Sign of the Day

From 2010-07-10-aquarium

Choosing Joy!
©2010 D.R.G.
~Coram Deo~
Living all of life before the face of God...

Torture in Japan

From 2010-07-10-aquarium

A special kind of torture...a huge, well-organized bookstore and not one book in it that I could read.

Choosing Joy!
©2010 D.R.G.
~Coram Deo~
Living all of life before the face of God...

Asamushi Aquarium

Today we went on an ITT tour to Asamushi Aquarium.  It was a perfect, rainy, yucky day to have something inside planned. LOL

From 2010-07-10-aquarium

This aquarium was amazing...standing under the fish....

From 2010-07-10-aquarium

From 2010-07-10-aquarium

From 2010-07-10-aquarium

From 2010-07-10-aquarium

From 2010-07-10-aquarium

From 2010-07-10-aquarium

From 2010-07-10-aquarium

We left the aquarium for the ELM mall. I guess we aren't really mall folks...but they did have a food court. LOL  The bus was a TOUR bus - we were expecting a blue rattler from comments we've heard. All in all, it was a nice day. We're going on another tour next weekend.....perks of deployment. LOL
Choosing Joy!
©2010 D.R.G.
~Coram Deo~
Living all of life before the face of God...

Amusing Sign....

Care to hazard a guess at what this sign could mean? Or suggest a title?

From 2010_07_05_zoo

We had fun with it......here was the text.....didn't help us out, but I'm sure the sign doesn't mean any of the things we came up with. ::snort::

From 2010_07_05_zoo

I have shown this to Akiko. She says it's about "number 2" so we weren't so far off. She says this is educational about the effects of various diets on the monkey's "number 2".
Choosing Joy!
©2010 D.R.G.
~Coram Deo~
Living all of life before the face of God...

Tale of Two Breads

I've been grinding wheat and baking bread off and on since we lived in Hardin, MT.

Tuesday night, however, I went to a bread baking demo. I needed to get out for a bit. The kids encouraged this solution to my cranky attitude.

Twyla has been talking about mini-loaves and so I bought this pan when I saw it. It's CUTE.

Melissa makes "mini-loaves". From all the talk of this, I expected TINY loaves....she said to use 3/4 lb of dough. I've NEVER weighed dough....but we guessed that a "typical loaf" is probably 1 1/2 lbs....so I decided to try this with my typical recipe....aiming for 2 mini-loaves instead of one large.

Wednesday, I took my Seven Grain Bread dough, and instead of 4 BIG loaves, I made 2 BIG loaves and then added Cinnamon, raisins and Rapadura to 1/4 of the dough and Italian herbs to the other 1/4 of the dough. I aimed for 2 mini-loves of each of the speciality breads.  Here are the MINI- which are quite a bit bigger than I envisioned when folks talked about "cute little loaves".

When the slices are stacked you can see the mini- is much smaller than my typical size loaf.

I began to think that the mini- is a good size for the youngers for sandwiches....and that with Mike and the older ones gone we really don't go through bread as fast as we once did.....I think it would be good to have varieties of several smaller loaves available (that said the kids ate BOTH giant loaves in less than 24 hours).

Thursday I set out to bake 4 Seven Grain mini-loaves and 2 doz hamburger buns. My Bosch malfunctioned....HOT dough, couldn't even handle and oil in the dough.....and I forgot salt....but I did end up with flat bread and mini loaves. LOL  On the left is my typical sized loaf, in the middle I used 1/2 the dough, and a bit less on the right.....I think I like the middle sized loaf.

And now the freezer is stocked with mini Cinnamon Raisin bread, Italian Herb loaves, flat buns and a couple of seven grain loaves. Note the cracking in the mini-loaves....must be the overheated dough or lack of salt....but it still eats. LOL  Thus ends my weekly bread saga.

Choosing Joy!
©2010 D.R.G.
~Coram Deo~
Living all of life before the face of God...

Toy Story 3

Toy Story One entered our lives in 1995....Jared was 1 yo, Jamin was 4 - the perfect Toy Story Age.....I can remember scouring the shelves for a Woody....ah the fun memories.

Today, Toy Story 3 hit Misawa Air Base. We will be out all day tomorrow. I dreaded trying an Opening Day showing, but knew if I didn't do it today, we might miss a movie the kids were looking forward to (Ok, me too). We went to the 3 p.m. showing. No line at all, lots of space in the theater......

Great movie....I knew it might tug on the heart strings a bit as Andy is going away...but I was NOT prepared to have a memory loop of Jamin at four running through my mind during the whole movie....and I lost it totally when Mom saw his empty room, Andy driving away......Ah man...growing up is GREAT and we long for our children to be functioning members of society....but  I sure miss those days when we had all the chicks at home in the nest.

If you had a Woody Lover, your husband is deployed and your Woody Lover is thousands of miles away....take kleenex....but come to think of it....many with children in college wouldn't have the excuse of a pre-schooler to take the movie to and may not even go. ::snort::  I think God is letting me live a rather extended childhood through the past few decades. LOL

Choosing Joy!
©2010 D.R.G.
~Coram Deo~
Living all of life before the face of God...

Thursday....

Some days don't go as planned...but they turn out to be good days anyway.

I planned to start yogurt, run Nolan to the dentist, go to the lake and swim with friends, bake more bread, cook dinner and enjoy the night with Akikosan learning Japanese.

I started the yogurt and added the starter at the wrong spot. It doesn't work if you don't do it right.  ::snort::

We ran to the dentist and it took longer than expected for them to extract two baby teeth that would not come out and were causing Nolan to grow two sets of teeth.

Arielle learned today the person in the front must be ready to snap photos when Mom says, "Get a shot of that." I'll be sharing her shorts later on - funny signs. But this photo makes me smile....

While at the dentist I heard from the folks we bought the van from. Pass and ID had told them that it still wasn't in my name. Back to pass and ID. No CLUE what was up there. LOL But all is fine.

Headed for the lake and got an AMAZING lightening, thunderstorm...buckets of rain...felt like W TX. Someone told me she's been here 1 1 /2 and they'd never had a thunderstorm until the one a few weeks ago.....and I LOVE them.  Detoured from lake to BX. Left purchases from BX in commissary. I called right away and they had been moved from the check stand where I left them....Second time we've "lost" things in the commissary. Guess we need to be vigilant in there.

I baked bread and forgot the salt.....well....we'll eat it and it will taste fine...but isn't right.

Akiko taught us about Tanabata, we made paper cranes and lanterns and told her all about our trip to the zoo - in JAPANESE....that was a challenge. LOL  I'll blog about Tanabata later....maybe tomorrow. BUT - look at the fun treat she brought us tonight.

Coke and 7-up flavored Kit Kats. I really need to start a list of all the flavors we've tried....banana, apple, cherry, strawberry, white chocolate....

In addition to Cola Kit Kats, Stacia discovered she "loves" roasted peppers, onions, asparagus and zucchini today.

Choosing Joy!
©2010 D.R.G.
~Coram Deo~
Living all of life before the face of God...