Friends birthday party, and....that is about it this week.

It is still quite hectic at work and neither Kate nor I have had a lot of motivation. As a result we have not taken the effort to get out and do a lot. Recently it has been pretty cold and that also does not help with the motivation. Last week when I got up to ride my bike to work I noticed thick ice had formed on the inside of the windows. We do not heat the house at all at night and it does get below freezing inside. We all have heated blankets to keep us from freezing while we sleep. Then I set the timers on the kerosene heaters to come on about 30 min before we get up. There is one heater in the living room and 2 on the second story where we sleep. Using that heating style we only use about 18 liters of kerosene per week. That is a little over $10 per week. Actually that is much cheaper than what it used to cost us in the US, but the difference is that we are only really keeping one room in the house at a comfortable temperature, rather than the entire house. With little to no insulation if the heater is not running the house immediately gets noticeably colder.

This weekend we had the Shionome's over for Chizuko sans birthday celebration. We served a variety of different foods that we typically made when we lived in the US. They also brought some Japanese dishes to share. For entertainment we played Jenga.

To make it more interesting we made a rule that whoever lost had to dance to the mayahi song in front of everyone. Here is a link to that song for you to enjoy, I think it was popular a few years back.

マイやヒ

Chizuko sans dance...

Kate...

and Taka san..

You will notice that there are no pictures of me, that is because I brought my Jenga A game and was able to get through the night with no dancing..

Kate and I made a cake for the event. It was from one of the cake mixes we brought with us, but we put fresh strawberries and whipped cream on in in place of heavy frosting.

Chizuko san was happy to get the cake.

and everyone really seemed to like it. The children went crazy for it.

Here are all the children after the sugar buzz....

To finish off this post I am attaching a picture of a rugged looking motorcycle we saw recently. It is a Honda Motra. It is a fairly small bike with multipurpose tires on it. Looks like a cool ride. The owner even attached a horse shoe on it to add to the rugged motif. Anyway I like this picture so I figured I would share..

That is all for this post, hope everyone has a good week..