She loves to swim

Here's a video from Mia's swim class last Thursday - the kid is a born swimmer, she loves it. She's improving too.

Whale Sharks! Blog!

My dive buddy from class went diving with whale sharks today (largest fish on the planet - about 7m long). I'm going to see if I can put a link to his pictures here:

http://share.shutterfly.com/action/pictures?a=67b0de21b35360304522&sid=8AatGLdu1cuHnw

If that doesn't work for you, whoever you are, email me so I can pull it. I'll be doing this soon despite the $115 pricetag - gotta save up for that experience before I go!

I also found an incredible local blog - http://okimama.wordpress.com/
HOLY COW wealth of information! Categorized beautifully with pictures, directions to places - wow, I am more than happy I found this only 6 weeks in!

Off Subject

Ok, this isn't normally what I'd use a blog post for, but this video is really cool. Hang in there, I know it's 8 minutes long, but it's fascinating. Ryan, I think the guy that shot this sounds like you a little bit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM

Things are pretty much status quo - Mia's in swim class every day for a few weeks, Craig is at a seminar this week with a bunch of guys (at at least one woman) of his rank. We have been enjoying local food, meeting some more neighbors & stuff, and I just bought tickets to "Okinapa" - VERY excited for that! ( I hear from everyone that has been here for past Okinapa wine festivals that it kicks butt!) It's $25 a head (adult thing) for wine tasting, amazing food, and they sell the wine you taste also, and give you a 10% discount on mixed cases. One of the tickets I bought is for a friend from my dive class who even offered to be the DD. YESSSS!

This weekend Craig will probably play golf at some point. Saturday morning I have to take Mia to the family practice building (doctor) to get a form filled out that says she has all the immunizations & such she needs to attend school. Hopefully she won't need any shots, but I've prepared her for the possibility.

Otherwise, things are great! Some pictures soon - a weekend is coming and I plan on getting out to do something fun - Obon & Eisa festivals are this month - that means lots of dancing, drumming and musical performances - I'm bringing the SLR for that stuff!

I Predict I Will Become A Dive Bum

This weekend I did my first 4 dives - 2 on Saturday at the Kadena Steps, and 2 on Sunday off a boat in Ginowan. (I recommend a boat over walking out on coral, I have a big target bruise on my calf to prove why...)

Loved it. It's peaceful and fun down there, I was comfortable in the warm water with a very good instructor and a cool dive buddy in my class. The visibility was pretty crappy - mostly still due to the after-effects of the typhoon. (max was the very first dive, 25-30 foot vis)

But, we saw a variety of fun creatures. I don't have a waterproof case for my camera (yet...) so deal with the fact that I had to put pictures from the web in here to show you what I saw.

Yesterday off the boat in Ginowan, we saw 2 of these guys...one of the most poisonous snakes that exists anywhere. I'm glad he was about 10-15 feet away from us!


Yep - "Gill" was everywhere. These are super cool, we saw families of them swimming around & eating coral.


Lots of puffer fish. Some are pretty large too - but they only puff out if you yank their tail, so we didn't do that.

THIS was a gorgeous fish. One of the prettiest we saw.

Yep - the first day I found Nemo - in an anemone. Very cool.
Lots of these - I called them referee fish.

These nearly glowed in the dark down there.
But THIS blue one took the cake. WOW was this sucker bright. In turquoise waters, this guy seemed to have a light bulb inside of him. Amazing.

Lots of these butterfly fish - really pretty.


And tons of sea urchins, anemones, pretty coral - and one poking out head of a moray eel - orange guy. Very cool. I'm excited to get some more diving done here, I'm glad I got certified early. I hope Craig can drop the golf thing for long enough to get certified & come with me. Unfortunately Mia will still be too young for a while.

Other news? Not much - I was gone from the early morning until after 3 both days, so I just came home and relaxed. It's still hot. We're happy to have our stuff. And after a brief time of sleeping on the mattress on her floor (due to the movers losing the 8 bolts that hold her bed together), Mia should be on a bed tonight in a put-together room. My parents were kind enough to go to Ikea and find the bolts to Mia's discontinued bed and mail them out to us. THANK YOU!

Gotta go, she'll be up soon and then we need to start our day.

Ladies....

I had the best pedicure of my life today- and I now know why all the American women on this island talk about Cocok. I made appointments for Mia and me, and we arrived at noon. They sat us down, and gave us a binder full of nail design pictures. Seriously - as many pages as a magazine. They had separate nails painted with designs for kids (to include butterflies, Spongebob, an ice cream cone, etc.), and for everyone else (including kids if they wanted) they had everything from seasonal pictures to every color shape & size flower imaginable - and more than that. Amazing. I had a 20-minute foot & calf massage, Mia had one too - she really loved it. Here she is with her feet in the pink water, but when she was done she hopped back up in the comfy recliner to get her massage & painted toes. These women are artists - they can do ANYTHING on your toes.

Mia picked glitter pink with dark pink hearts with wings on them. First - have a laugh at how much her toes look like mine (oh yeah, I'm subjecting you to my toes below...), and then realize that the woman painted these hearts with wings on EVERY tiny toenail - She didn't screw up either!

I went a bit more unusual with a cool flowing design I saw. Next time maybe just some nice hibiscus flowers or something, but hey - first time there, what the heck?
So - it's not a once a week thing, too expensive, but yes, I will definitely treat myself to this once in a while! Totally worth the splurge.

