Singing Ourselves Silly...or Sick

On Monday for Family Home Evening this week, James and I tried karaoke for the first time together. Wow, we have been missing out.

The karaoke bar we went to was in the basement of a very dingy, somewhat smelly, building and (thanks to my mother's germ phobia), I kept telling James, "Don't touch anything! There is disease everywhere here!" Turns out I was right, but I'll expound on that later. When I learned that there was all-you-can-drink hot chocolate for only 100yen, I forgot all about germs.

We had a blast serenading each other on what ironically was our year-and-a-half anniversary. (Yes, we are still newlyweds and can celebrate things like that.)

It took us about 20 minutes to figure out how to use the machine (all in Japanese) and to find the English songs. But once we did, there was no stopping us.

Hot chocolate!

Sorry, bad quality. Does it adequately capture his excitement? James was such a good sport. And a rather good singer, too.

Well, apparently the excitement of karaoke was too much for poor James (either that or he didn't obey my orders not to touch anything) because he came down with the flu a couple days later. It was...violent. I will spare you the gruesome details, but I have never seen my poor hubby so sick. I did think it was noble of him to cut down on our grocery bill by eating only applesauce for a couple days. Fortunately, he is feeling much better now.

This week was graduation at my base school. Graduation in Japan is an extremely solemn ceremony. There is a lot of standing up, bowing, sitting down. And the gym was FREEZING! Cheese whiz, sometimes I really wish there was such a thing as central heating...or any kind of heating. Anyway, below is a picture of one of my favorite students, Kana. She graduated this week. I will miss her a lot, but James will be teaching at her college, so hopefully we will stay in touch.

And a bit of random baking. These look really foul, but I promise they aren't too bad. They are called butterscotch haystacks. Chow mein noodles, peanuts, raisins, and chocolate chips coated with melted butterscotch chips and peanut butter. James says, "They're all right." Of course, if you asked James how he feels about his wife, he would probably say, "She's all right." I never really know what he means with that phrase...that's probably his tactic.

Anyway, here's wishing you a happy week. Love to all our family and friends!