A Little of This and a Little of That

It's yet another Bento night at the Corry household. I always look forward to Bento night. That's the night that I just get to go shopping for dinner instead of making it. Got some Sashimi, Fried pork and rice....I know what some of you may be thinking, HELLO buying pre-made rice?! My motto is if I'm going to be lazy for dinner, I might as well go all the way! Anyway, I just finished up hosting a very fun playgroup at my home for the first time. So, I'm just a tad pooped. It was a fairly small group but it was great to chat with Moms. I absolutely love hosting parties and having folks over. It's just something about opening up my home to friends that I just really enjoy. This group of Moms I've been really excited about. We all live in this neighborhood and we all have children in and around the same age. It's been nice to finally find a bunch of moms to maybe start touring the zoo and aquariums with. Something about being in a group while having adventures makes it a little less intimidating. Don't get me wrong, if it were just me I'd be fine jumping on a train and going anywhere. It's the fact that my boss, AKA Joshua is a very high maintenance traveling partner. We always have to make sure that there is somewhere to eat, freedom to romp around and we have to make sure to make it home by naptime which is about 12:30. Taking it into account that most places don't open until 10:00AM, it's not so easy to have an adventure solo.

Also at the grocery store I spent my money on yet another new Kit Kat flavor! This one is Le Patissier Takagi. Supposedly, it's wine flavor and made with Bretagne Milk from northwestern France. One of the top Japanese patissier, Yasumato Takagi, created this flavor and is also famous for being on Iron Chef. Oh, how fancy! After taking a look at other pictures of them though, I'm not so sure this is a new flavor but maybe just new packaging? After going to the Japanese website for Kit Kat it looks as though the newest and greatest flavor hitting the shelves is Fruit Parfet....interesting, I haven't seen that one yet.

The weather might finally be starting to warm up. Supposedly this is an unusually cold spring we've been having here so far on the Kanto plane. With the threat of rain today, I was thankful to see Sunny skies. Pretty soon we can really start exploring. Infact, I just got my walking sandals in recently and have been so excited to test them out. They are Chaco's brand sport Sandal. My girlfriend Maggie introduced me to them and swore they were the best on the market. After testing them out I have to concur. The arch support in phenomenal. I think I'm going to pressure my mom into investing in a pair of these. Seeing all the Japanese Moms on bikes has motivated me to maybe invest in a bike while I'm here. We are really only about 5 miles from base and it would be great exercise. With all of the baskets and accessories that they have here, I can easily get groceries and Josh on at the same time.

I've also been on a bit of a Loretta Lynn kick lately. A friend of mine that I meet at Starbucks, Joe burned a whole bunch of country music on an MP3 disc. There are over 200 songs on the thing so, lately I've just popped in the disc and set it to shuffle. I just heard this Loretta Lynn song that made me smile. If you're not into country.....I'm truly sorry. If you know anything about Mrs. Lynn you would definitely respect and admire her. Her lyrics are very much about her life. I had to listen to this song a couple times. It's called "The Pill" and yes ladies, she's referring to the Thee Pill. Loretta was a big star right around the time that the pill became very main stream. Anyway, don't loose hope in me all you country haters out there. I love all kinds of music. Punk, rock, country, classical, reggae, kids songs. There is just to much creativity in the music world why stick to just one kind?!

Tomorrow is a big day....Sesame Street Live is coming to Yokosuka Navy Base!! Elmo and all his pals will be visiting us to entertain all the military kids. I bought Josh's tickets to the show and coincidentally we will be sitting in the Elmo isle. I think I'm more excited about it than he is! Along with it being Easter weekend, it's also The month of the military child on the Navy Base. Along with having Sesame street live, there will also be bands and fun activities for young kids to do. Nothing to crazy planned for Easter. We have Josh's basket of eggs for an egg hunt in the backyard and we will probably take him on base where they'll have all kinds of egg hunts going on.

As you can see this is why I so properly named this blog at A Little of This and a Little of That. Nothing too new and exciting to report. Just life! Thank goodness. It's been nice to just sit back for a little while!

Mike's Turn...

Nicki and I have a relatively unspoken rule about "hijacking" each other's posts. Basically, we consider a post hijacked when one of us writes something (like Nicki's beautiful post above) and then the other one writes another one within 24-48 hours after the previous post, leaving little time for viewers to actually read, enjoy and comment on the first post. Since I didn't want to hijack her "Little of this, Little of that" post, I figured that (with her concurrence) I could add to the bottom of hers and hope that you, the reader, actually reads this far down anyway. Here goes:

Pictures of My Boss's Wife

As many of you know, I work for SushiJeff, who runs a little blog we like to refer to as Sushicam. Over the weekend, when Jeff was shooting pictures of primates, the Corry family (Nicki, Josh, and I) were at Yokosuka's naval base attending the 2006 Sakura (Cherry Blossom) Festival. This annual event is one of just a few that is open to the general public, so the local Japanese can come onboard base and take pictures and enjoy all that is American in Japan. The most popular draw, without a doubt, is the pizza. Japanese pizza is not much like American pizza when considering size, ingredients, and whatnot. But the biggest difference is the price. A Japanese pizza of any decent size tends to run about $25 or more. On base, you can get a good sized pizza for about half the cost. So Japanese people tend to buy as much pizza as they can carry, then they eat some on the spot and take the rest back home, put it in the freezer, and save it for later.

Anyway, aside from the pizza, the Sakura Festival is also an opportunity for the American and Japanese cultures to blend together for a few hours, while people from both nations perform dances and other rituals for everyone to watch and learn about. We stuck around long enough to see several Japanese children's groups do cheering and dancing. We also stopped to get a picture of a group of Yokosuka's residents wearing kimono. Since my vision isn't too good, I got up close to the kimono clad women to get a good shot, when one of them said, "Hey Mike". I thought to myself, "how on earth does the woman in the kimono know my name?". Once I lowered my camera away from my eye, I realized that one of the kimono women was SushiJeff's wife, Junko. Junko-san had been practicing with several other ladies on base for several months for the performance. They did a great job and I was lucky to get some good pictures to share. Also, Junko was kind enough to round up the group for a picture, too (Junko's the one on the left in the pink kimono). Arigatou gozaimasu, Junko-san!

I've posted pictures from the 2006 Yokosuka Sakura Festival in our Gallery, dated 04/14/2006.