Christmas Celebrations!!

We had a great Christmas season together... lots of things to go to, but that's okay with me because I love Christmastime!!

Chris and I are at his squadron's Christmas party... it was pretty uneventful, but we still had a good time dressing up. And I do realize that I live in Okinawa, but am still badly in need of a tan!!




I realize that this is not a good picture of me... I have that awkward eyes-half-closed look, but I still love this picture because 1). it's of me and several of my friends here and 2). my friend, Audrey, who is all the way on the left, is 9-months pregnant in this picture. She was 2 weeks from delivery, but you can't even tell she's pregnant at all!! I think it's partially because of the camera angle and her black dress, but she looks amazing!!
(She just had her baby last week... she and her baby boy (Barrett) are doing fine!)


Chris and I spend Christmas Eve with friends from the church. Lea, Sam and I made Christmas dinner for the singles and college students. It was a fun night of food and games...

Can I just mention that I hate this blog site!!! It's horrible to use. For example, this underline feature just came on and there's absolutely no button to turn it off... plus it does weird things like delete my picture and text at random times.... grrrr!!!


Anyways, here's a picture of my cute doggy, loving Christmas. Her favorite part is ripping all the paper into little tiny pieces, can you tell??


Chris and I were especially thankful to spend Christmas together... we thought he was going to have to leave for Alaska and miss everything. So, it was a great time to spend with friends!

Otherwise, we haven't been up to too much. Chris has been really busy at work... he's now in charge of all the awards in his squadron. I've been really busy with cheerleading. To make a long story short, the two girls that were in charge of the program had enough and decided to quit... they then asked me if I wanted to take over the program. Things seem to be turning around for the better... we just had our tryouts yesterday and we took 12 new girls on the team.... but it's been a LOT of work! I haven't had too much time for cakes, but I've made a few this month... if you want to see them, you can check out my website: www.customsweetcakes.webs.com. Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas! We missed spending the holiday with everyone!!!

Well, hello everyone! It is my posting debut on our website! Just trying to help out the wife. She is currently writing her lesson plans for her class tomorrow, teaching English to the Japanese. So, we'll start with Thanksgiving. It was our first Thanksgiving away from our immediate family. We do have a lot of firsts since this is our first year in Japan. However, it was ok being away. We have developed a great sense of family with our small group that we meet with each week as well as with Japanese and Americans at our church. But when you wake up to a site like you see below, you can't help but think that God is watching out for you while you are in a foreign land without your family and you can't not thank God for his beautiful creation. That was my first prayer of thanks on Thanksgiving day. This sunrise was absolutely beautiful. Even when I don't get a sunrise because its cloudy, I get to wake up next to my beautiful wife and thats a gorgeous sunrise in and of itself!.....was that cheasy? Oh, well its true. On to our next pic.

After the gorgeous sunrise I headed out to a local park where my church, Calvary Chapel Ginowan, played the other Calvary Chapel of Okinawa City. I don't think I had played flag football since high school gym class. It was a blast! Just a bunch of believers getting together for a friendly competitive football game. I think I had a few receptions as I helped block on the offensive line and I played safety or the linebacker position on defense like my man Ray Maualuga on the Benglas minus the hair. I'll get a wig for next year. I had 3 interceptions for some pretty sizable returns. It was just a great time. Nothing like food and football all on the same day. And yes that was my football for the day because being 14 hrs ahead of east coast time, all the games came on the next day. Playing in that game really started the day off right....I made this tackle by the way.


The day after Thanksgiving we celebrated the marriage of one of our friends from church and she had Julie make her wedding cake. This was Julie's first wedding cake and it was pretty awesome. The whole process didn't make the kitchen look so awesome and I had to clean it all up but the end result was pretty impressive!



Again, another first for us. This will be our first Christmas away from our family, but our first Christmas together being married. So that would make this our first Christmas tree! Julie beautifully decorated our tree with all her decorations she brought from the states that so impatiently could not wait to get out of the box and around the apartment and on our new tree! And Go Bucks! Beat Oregon in the Rose Bowl!














Just a couple days ago we attended my squadron Christmas party. It is a little hard to get into the Christmas spirit here because now, its Dec 6 and I'm still in shorts, t-shirts and flip flops, its still in the 70s here and no snow! Anyway, the party was fun. We got to get dressed up a little and eat some good food. I mean, I can't remember the last time I wore dress shoes and a tie. I am so used to wearing my "pajamas" to work every day! And getting dressed up means my wife getting dressed up and when she does.....well a picture is worth a thousand words, but I'll use a few anyway, she looked pretty hot that night!

