Where DOES the time go?

Whoa, my bad! It's been nearly a month since we updated! Summer is slowly winding down for us...J and kids are waiting for a return flight to the states to come up. Supposed to be leaving tomorrow, but it got pushed back so possibly 2-3 more days of family time before we have to say goodbye. It has been an awesome summer and we never want them to leave, but somehow it is more pronounced when they are leaving someplace so wickedly cool.

The coolest thing we've done recently was headed to a street festival not far from the base. We were lucky enough to have a small group of locals to follow to the festival location, so that added to the adventure. It was a "Ghost Festival" of sorts and we even went through a haunted house that was put on by local middle and high school students. We saw a ton of people in the traditional summer kimonos, Yukata, as you can see below. Lots of fun! Afterward we drove a short distance and watched the tail-end of some fireworks that had been going on for almost an hour and a half. They were very impressive and even more so if you considered the sheer amount of money involved in the celebration...I don't have any idea what fireworks cost in the states, but one of my companions works closely with someone who produced the fireworks and the biggest ones cost 2 MILLION Yen each! To save you the Google time, that is $25,567 per "large" explosion...for roughly 90 minutes. As you can see the fireworks business in Japan is extremely lucrative.

This trip was a great experience for us and the kids as well. I got the chance to play "paper-rock-scissors" with a Japanese boy at the chocolate-dipped banana stand...the object was to buy one, get up to 3 for free and needless to say, I whipped "paper" on him in the final round and won us 3 lovely and delicious pineapple halves to enjoy with our bananas. He went with rock, btw, for those of you who were curious. Speaking of curious, I just did a little more Google-in'...did you know that in 1999 a paper-rock-scissors algorithm was created?! The program beat the opponent by learning his "fallback" preference (it doesn't say which he preferred). I am smiling just thinking of how many times the programmers had to think of the words "paper, rock, scissors." I think of random things like this. You're welcome, btw. I knew you were wondering what happened when you Googled "paper rock scissors."

Ahem.
Anyway, not only was the festival a great time visually but it was a great bonding time with our new Japanese friends. They are incredibly generous, down to refusing to let us pay for our own dinner (and that of our 3 kids) simply because they had invited us to go to the festival. Not only that, we also met up with a couple of my English students and we received several gifts including some of the best fresh corn I have had in years. We are so very incredibly blessed to be here. If I forget it for one crazy moment, I am reminded by a lapful of cool gifts from kind-hearted people.

As I said, summer is winding down and we are trying to find the fun free stuff to do in our area. Thanks to the power of the internets, we found a great website written by people stationed here that included detailed directions and GPS coordinates. We made our way to an obstacle course park nestled into the hillside just a few minutes from our house. It was very hot, but hey...that's summer, right? Pics are below. We were blown away by how clean and graffiti-free the whole park was...just another example of the do-unto-others mentality here. All for now, hope you are all finding fun ways to stay cool.