Gentlemen....

The Banyan Tree Golf Course on Kadena Air Base. The location hereto forth to be known as "Where Craig caught the golf bug". Clubs are going to be the next major purchase for him - I guess he'll wait to get scuba certified so that he can dump money into golf equipment. They do also have a par 3 9-hole course (maybe for Mia & I one day).


You can see the driving range in these 2:




This is the Tee House restaurant overlooking the course - 5 minutes from our apartment, and very good! Great lunch spot.

And So It Begins

What a week we have ahead of us! First of all, thanks to everyone who complimented the photos of the water via comments & emails. It's fun to shoot, and a bit easier to get good shots with thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment. Also, we shot those in RAW format, and manipulating them with Adobe® Lightroom is OH so fun - it'll be even more fun when I have my manual with me to reference (see "Household Goods" below). The water is great, but it's 86 degrees in there, so not really that much relief. And hosing down the kid & us after getting out is a bit of a challenge too - at a tucked away beach with no fresh water faucets close-by. And of course, the moment you're out of the warm water you start sweating profusely again, and now all the sand is sticking to you.... you get the picture.

Scuba Class, Day 1
I began last night, Sunday evening, at 3pm. The night previous Craig and I were lying in bed and he said, "Are you excited for diving?"
"Yeah," I replied, after having finished chapters 1-3 of the book I had to read before day 1 (which was about 2/3 of the book). "Just want to be as safe of a diver as I can be and really learn all this stuff. Maybe a little nervous."
"Well," replied my wise hubby, "Les and Wendi did it, and they were probably drunk the whole time while they were on that vacation, so you should be fine." We had a good laugh at that one. I put this dig in my blog, not to insult them, but pretty sure that neither of them read this regularly, so now I guess we'll see.

First class - I arrived at 3 for a classroom session and finished at 8. I did NOT think I'd be there for FIVE HOURS or I would've brought a freaking cheeseburger with me! We actually didn't start until 3:30 because we waited for 2 no-shows for that long.

The instructor, Bill, a Marine with 20 years of diving experience is fun, amusing, and will be a great teacher - though quite VERBOSE. There are two 11-year-old girls in our class, which we've all been told will slow us down in the pool and on our dives. Fantastic, because in the classroom that shouldn't have made a difference but it DID because one of the girls has a mouthy diver father with her who needed to put his two cents in on everything the instructor said. THAT guy is going to annoy the heck out of me for the rest of the week - guaranteed.

At the beginning of the class, Bill said that if everyone wanted to pitch in we could rent a boat to go out to a really cool dive site for our dives, but only if everyone agreed they had the money to pitch in. UNFAIR! Of course I do, but there are 3 Marines in the class (I'd say E2s or so, which translates to starving teenagers who don't have much money to their name) who probably won't be able to afford it. Just my luck. But - whatever, I'm there to learn and get certified, right? I have 3 years to dive - minus any time I might be pregnant of course (I said "might" - in the future, not now, stop speculating - I want to have cocktails and eat sushi for a while).

We watched a video of the first chapter of the book - nearly verbatim. (Yes, about half of the 10 or so students in the class didn't read or do the chapter reviews before class, so that slowed us down too.) Then we went over it and took a quiz on which I got none wrong. 5 minute break. Then we spent about 1 1/2 hours going through the Tsunami Gear dive shop and learned about & saw all the gear. Interesting, educational, and informative - but at least 30 minutes more than needed to be dedicated to it was in there with funny quips and stories. I did learn that I should buy ALL my gear here if I want to keep doing this - it's HUNDREDS of dollars less than in the states due to government subsidies. (For those who know the equipment, a top of the line BCD is $300-$500 here, in the states upwards of $800-$1,000, or a titanium regulator is $365 where I think you'll spend $500-$800 in the states for it.) Then we went BACK to the classroom, another video, 2 more quizzes, and at 8:00 the class voted to go over chapter 3 on Tuesday when we're back in the classroom.

Today (Monday) I have to swim 200 meters (no time limit) and float for 10 minutes. No big, then we do some pool work with the equipment for the first time. I did already buy the mask, fins & snorkel, they provide the other stuff for now. Tuesday more class time where we cover the last 2 chapters of the book. Wednesday in the pool again for more practice and some emergency situation procedures. Saturday & Sunday are dive days. Very excited for that!

Mia's Swim Class
For the next two weeks Mia has swim class at 5:30 - Craig has to take her b/c my scuba class is at 6 - whoops... but oh well, Mia will be back in swim! She's so excited. The following 2 weeks she has swim class at 10:30 b/c I can take her.

Household Goods
AND today they're coming to get our borrowed furniture (2 beds and a couch) and we sleep on air mattresses tonight. Tomorrow (Tuesday) we get our household goods somewhere between 8-5. HOPEFULLY closer to 8! OUR OWN BEDS! OUR COUCH! MY KITCHEN STUFF! It's going to be like Chrismakkah! We haven't seen our things since May 30th - I think I've forgotten have the crap that's even in those crates. I'm very excited - so are Craig & Mia. Back to big head TV!

Ok, it's 7:40 and they might come as early as 8am - gotta go get ready and take the sheets off the beds!