Okay, it’s official. I was awarded a contract and I start working next week. It’s funny, because I had been watching for jobs at the hospital for a year, and while there were often ones available, they were always full time. Once I started volunteering at the hospital, I had 2 job offers in one day, it was a matter of the departments knowing there were interested people, and then modifying the contracts for part time work. Of course, the contracting office had no incentive when I was calling previously asking about positions. They could probably fill more positions if the contracting office was more helpful.
I usually like to include a few pictures, but today I’m going to send you to someone elses blog to look at pictures. I think they came out pretty good. It seems that I am having problems putting a link in so you’ll have to copy and paste into your browser- http://aviva-photography.com/blog/ (actually click on the red words and you’ll get there!)

Here’s a sneek peek…

Cameras just love Catie, and she loves them. If you look closely at Sean’s forehead, you can see where his head met the headboard 2 days before this photo. It left a lump the size of an ostrich egg.

We had a really fun day today. It was a Japanese holiday, so Sean was off from school. We went to a beach that is new to us this morning to work on a project to send to Jeff. We’ll have pictures later this week or next, stay tuned. There was a playground there with a pretty fast cement slide that Sean fell in love with,

and a great beach to play on.
I love this picture

And best of all, we got to paddle our new kayak!!!! Yeah!! At low tide, it was all coral and tide pools, but we played there long enough that the tide was coming in, so we changed into swim suits, and set up the kayak and off we paddled. It was fairly breezy, but not to bad for paddling, we stayed in a small area that was protected by a reef, so there wasn’t any real surf to deal with, and there were quite a few surfers out beyond the reef. I don’t have any pictures of the kayak – water, children and cameras don’t mix to well but this is where we got it from- http://www.pakboats.com/kayak-models.htm we got the double down at the bottom of the page. Sean and Catie shared the front seat and I paddled from the back. Sean said that was the best part of the day. Here he is carrying the paddle back to the car for me, that orange hat is telling everyone to watch out!

Doesn’t that beach look great? You can see the waves in the distance breaking on the reef.

Today Sean, Catie and I went on the sweet and salty tour. The first stop was a small plant where sugar cane is turned into sugar. It was a pretty small set up, I imagine mainly as a tourist draw, they also had an adjacent place where they slaughter and process pork and a restaurant. I say a small set up, because there is no way they could process the huge truck loads of sugar cane that we see traveling down the roads in the winter here. Sugar cane is apparently the top agricultural export of Okinawa. Most of it used to be shipped to the mainland to process sugar, but more of it is being turned into brown sugar now here on the island. It was interesting to see, the kids LOVED eating sugar, and being encouraged by the store workers to try everything in there, and they even fired up the cooker before we left. This first picture is of a bowl of brown sugar that met you as you entered the store to taste.

This second picture is the machine that chops up the sugar cane and extracts the juice.

After the sugar cane has had 2 extraction trips, it’s used to cook the syrup. It’s shoveled into an area beneath the vats where the cane juice is cooked.

And here is the cane juice cooking

The second stop was one of the many places that makes sea salt on the island. In this big greenhouse looking building

is the first step of evaporating the sea water, ending up with about a 25% briney solution.

Then it’s moved into tanks that are heated with charcoal fires underneath to evaporated more of the water, and crystals are removed as they form. The final stage it’s in buckets with hairdryers aimed at it to dry it out (the hairdryer part we didn’t see, but was told this by our guide). We got to taste the various salts that they had for sale there, some of their own and some from other areas of the world. Catie really liked that part. But unfortunately at one point she tripped as she was tasting and brought down a crock of salt with her, spilling the salt and breaking the crock (gomenasai!). The best part though was the water there…

Sin what? Well this little storm has been affecting our weather for over a week now, and it is finally here.

The military went to TC-3 (Typhoon condition 3) last Wednesday, which means that we could expect winds of 50 knots or greater within 48 hours. We were thinking that we were going to be hit with a Cat 4 storm last Friday. We kept watching a waiting, the commisarries were packed on Wednesday and Thursday, and we had nothing but a hot humid day on Friday. Finally yesterday and today, we had a lot of rain and some wind.

