New Years in Nihon!

Hope you all are enjoying your week of fun and festivities with family and friends! We've managed to have a pretty fun and relaxing week here in Japan. We've had several dinner parties with friends and Josh has been able to work some shorter days which has given us time to go on adventures and relax some too.

We're on our way to Tokyo for an overnight venture tonight. Hopefully they will still have Christmas lights up around the city...and maybe we'll catch a bit of the pre-New Year's Eve hub-bub as well! New Year's is the biggest celebration of the year in Japan. Many of their customs and traditions are linked to the Buddhist religion -

http://mothra.rerf.or.jp/ENG/Hiroshima/Festivals/27.html

From what I've learned from my Japanese students, this link seems to provide a good overview of the traditions that will occur in homes all over Japan throughout the next week or so - it's pretty fascinating.

One of my students has invited us over for New Year's food (Shogatsu dishes), so I hope that we can join her family to enjoy some of the Japanese tastes of the season. She doesn't cook anytime during the year - except for New Year's, so it is a VERY big deal! They will celebrate from January 1st - 3rd and most businesses and shops will be closed during that time.

Also, a very popular tradition in Japan is to send New Year's cards (Nengajo). It's similar to sending Christmas cards, but they are almost always post cards and usually themed around the lunar symbol of the year - this year is the "Year of the Wild Boar" - most people include a short personal message and a wish for good luck in the new year. The craziest thing is that if a person gets their cards to the Japanese post office by December 24th - they are GUARANTEED to be delivered on the morning of January 1st! Everyone recieves a large stack of cards on that day - it's the only mail delivered!

Happy New Year to all of you! Love, Rebecca and Josh

Christmas in Japan!

I thought you might enjoy a few pictures from the TODD School Christmas Party. It was hosted at one of the clubs on base and all of the high school and adult students at my school were invited to attend. In all, there were about 80 people there for an evening that included a "traditional" American Christmas meal (complete with ice cream and apple pie!), karaoke Christmas carols, and a BINGO gift exchange. I was the MC for the evening and Josh was gracious enough to attend the party with me! It ended up being a very nice evening and all the students seemed to really enjoy themselves!


Teaching the girls at our table about the traditional American foods. (sorry about my crazy eyes!)


My students from the City Office, with their rendition of "Jingle Bells."


TODD School teachers leading the Christmas Sing-a-long!

Our holiday home...

Just a few pictures of our little house and the decorations we have up for Christmas!


Rejoice with us for Emmanuel has come!


Our "Messiah Vine" tells about Christ's lineage and the prophesies leading up to His birth. (sorry about the rest of our kitchen clutter!)...doesn't Banny's painting look great too!?!?!?


The stockings were hung by the "pantry" with care...


Okay, so this has nothing to do with Christmas, but it's the orchid that Josh gave to me on the day we found out we were going to have a baby! It's lovely!

just to clarify...

Just so that no one else get's confused...the "little rascal" growing inside of me is neither a tapeworm (as Josh's dad posited!), nor is it stomach cancer (as I originally thought in my usual hypochondriac way!)...it's a BABY! Looks like he or she will be coming to a Japan near you in July of 2007 - YIKES!

Wait, there's more!

Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you about meal times! All of the officers eat in the "wardroom" for meals. Every meal time falls in about a one hour time slot, so you go down to the wardroom at some point during that hour and look in the window. If there are empty seats, you go in and sit down (there's room for about 15 people). Before you sit down, you have to ask the highest ranking person at the table "May I join you please, ______ (whatever their title is)." Then you have a little menu of things to choose from for the day (spaghetti, pizza, fish, brussel sprouts, soup, that kind of thing). You circle what you want, and then someone brings it to you. There was always something playing on the big plasma screen TV, so mostly people would watch that and make small-talk. I've heard on other ships that sometimes the atmosphere can be intense depending on the tension among the officers, but it was pretty low-key on my ship. One night we had a formal dinner where we wore ties and had filet mignon and lobster. That was very high class; no wine though! My tie might have been a little too long, however - what do you think?
All of the officer's meetings are also in the wardroom, so after meals, the table got cleaned off and became a meeting table. Unfortunately, since there wasn't much room at the table, if you didn't get there early for a meeting (or you weren't the Captain or Executive Officer or a Department Head) you ended up on the surrounding couches or standing up! Bye for now!

Merry almost Christmas!!

My rebuttal to Josh's comments about me sitting on the couch and eating bon-bons is as follows: yes, I admit to spending a bit more time during the day being horizontal - trying NOT to get sick, since I've been feeling nauseous for the better part of everyday during the last few weeks. And as for bon-bons...none for me, thanks, I prefer saltines and ginger ale!!
Anyway, I think I've also been feeling a bit sad about being so far from home for the holidays, so that has made me a bit less enthusiastic about Japan as well. We are trying to plan some dinners and dessert parties with friends...that is, when I can handle thinking about or looking at food!
Our Christmas tree is looking festive and it makes our cold, drafty house feel a bit more cozy! We've got all of our Christmas packages off to the States and are finishing up our Christmas cards now too. We'll try to make the best of our quiet little Christmas in Japan...mix some of our family traditions with a bit of sushi and see what we come up with!


I know, the picture doesn't do it justice...but it's a very cute tree!!

A sailor's life for me. . .

