought it would be nice for Sulseob to have her own cake for once. (I’ve not had my own for some time, nor one I haven’t made for myself, but I’ve had cake and a celebration with some of my students – thanks guys!! – so thought I’d do it this way this time).

This was waiting to greet me on Tuesday when I entered class:

A very, very large Birthday card for me

A very, very large Birthday card for me

Here are a few photos of the cake and such from our little celebration at home:

Heiwa Koen Walking Course Path in Nagoya

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

These days I am trying hard to stay fit, and active, and of course, have fun while I’m doing it.

One of the things we’ve been doing as a family has been going for walks at the park near our home. It’s not all flat walking, but it’s not exactly mountain climbing either since you don’t have to use your hands anywhere along the way, but some of the paths do have their physical challenges, steps, rocks to step over, up, that sort of thing.

We’ve been going a couple of days each week, early in the morning. It’s cold now, but walking early is a great feeling. It’s also nice to see the other people who are out walking and yet not be crowded.

It sure beats walking on a treadmill. That is of course if you have the time to get out of the house or office.

Here are some pictures I took a few days ag0.

New Year’s Skating fun

Thursday, January 5th, 2012

During break time we usually have a chance to get together with one of Ahn’s friends from back in his daycare days. She and her family actually moved away several years ago, but her grandfather still livesa few houses down from us, and they come to visit.

When she visits, the boys try to meet her and at least go to the park to play or invite her over to watch movies or eat or play here at our house since she’s usually here for a few days.

When they come, we also usually try to get together as families for some kind of fun. We’ve gone to the river, BBQ’d with them, and out to eat in the past.

This time we decided at that last minute to go iceskating.

Yep.

Iceskating.

When I was a boy, we used to skate on the ponds on the farm. Yes, I’m one of _those_ guys. We even sometime had people over for skating parties.

I remember sometimes skating when we couldn’t skate next to each other for fear the ice would break, too 😉

We didn’t have those kinds of problems this time though, hehheh.

We’ve gone several times to the skating rink out at Morikoro park (where the Expo was held a few years ago).

That’s where we headed this time, too.

Here are a few photos from the day on ice.

Me being helpful :-)

Me being helpful 🙂

More strange Santa photos

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

Getting a lot more like Christmas around our house these days. Put up the tree of course right after Thanksgiving which is our family tradition. We usually leave the tree and lights up until New Year’s Day.

We have been putting things up a little at a time this year because of a really, really crazy schedule and the fact that large number of our previous decorations haven’t aged well and needed replacing.

We were playing around the tree a few nights ago and took a few photos of our blowup Santa and some of his helpers.

Here they are…

Santa looks a little different here

Monday, December 12th, 2011

Last Saturday we had a huge get together with the Tokai CISV group.

Nothing like bowling and food and friends!

We had a good time, and it was really great to get to see every body, and to go bowling. It’s been a while.

On the first game I bowled 3 strikes in the 10th frame. WOW!!! It was pretty cool, well, except that even with that I only bowled 106 total. Sad ;-( Especially because lots of people saw those last three strikes and then noticed that I hadn’t exactly been tearing it up before that. Oh well 😉

Here are a few pictures from the afternoon, plus one of the boys with the ‘Santa’ in the display at the Hoshigaoka Bowling Center.