Minnesota is Heaven, But Virginia is Home

Tired of cherry blossoms yet?  Oh good, because here are a few more:     These are from just a few hours ago...the cherry blossom or sakura, is truly ephemeral.  The blossoms appear almost overnight and won't last more than a few days, depending on weather.  It's important to get out and appreciate them while you can.  The Japanese actually have a term, hanami, for the "sport" of viewing sakura and there are many, many places in Japan where people flock to see sakura in breathtaking settings.   I'll settle for CFAY, since I'm still single parenting and the Japanese school children are on spring holiday, so the crush would be intense anywhere we would go.  If you saw my last post, you know I had to bribe the kids with ice cream for a two hour trip down to Miurakaigan to view the blossoms a couple of weekends ago.   It's been a busy couple of weeks.  I had a new class start up, just the other half o...

Yesterday, I forced the kids at knifepoint to go see early cherry blossoms at Miurakaigan.  There was moaning and groaning and gnashing of teeth, but I decided we were going.  My parents, God love them, used to drag us places that weren't exactly on our "wish list" and dang, except for EROS Data Center, I'm really glad that we went to those places! Even though I didn't want to go to EROS, see how I still remember it so fondly Dad?  Ha! Had a bit of a snafu with the train, but otherwise arrived safely, along with 1.6 billion other Japanese people wanting to enjoy the sakura.  Sigh.  Hans and I don't enjoy crowds.  Maybe that's putting it mildly.  Hans and I hate crowds...crowded places bring out the worst in us.  Let's just say that I would say that random crowds have witnessed many of the more beautiful, touching moments of my marriage.  No big surprise because we are homebodies and get anxious in crowds and social settings...now Josia...

In my head, I always spell it "monkies" for some strange reason. Don't you love it when I start a blog post with a digression, right off the bat?  Ah, my mind, it wanders in strange directions.  The older and more forgetful I get, the more I wander into a room and wonder what I came in to get...I think I can actually feel my synapses getting farther apart, the fires between them less like a bonfire and more like one of those trick birthday candles. I have been so klutzy the last few days.  I have certain, ahem, times of the month when it seems that God somehow decided that not only would it be fun for me to have PMS, but also be a complete dingbat klutz.  Here are a few examples of what's happened to me in the last week (or thereabouts, the day is ending and the synapses aren't firing very quickly): On a mission for the FRG, I had to make a mad dash down to the ship to get a car key from Hans (unbeknownst to him).  I got on the wrong ship and didn't fi...

It's been a snowy couple of weeks in Yokosuka.  Yes...I know, when compared to Minnesota it's not really all that snowy.  Or cold.  But--there has been a LOT of snow in this part of Japan.  They are completely and I mean, completely, unprepared for snow.  Our first storm, about two weeks ago, dumped around 6-8" on us and more further north in Yokohama and Tokyo.  They shut the expressway down, the trains were down...everything was closed down.  They don't really have plows or snow removal equipment.  We got another 4-6" on Friday, so school was cancelled.  Whee, four day weekend! Oh, just so you all can rest easy, we've had two days of 50+ degree weather, so the snow is pretty much all gone.  Don't hate.  I can't help weird Japanese weather! It's been a bit since I wrote and that's because I've been busy.  Too busy to blog?  Meh, not really.  I just didn't have much to say.  I was sick, the kids were sick, Ha...