This is Julie, letting out some anger and stress on some poor helpless Japanese dude. Yes, as sweet as she looks, she does have another side to her!

Actually, this was a probably one of the most coolest places we have been to on Okinawa. Its called Round One. It is seven stories of absolute fun! So you start on the 6th level and pay to play for either 90 min or 3 hours or more. So we payed for 3 hours and you get to play arcade games, mini bowling, tennis, soccer, and golf games and mini bikes all on one level. Then you go to the top level and up there you have two basketball half court courts, a soccer field, tennis court, batting cages, pitching cages and archery! This would be my little brother's dream! Its like the ultimate Chucky Cheese for adults and kids. My little brothers would pretty much go nuts if they got to go there, so hopefully if they come next summer I'll take them there. They would love it. And when you are done with playing there is even an A&W and Baskin Robbins in the same building! Here are some pics of us playing everything we could. We didn't get to race the
mini bikes but our friends did. Julie played a little tennis and I played a little soccer.









Well that is all for now. I have to get to bed so I can get up for the Bengals game that comes on at 3AM! Until next time....Konbanwa...Oyasuminasai...Matane!

Cakes!

So, I had a few requests that I share some of my cake pics with everyone... so here they are!

I never actually sold this first cake to anyone... but I was playing around with freezing cakes as well as this decorating technique, but I think it came out pretty well, so I took a pic of it.


This is the cake I made for my friend Audrey's shower. The cake matches the bedding that she has in the nursery...


This is a cake I made for a little one-year-old's birthday. I love how girly it turned out!


This last one looks a little scary, but I made it for a fighter-squadron party here. Not sure if you can tell what it is, but it's a scary looking bat. The cake is a replica of the plaque they have in at their squadron. This is definitely the meanest looking cake I've made...


That's all for now, but I'm doing my friend Ally's wedding cake this week and then a Michigan cake on Saturday (I know, I know... I feel like a real traitor for making a Michigan cake, but I need the money! And I feel much better knowing that we beat them today! :)

Cheer Drama!

So, I don't think I told many of you that I was coaching cheerleading over here... but I am! I coach with an all-star squad. They just put on performances at various events on the island and are hoping to travel back to the states to compete. So, here are a few pics of their practices and first performances...The good news is the girls are adorable and oh so much fun!
The bad news is that the coach who started the program is on a serious power-trip and unfortunately running the program into the ground (in my opinion, but I'll save you all the very over-dramatic details!) So, I may not be with them much longer... :(

But, I had a blast while it lasted!

Back in Oki!!

So... it was a little difficult getting back into the swing of things again, but it definitely helps that there is so much to do on this island!
Chris got sent to some little island for a weekend to help a chaplain with some kind of session he was putting on... it looked pretty beautiful.
It's finally cooling off here... no more hot August sun! However, with the hot weather passing, the strong winds have been moving in. This is a pic of us on the seawall... which is exactly what it sounds like - a wall the borders the ocean. It's a pretty popular place for snorkelers and scuba divers, as well as walker and runners.
Hooray for my friend Ally, who told us about this place called YogurtLand! Favorite place so far on Okinawa. Okay, so when you enter YogurtLand, and entire wall of the place has frozen yogurt machines in about 2 dozen different flavors. You start by picking out a bowl, dispensing your own yogurt and then piling on the toppings. Being a frozen yogurt fanatic, even this picture doesn't accurately depict the excitement I was feeling... I'm pretty sure my heart skipped a few beats when I walked in... So, the price of your yogurt is based on the weight of it when you're finished. Congrats to their marketing team, who figured out that people would fill their bowls with a lot more yogurt if they only had one giant bowl to choose from when they walked in.
So, if you check out Chris's big bowl of yogurt below, you'll see that it was pretty big... but at 200 yen per gram, his tasty little treat ended up being $8!!!
My friend told me later that her neighbors went to YogurtLand one afternoon and their family of 4 ended up spending $40 on frozen yogurt... ouch! Don't worry though... I won't let their steep prices deter me from eating there anytime I get the chance! :) ... cause it was DELICIOUS!

