Blogging again?

 

Yeah……We’ll see how this goes again :-)

So after much prodding, poking, shoving, and eventually a kick in the pants, meredith got me to update this thing again :-P

So I will endeavor to update the blog some more.

It’s been a long time, and much has happened. We’re still here in japan, having lots of fun. We just purchased a car over here, a Nissan “Sunny”, the japanese have some cute names for cars here hehe.

Anyways, that’s all for this post, i’ll try to include more “wordy” stuff in the next one i put up. For now, be content with photos :-)

Haircute! :-P (misspelled on purpose )

 

 

Halloween!

 

Sushi kids!

 

Insert coin(s) for witty and amazing title.

 

Hello family, friends, creepy stalkers. It’s time for another blog update!

I know, I know, it has been awhile, but I assure you, nothing big has happened. No big plans, no big changes, nothing out of the ordinary.

…did i mention we gave Thian his first haircut?

anyway onto other things… wait wait wait, ok, I hear you gasping behind that monitor, and I also hear you wondering when im posting picture. Well fine here they are :-P

Before:

 

After!

That’s all for now!

oh, did I also mention we have a super typhoon coming our way? I sure do love the rain :-)

Strange, and yet so delicious

 

So being in Japan for me is like being a small kid in the candy store for the first time. You look around and all around you are strange and alluring objects. Every candy in the store surrounds and swirls around you in a maelstrom of flavor and color. The combinations are nearly endless, nary a flavor left untouched and all of it wrapped into alluring packages whose call rivals that of the Sirens in the tales of old sailors books. As such, I have found myself trying nearly everything I can get my hand on:

Bananas covered in chocolate. Rice crackers. Octopus packed into a small round breaded thing. Sushi of every kind of fish. Flavored sodas and drinks of nearly any type you can think of.

All of this and more! However, it is the latest item that recently tried to attempt to make on my own that I will talk about now:

Coffee Jello!

Meredith had found a Japanese website that was doing a recipe day or something of the like, and it featured the new jello. Instantly I was enthralled with the idea and set out to make it as quickly as possible. It didn’t take much, just some instant coffee, some non flavored jello packs and boiling water. Nothing special, just….coffee jello.

Let me tell you my friends…… it is Delicious.

Now to find the next thing in the candy store :-)

You have gained a level in, Cooking!

 

So I managed to accomplish something I’ve wanted to do for a long long time; Creating my own pretzels!

Everytime I go to the mall, the lure of Auntie Anne’s pretzels is too much and I wind up with like $20 worth of pretzels to eat / save for later. Yesterday I happened to be browsing a food recipe application on my Ipod touch, looking for something yummy to make for dinner when a shiny beacon of tastiness that is Pretzels graced my screen… I was helpless to resist.

Soon after Meredith got home we went to the store and I immediately bought up everything I needed to create the goods. All went well but then I made and error, a very serious and stupid error. In the recipe it called for 1 cup of sugar, 1 1/2 Teaspoons of salt. What I wrote down was: 1 cup of sugar,    1 1/2 salt

As you can probably guess, I put 1 1/2 CUPS of salt in. Yes I thought it was kinda weird for that much salt, but I was drunk of the promise of delicious pretzels and forged ahead thinking I was safe because I wrote the directions down. lol.

Anyway, the cooking process wasn’t so far from normal, although the dough didn’t rise as much as it should have, and it was kinda dry-ish.

Finally I got it all baked and as soon as it was out of the oven, I took a huge bite and, lo and behold, it didn’t taste that bad…… for the first second or two. Then the taste of salt flooded into my mouth and stayed there like an entrenched army. Nearly anything I tried to do could not get rid of this soft, lingering ghost of a salt taste in my mouth.

ugh.

Fast forward to today:

I tried to attempt creating my pretzels, the taste of salt finally had released it’s grip on me and I deemed it time to try again. This time I used the normal amount of salt and I have to report this: They are Delicious!

Not quite as good as Auntie Anne’s pretzels, but still pretty dang good.

Sooooo tired

 

Here’s an email I wrote to meredith this morning, thought it was enough to post up.

ugh, what a night :-(
Here's how it went.
Rienna first woke up at about 2-3ish, complaining that she was cold, ok, ac was on, i'll just turn it off.
*buzzer sound* wrong!
She complained like hell and woke up thian, so I just covered her back up again and tucked the blankets in and went with that, she complained a little but I told her thian was sad, go to sleep and she did.
Went in, changed thians diaper. Now that he was awake he seemed to be having some teeth pain, must be getting a new tooth in, he's been doing that a bit more lately. Fine, got him some tylenol, back to sleep for me.
I wake up again at about 4 this time.
Rienna is up and cranky again. Fine, put her back in bed, cover her up, give her an extra blanket.
In my half awake daze I also try to shut off the AC again, stupid me. This sets off a chain reaction with rienna of whining and eventually I turn it back on. No way to comfort her without it. Odd because just a few weeks ago she was scared of it being on O.o
anyways, I try to leave and now it's the normal bed time " I want a hug, I want a kiss, I moved you need to tuck me in, now I want a kiss, now a hug, I want bear, no I don't want bear, I want baby"
Arrrgghh.
Eventually I get her to sleep and I go back into the bedroom and pass out.
In my dream I faintly hear the alarm, but then it's gone quickly enough.
Eventually I wake up on my own at about 7:10 going WTF something is wrong. Yeah, the whole "not being late" part of my brain was shouting angrily at the rest of my brain for not listening to him....sorry Late Man, I was tired.
Thankfully Rienna was still asleep and as such wasn't downstairs in danger or anything. /sigh of relief.
Crazy kids.
Today, im going to take a nice long bath and maybe a nap.
Yeah...that'll be nice.

Dora the explorer…more like Dora the Thief!

 

 

Heh, ok, so i haven’t written a blog in awhile, I have been really busy with the kids, however, something happened today that I thought was so funny that I HAD to write it down for all to see.

Ok, so here’s how it goes:

I was laying Thian down on the ground and was changing his diaper when Dora the Explorer came on. Rienna got really excited and ran over to the TV yelling, “Dora!!!”

Ok, normal so far. Then Swiper appeared on the tv and rienna again yelled out, “Swiper!”. For those of you who don’t know, Swiper is the Raccoon/fox/whatever the hell he is on the show, and he basically steals stuff, and Dora + the rest of the cast have to stop him before he does.

Anyway, so I’m changing Thian and I barely noticed that rienna was moving really slow, shuffling her feet going past me. Then she comes up around me on the other side and goes right next to Thian. Then, just like in the show, she slowly moved her hand towards the toy I had given Thian to play with and then snatched it out of his hands. After that she started to shuffle away again, but I stopped her, and not picking up on what exactly she was doing other than taking Thian’s toy, said to her, “Rienna! don’t take thians toy, that was very naughty!”. At that point she said, “but im swiper! swiper!”

I just cracked up laughing because it all came together and actually made sense. I tried to explain to her that playing swiper was bad, because swiping other peoples stuff isn’t cool.

Ahhh, children, it’s the small things that turn out to be gems, lol.