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What a fabulous weekend! On Saturday, Lori and I went to children’s Halloween parties with my JTE Satomi. Although the kids from the first party were wild and out of control, at the second party the kids were older, it was calmer and—more fun to be honest!

I’ve been going to these Birthday, Halloween and Christmas parties for a year now and I was always concerned about the only boy in the class. He was too shy to speak Japanese with me never mind English, but on Saturday he was like a new kid altogether. I could see so much improvement in not only his English, but also his attitude toward English. We broke into groups for Charades and he decided to be team all by himself. He remembered the Halloween vocabulary, did great gestures on his “acting turns” and appeared to be enjoying himself immensely. I told him how impressed I was with his improvement and he smiled big and said, “Yes, I’ve become accustomed to English class now.” In Japanese, of course, but I was still so proud of him.

Saturday night Lori and I hung out together. We watched the Japanese version of “Shall We Dance” (thanks for leaving it in the apartment Yuka!), but we couldn’t stay quiet through the whole movie. If it wasn’t me comparing the Japanese version to the Gere/Lopez version (for Lori’s benefit), it was Lori commenting on the dance steps and explaining dance terms to me. Afterwards I was able to show Lori a new restaurant in Arikawa (we’ve got to get her out of George’s!) and we had two piping hot plates of sara udon (both the karikari and futomen kind) ordered niku nashi de (without meat) for vegetarian Lori. (I think more of this paragraph is inside parenthesis than outside them.)

As I was driving back home I emailed my J-boy quickly to say I was going home. When I reached Urakuwa (his town) I pulled into a parking lot ‘cause I know it’s not safe to compose emails while driving, and he drove out to me to talk for a few minutes. We had such a good talk and I realized we should do it more often. We just have been watching a lot of movies and TV shows recently and it’s not very interactive. He’s always downloading episodes of Lost or recording shows like Friends or Dharma and Greg for me because I can’t get them on my basic channels. Inevitably we always have a lot of TV to “catch up on.” I don't ask him to do it, he’s just sweet like that and knows I enjoy my American TV.

My seed with a message sprouted.

How do they do this?

Now, this will make you laugh; ironically when Ma came over last night he ended up teaching me how to use my VCR timer to record shows when I’m not home. It’s actually very easy, I don’t know why I didn’t try before, but now I’ll only have more things to watch in my spare time!! And we’re trying to spend less time in front of the TV?!? This week especially, with my AMAZING FUN-FILLED AND WONDERFUL package from America and “sick days” at home, I’ve been a serious couch-potato. Despite stopping all after-school exercise, I still haven’t recovered from my minor case of bronchitis! The medication is starting to work, though, I can feel it.

There was a scare this weekend that the pool was going to be closing down. I found out Friday night and spent the whole weekend calling friends, trying to find out if the rumor was true. Luckily it’s not—Aqua Blue’s not going anywhere—but can you imagine if it did? My life revolves around that gym in the winter. If it were to close I’d sit around eating bon-bons in my apartment all winter, gain a thousand pounds and go crazy from boredom! That’s how important Aqua Blue is to me!!

My beautiful pool (which I haven’t visited in over two weeks!).

On Sunday I went scuba diving again with Yoshida-sensei. I was pretty worried about my ears equalizing. The problem is not a head cold so theoretically it should be okay but it wasn’t okay last week and I had to ascend early.

Sunday afternoon the sun was shining, but there was a nasty wind blowing off the ocean and it was really tempting to turn around without even trying a dive. I didn’t want to disappoint my teacher by bringing him all the way out here and gear up in the cold wind, only for my ears to not equalize once in the water. But Yoshida-sensei is so patient and kind I felt comfortable being honest with him if there were any problems.

I took descending really slowly and cleared my ears properly before they got blocked. For the first time since I started training for my license I felt calm and confident under water. Until today I had always been a little nervous taking my second stage out of my mouth underwater, removing my mask and opening my eyes underwater—carefully breathing out of just my mouth so I didn’t inhale water through the nose—and then performing all these tasks like removing my scuba unit and taking off the weight belt. On top of it, there was a damsel fish who was very interested in me and wouldn’t go away.

We did two dives together, the second dive was mostly just for fun and we went around looking for fish, sea slugs and interesting plants. We saw two huge tai (my favorite fish to eat) and cleaner fish swimming around them eating the… ocean stuff that grows on bigger fish, whatever that’s called. It’s quite rare to see cleaner fish because they usually hang out on large fish, and large fish like tai don’t usually come near divers. It was very interesting.

Again we had two huge damsel fish chasing us as we swam around coral looking for sea slugs. Damsel fish are not aggressive, but they are poisonous so we didn’t really want them to hang out around us. We couldn't find a sea slug, but I still had a great time. We went about 12 meters on our second dive, which in the big scheme of things isn’t very deep, but I enjoyed playing around with my BC jacket and achieving neutral buoyancy with my lungs instead of the buoyancy control jacket. Bouyency always freaked me out a bit but I’m slowly getting the hang out it.

This week we have Thursday off so I’m having all the ALTs over to my place for dinner Wednesday night. The six of us haven’t gotten together since… I can’t even remember the last time, but I’m sure it was during summer vacation. I still feel like I don’t know the others very well, but I’m slowly getting to know them one-by-one.

Oh yeah. This is when the ALTs were together last. Here are some pictures from Kitty on Fukue from this summers Goto Block Party.

Me, Ian and Alistar

Look at clear that ocean is!

“Welcome to Hamaguri!”

Well, again, blogging at school so I should probably go do something more productive like send emails or something. I’ve got a four day week and a fun weekend on Ojika to look forward to!

Tom-foolery with Ojika’s One Woman Wonder (her words, not mine!) Dawn—thanks for your mail! I miss you so much and am excited about our plans this weekend!!! Luv, luv, luv you too!

Love, Sierra

Sent packages to Mama and Joelle from Okinawa and got pictures back!

Joelle opening her birthday package from Japan.

Joelle in her Okinawa T-shirt—but you hardly notice the T-shirt for all that LEG!!! Wowzers!

My Aunt Lynne with Joelle’s birthday cake! Them’s a lot of candles!! How old are you this year, Joe Joe?!?

Mama wearing her Okinawa T-shirt on some beautiful outdoor porch. Fall leaves are gorgeous!

// posted by Sierra @ 8:31 PM