Matt & Chiaki

I have yet some more pictures from Saturday's activities. They are on my Picasa site.

Enjoy.

Free Family pre-Thanksgiving dinner and Testimony

Diana and Melinda drove up to Utah to move Melinda in to her new digs. Joseph was able to come down from Rexburg with his Uncle Kirt and Aunt Brenda and surprise them. They had a great time. They spent the night in Paragonah on the way up and got to see the new trailer and John and Jen and gang. Then they moved Melinda in and had a party with the other free gangs up there. Then Sunday night they were with the Jamison cousins. Here are the pictures.

Here is a rare posting from Japan. This was taken yesterday at our New Years day luncheon at Chiaki's uncle's house. Her grandma lives there, and we took the opportunity to have our picture with her. She is 97! Chiaki's dad is 73 and is in the picture with us.
We ate lots of traditional Japanese food, including raw snapper that her uncle caught. Chiaki's aunt and cousin spent almost 3 days preparing all the food, there was about 30 different types!!

Here are some pictures taken of Matt and Chiaki's gang as they visited with family and made memories. I'm not sure all that happened so I will post the pictures and encourage them to provide comments on the pictures.

Matt & Chiaki and family all visited us here in Denver. We had lots of fun playing with them and visiting our favorite Italian restaurants and eating gelato, MMMMMMmmmmmm....This was a picture we took, Rufus was a good sport and let us sit on him. Thanks for visiting with us Matt, Chiaki, Anna, Erika, and Kent. Hopefully someday we can make it out to Japan.

The far side of Japan, where one of our factories is, got lots of snow this year. Around the city there was about 6 ft when I visited a little while back.
In the middle of it all I saw a mailman motorbike (mom and dad will recognize it) with chains. I took the chance to snap a shot while he ran into the building to deliver mail.
If you ever hear anyone complain about getting around, tell them the mailmen in Japan make do with 50cc (or about 4 HP) in the snow with chains!

Here is the group picture from Grandpa's camera. Many more pictures to come. It was loads of fun!

With BYU's loss of 35-28 to Cal, Mike takes home the chocolate!

Mike was off by just 1 touchdown with a prediction of 35-21.

Even though we all feel sad about the loss, we can be comforted by the fact that Mike has a promising career in Vegas as a sports handicapper.

We can present the chocolate when we see you next week.

Wow, does Buff have intution or what?
Following the theme of the great chocolate debate, I snagged some super high quality chocolate, imported from France. One each of Dark (76% cocoa) and Milk.
The winner will get to compare them both. These ain't no Hershey bars!

I worked on Thanksgiving again this year, but at least I was able to be home in the evening. Last year was spent in Korea. It is still strange to work on Thanksgiving..

Chiaki found an 8 lb turkey (big chicken maybe?) that barely fit into our "oven". The " are because it is nothing but a glorified microwave.

I put the turkey in at 1pm on Saturday, and when I checked it at 5pm it was getting warm. I finally pulled it out at 10pm and it was hot, but not yet cooked. This "oven" only allows you to set the timer for 90min at a time, so you can calculate how many times I had to reset the timer.

I set it again the following day as we left for church, and we were able to carve off the outside edges and eat. I then cleaned all the meat off the bones and cooked just the meat by itself to make sure.

Next Thanksgiving that I am in the states, my list of gratitude will include OVEN!

Kent was able to prepare his own testimony without help. Look at that proud smile on dads face! Kent made all of us proud!

The witnesses had to go into the water. They got soaked!

I found this eel on our walk down the side of the beach. We thought it had died by being washed up on to the shore, But we found a dead fish poking out of his mouth. It looks like it choked on the fish.

Kent was baptized in the ocean on October 8th.
This is the same beach that we took pics of before, but the wind was blowing and the ocean was quite a bit more rough. It rained all night the night before, and started raining as we left, but during the baptism itself the clouds parted and we were able to have a great service.
After he was baptized, Kent bore a great testimony, about how he believes the church is true, was thankful for all of the branch members coming so far for him, and he wants to grow up to be like Jesus.
He is growing up to be a great kid in spite of his parents!
Anna has a lot more pics she wants to post, and lots of comments, so I will just post this one and let her post more later. She even has a surprise she found on the beach! stay tuned..
(she had signed on hoping to post, but wasn't able to before bed time)

I have big News! This morning when we were getting ready to go to school, when I saw this white thing lined up against the wall of the cage with all of his marbles that kent had put in for him to play with. I thought that it was a chocolate covered almond at first, but when I picked it up I found out that it was an egg. I couldn't believe it at first but it so happens to be true. So the MANLY bird happens to be the GIRLY bird.