Every year they have a Christmas bazaar on base, so Chris and I hung out there one afternoon. Of course he was hungry, so we grabbed some yakisoba to eat for dinner... I actually wasn't "posing" for this picture... I just figured out that this was the easiest way to eat Japanese noodles...
One afternoon, Chris and I went to a basketball game on base... I guess there used to be this really popular tv show on espn called And1...?? I've never seen it, but it used to be espn's #1 show... it was about a bunch of really good streetballers who would play pickup games and just annihilate their competition. Anyways, they quit the tv show to turn their basketball skills into a community thing for kids. So, they traveled all the way to Okinawa to put on a show for the military. I must say, they were pretty good, although our favorite part was the dance competition they had at halftime with the little kids... I've seriously never seen little kids dance like that in my whole like!
And here's a pic of my friend, Audrey's shower... she's due in just a few weeks and they're having a boy! Can't wait to have another cute baby around here to play with and then give back to his parent's when he's crying! :)

Fun at Home!!

Ok, so I'm starting to catch some slack because I haven't updated the blog in forever! The best excuse I have is that I've been really busy!!!
So, our visit home was amazing! We had so much fun seeing all of our friends and family... it definitely seems like we haven't been gone that long at all because very few things have changed back home...
The trip home was pretty long though... this is a pic of me in the cockpit of a C-17. I'm attempting to keep my lunch down, as they climbed to a very high altitude in a very short amount of time! I very much missed these two people (my mom and nephew, Calvin)... along with many others!

Chris and I just happened to get home during Cedarville's Homecoming weekend (it was my 5-year reunion, can you believe it?!?) While I was there, I ran into almost our entire cheerleading squad during my junior year!... I can't believe how quickly time has flown by!


While we were home, we had parties at both of our parents' houses. We also went bike-riding with my grandpa...
carved pumpkins...
played football with his brothers...
and went to an Ohio State game with his parents...
Thank you everyone for making our time at home so wonderful!!!

Scuba Diving!!

Chris and I recently got scuba certified... meaning that we can rent gear and scuba dive on our own anywhere in the world. I'll be honest... I hated the training. The scuba diving is fine in itself, but they made you practice all these "skills"... I was okay in the pool, but when we moved to the bottom of the ocean to do them, some of them freaked me out! Anyways, I made it (alive!) and here's a pic of me and Chris with our 500lb. gear on (it seriously feels like it weighs that much... I have to carry mine like a hunch-back...)

Our neighbors here are HUGE scuba divers, so we decided to go out with them last Saturday morning... they took us to one of their favorite spots here - Toilet Bowl. We saw lots of cool stuff, starting with the blowfish that Chris found... when you grab its tail, it puffs up!

We also saw lots of beautiful fish ...

Unfortunately, the underwater camera isn't ours... but our neighbors took some really cool pics for us... Then all the excitement began! Our neighbor Scott, found an octopus and pulled it out of its cave... it started inking everywhere to try to get away. We took our gloves off to feel it... its skin is super velvety...

Here's a short video of us holding it...

Chris and I could only do the first dive with our neighbors... Chris's squadron has a rule about there being 24 hours between scuba diving and flying (because of the differences in pressure)... But, on their second dive, Scott found another octopus, but this one was much bigger. He actually got into a "fight" with it, and it tried to pull off his regulator and mask, so he had to let go! Watch how it changes colors! (And dont' worry mom... I will never try to do this!!)

So, last week, the Okinawans celebrated one of their yearly holidays, called Oban. The whole premise of the holiday is that they call back their ancestors spirits, then for a couple of days they visit their tombs and pray to them, and then send the spirits back. So, to call back the spirits, they have these huge Oban drum-beating/dance performances on the sides of the road. We've seen several the last few days... here's a picture of just a few of the dancers as we were driving by...

The cake business has been booming! I can hardly keep up with all the orders at times... but I really do enjoy the work! Anyways, I got a last-minute call for a wedding cake... a couple was renewing their vows on one of the beaches here and wanted a cherry-blossom cake. Anyways, here's a pic of the cake at their party...

Afterwards, Chris and I went to this cool seafood restaurant here... it's kind of unusual to see a seafood restaurant here. I mean, every restaurant serves fish in some form, but most of it's raw, like in sushi, not like what we think of seafood back in the U.S....


This place actually had pretty good serving sizes as well... (Chris typically leaves the Japanese restaurants still hungry...)

They had some pretty cool decorations as well... this picture is sideways, but there were all kinds of shells hanging from the ceiling, turtles on the wall, etc.
Then on Sunday, I went out with a bunch of my friends to celebrate Sara's birthday... we went to the Rose Garden (a restaurant) and got pedicures! Lots of fun!

Can't wait to see everyone soon!