As you can see by the map above, it wasn’t really moving too fast, it took a whole week to make from the Philipines to here. Apparently northern Taiwan had a tough time as it sat near or over it for a few days. Funny thing is, back in 2002, there was another typhoon named Sinlaku, and it sat over Okinawa for 72 hours. The Okinawans are smart though, and much better prepared for typhoons that residents back in the US. All the homes here are built of reinforced concrete, and in many places newer homes start on an upper level if they are anywhere near water. Life is hardly affected here by a typhoon. A cat 4 hit here last year 2 days before we arrived on Okinawa, and other than a few piles of branches and debris waiting to be cleaned up, life was already back to normal. On the wet side of things, both Catie and Sean had accidents last night, requiring lots of laundry, and I probably won’t be able to hang anything out to dry for a day or two.

Late addition- Just after dinner we had a little break in the weather to give us a beautiful sunset before bedtime…

This past Saturday we trekked up to the aquarium, again….It makes me realize we’ve been here over a year now, I had to renew my membership at the aquarium. The nice thing is the kids are still free (admission that is). First stop was the playground and nets, of course

I think Sean was trying to be a monster, I think that’s what these faces are about… and check out those cute freckles. I haven’t managed to keep him completely out of the sun, but we haven’t done to bad this summer. It’s really just that it’s to darn hot to be outside during the sunburn time of day.

So now you just get stuck with lots of pictures because I think they are so darn cute.

Sean and Catie are doing well despite Jeff being gone. He’s really been gone so much since we’ve been here, that he kind of reached visitor status, and it was disruptive to have him home. The daily routine is just smoother, and easier to adjust if needed, with just the three of us here. They get to watch their Daddy movie most nights, which they don’t pay attention to, it’s really just an excuse to play on the big bed and explore mom’s stuff on the bureau. Up until the past day or two, Catie thought that Daddy was still on an airplane, I think I finally got it through to her that the airplane took Daddy someplace else to work. She told me that sometimes she goes on the airplane with Daddy too. Of course, the last airplane trip was to Disney, so wouldn’t it be cool if that’s where Daddy’s plane went? That trip to Disney won me a door prize at a coffee today, since I was the most recent person to have been to Disney Sea.

And here’s some more pictures..

The angle on them is different, but look how much he has changed in a year…

Sean has discovered Lego. When we were on vacation, Catie had gotten a 6 piece bag of lego knockoffs with lunch one day. Sean comandered them and never looked back. He could spend an hour playing with those 6 little pieces. So we requested lego for his birthday, and got him some on his own. Now I’ve built more lego in the past month than I have in all my life. They come with nice little how to booklets with each set, and then Sean takes off and modifies them. He’ll play for hours. He’ll play before school and afterschool. Fortunately, he’s good about leaving them home, and it doesn’t take too much encouragement or scolding, so far, to get him to pick them up off the floor.

So now I’ll post some of the pictures that I just didn’t have time or was to lazy to edit and upload to the gallery. Okay, I was still to lazy to do too much post picture editing, I’m generally content with what I get straight out of the camera. On the day of Sean’s birthday party that evening we went to the big Eisa festival…

And as I mentioned, Sean and Catie had a great time playing together, and getting another day of use out of their yukatas, …

alot of japanese were there in their summer kimonos, some of which are just beautiful…I got a picture of this mom and her son as they passed by…

The following day, we went to the zoo. In the spirit of spoiling the kids before dad left, they got to ride the ponies there for the first time ( of course, when it came time for dessert, dad said no, they’d had enough treats for the day, one of these days they’ll learn to ask mom, she always let’s them have dessert at the zoo when it’s hot)

I

I have no idea what Sean was thinking, he was making funny faces most of the way around, but they both LOVED riding.

And here is Sean’s haircut, fortunately, it kind of blends in with his cowlick. I noticed that a few of Caties hairs were a little short on top too, but it’s not noticable.

And that car Catie was wishing for…..Today we were driving and talking about buying a present for Sean’s birthday. Then Catie said on her birthday she would have a cake and candles. And she will blow the candles out and wish for a big car she can drive, drive, drive. I told Catie that we don’t get everything that we wish for and she said “why? ” “Because sometimes it’s not a good toy that you wish for” and I went on that we don’t have room for a car, etc. And then she said that she had already asked Daddy. I told her that Daddy had said no and she broke into tears! Big tears! Jeff told me that I would only be able to use him as the bad guy for a few weeks after he left ( as in where did enter name of toy go, and I can say daddy threw it out) but this will work all the way until her birthday.