Monday, May 25, 2015

Yokosuka Matsuri

Our local town matsuri (festival) was this past weekend.  See some pictures here:

http://jcfoodreviews.blogspot.jp/2015/05/special-edition-yokosuka-matsuri-food.html

Monday, May 4, 2015

Some news

Hey there...there's nothing earth shattering going on, but we have had a bit of a change in our lives recently.  Over at one of our other blogs I have a post up explaining that we have stopped trying to start a new church in Yokosuka.  We found a great church (Grace Harbor Church) up in Tokyo that is surprisingly not too difficult to get to, so we will be attending up there.

Related to that, we finally got an electronic toll card (ETC) for our car (30% discount on weekends).  JapanETC Card is a service started recently by someone who used to work on base, and it's the easiest way to get one of these cards.  It used to be almost impossible, but now it's very easy.  I highly recommend them!  And oh wow, it's soooo nice to have ETC.  Aside from the quick entrance/exit from toll booths (20 kph) there are the additional benefits of 1) don't have to have change, 2) no receipts floating around, 3) Kerri can knit in the car again because she doesn't have to manage all that stuff!

We've been ramping up our planning for Rowan's 8th grade year.  As we get ready for high school we are kind of thinking of this as the "dry run" before the real thing.  Things are getting exciting!  Kerri and Rowan will be back in the US for a month or so from July to August.  I plan on using that time to review lots of interesting places for my new food review blog.

Kerri continues to be heavily involved with roller derby.  A while back she was invited to help with a commercial for a local soft drink.  That was quite the story, so you can ask her about it it some time.  She hasn't broken any bones yet, though on Saturday at the "Running with the bulls" event on base, she scraped up her fingers.  That's what comes of skating around on streets whacking runners with foam swords!

Work remains fairly constant, no rumors of mass lay offs or anything at the moment, which is always nice.  If things remain stable, we're planning to remain here through Rowan's high school, which would put his graduating around 2020 (just in time for the Olympics!).  By then we will hopefully know where we are going next in Japan.  It's hard to imagine, but we will have been living here almost 9 years if that comes to pass.

Other than Kerri's trip to the US, we don't have any big travel plans coming up.  We are going to try and go "camping" (i.e. staying in a cabin with onsens near by) at the end of May, but that's about it.  My vacation situation at work is such that I have to use all of it each year or lose it, so I have to build up my balance again each year.

And that's about all that's going on with us!