Sorry that it's been so long between blogs - Rebecca has had a little rascal growing inside her for the past 8 weeks and due to her busy schedule of lying on the sofa and eating bon bons, hasn't had time to discuss our Japanese exploits. Therefore, I thought I'd interject with a reflection on life at sea. Here's my reflection - avoid it at all costs (just kidding. . . kind of). However, for some of us, we cannot avoid at any cost. So for you who are going out to sea on a big gray metal boat in the near future, here's what it's like (at least if you're a physician): On October 17, I showed up at the ship at about 0600 in the morning with my big bag, filled mostly with potato chips and underwear. By 0800, we were leaving the base, on our way to an empty expanse of water in the middle of the ocean somewhere. The first two days were spent taking anti-nausea medication and trying to sleep. When I woke up, I would eat potato chips. After the first two days, though, I was feeling better. I would spend several hours each day seeing patients who thought they were sick (they usually weren't), and responding to 30 or 40 emails from the other ships in the squadron and providers on shore with medical questions. Over the first two weeks, I did have to send several patients by helicopter to the nearby aircraft carrier for further evaluation, which was exciting (this degree of acuity is unusual, however, so I think the crew all thought I was paranoid). After the first couple of weeks, everyone with minor complaints had been evaluated, so then I really had hardly any patients to see on the ship, although there was always plenty of Smallville to watch on the ship's TV network.
I spent most of the days doing my shipboard coursework (I have to do a bunch of online lessons to qualify as a "Surface Warfare Medical Department Officer" and get to wear a cool pin on my uniform), participating in meetings and drills on the ship (trying to learn about ship stuff by osmosis) and watching TV. I stayed in a little tiny cabin right next to the pilot house (where the ship is driven from) so I could walk outside whenever I wanted and look at the sky. I stayed out of the pilot house during the high tension exercises when everyone was yelling at each other. I also went to the Bible Study that Chaplain Barry ran. She is the Destroyer Squadron chaplain (a lieutenant like myself) and she and I work together often. I played music on my guitar for her worship services; I'm sure she enjoyed my incessant critiquing of the Joel Osteen book on which she based her Bible study (but she was a good sport). I actually did a reasonable amount of Christian mentoring to some of the young guys on the ship, which Chaplain Barry appreciated.
Almost every day, there were activities for improving morale, and I participated in a lot of them, since most involved food. There was Americain Idol (a play on the ship's name, USS JOHN S MCCAIN); I have never heard worse singing. All of the tone deaf men on the ship somehow made it to the finals; as far as I can tell, none of the ship's 3 women participated. There were a couple of "Steel Beach Picnics" - grilling burgers on the flight deck (yum!), ice cream socials, buffalo wings nights, nacho nights and movie nights to name a few. I also worked on the computer on a song I had written a couple of years ago (if you click on my Josh's Pics and Tunes link to the right, it is the one titled "Song for a Funeral"), I somehow managed to completely delete the other song I was working on (curses!!!) so I didn't get as much music done as I wanted. It was funny to find how badly I had balanced the song when I got home; trying to carefully mix the bass and treble turns out to be near impossible with 100 decibels of ship noise in the background! Some Navy things I did while underway included shooting a big gun off of the top of the ship (the officers made fun of me for "missing the water" - I'm sure I hit it eventually!) and giving commands to the helmsman to drive the ship during man overboard drills and replenishment exercises (hooking up hoses to a big ship next to us to get gas and vittles - see above). The crew was so excited to have a doctor and chaplain driving the ship that we were featured in an article in the base newspaper (see article below - click it to enlarge). I should point out that the quotes in the article are significantly embellished - giving commands to the helmsman being my best experience in the Navy? Not quite!
As you have probably read elsewhere on this blog, two weeks into our trip, we were supposed to go to Hong Kong, but the best "port call" ever got cancelled after two days of sitting outside of the harbor waiting for a typhoon to pass (annoyingly, it just sat there until we had to leave). Unfortunately, some of the spouses of sailors had already arrived in Hong Kong before we were diverted; fortunately, I told Rebecca not to get on the plane within hours of her leaving. As Rebecca has already told you, we got to go to Okinawa instead for 4 days. The next 10 days were spent in formation with over 100 American and Japanese ships and subs and hundreds of planes and helicopters doing "AnnualEx," which is an annual training exercise involving two teams of American and Japanese ships working together in a simulated battle to blow each other up. This was, of course, very intense for all of the surface warfare types, but didn't involve me at all, so it was a little anti-climactic for me. There was one part called PhotoEx (creative, right) where approximately 40 of the ships and a bunch of planes bunched together for an aerial photo. That was pretty crazy because all of the ships were right on top of each other; seems like an inviting target for someone, doesn't it? After that, I got to go home because the ship was scheduled for repairs (all of the other ships were out for another month!). All in all, it was a good month - all of the crewmembers (from the junior enlisted sailors who taught me to play Call of Duty on XBox 360 to the Captain who instructed me on day to day shipboard activities) were very hospitable to me; they took me under their wing to make me just a little bit more of a surface warfare officer than the seasick first-timer I had been a month earlier.
The Captain of the ship I was on (who loves taking digital photos) gave me a tour yesterday of the ship under construction. Here I am after climbing the scaffolding to the top of the mast - don't I look cool!