New Year’s Skating fun

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

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

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.

New Christmas Lights at our house

December 8th, 2011

We got a bit of a late start on this, and we’re still not finished even though Christmas is just around the corner.

Our lights from the last few years have been dropping off one by one, so this year we had to get some new ones. We’ve looked at all the department stores and specialty shops but couldnt’ find anything that really went well for our house, so we ended up having to order some things.

We love the internet 😉

Here are a few pictures. They’re not great, but they give you an idea. We have more lights coming in the next couple of days so I hope to update things then.

UPDATE: added a couple of new strings of lights.

2011 Seminar BBQ

November 24th, 2011

It was that time again, yeah!!!!

Cold weather is just getting here, and that means it’s time for our annual seminar backyard BBQ.

We had a great turnout with almost everyone from this year’s class making it, plus a guest and honorary member you’ll see in the photos 😉

We didn’t eat the record 7 kilos of meat this year, but it was starting to look like we could have.

We rounded out the night with some marshmallow roasting and S’mores. I did discover that you can just roast the marshmallow pop it in your mouth and chase it with the chocolate for a pretty good treat without the mess of graham crackers, hehheh.

We also had some of my wife’s famous brownies and carrot cake with cream cheese icing. I may not be able to eat again for a couple of days to make up for all of that, but it was worth it, I think…

Anyway, we had a great time having everyone over, and I’m really glad we did.

Here are a few photos Ahn took (also why he’s not in any of this year’s photos since he was pretty much the official photographer).

Now were cooking

Now we're cooking

 Now were cooking marshmallows

Now we're cooking marshmallows