Fall 2015

Post-boards exploration of Shibuya Crossing

Man, time flies when you let life happen! (Cue the perpetual "blog deja vu" that is our inability to post with regularity) Here's a quick-ish recap of the past three months or so:

--September happily brought the arrival of our household goods! Everything arrived here in one piece and it was so nice to get some of the much needed items back. In true Taylor fashion, we're still working on hanging up most of the pictures/frames and have been procrastinating on the office space, but it's feeling so much more like home. Once it's all completely done, we'll give you a video tour (probably in like 2 months knowing us!).

Tigre happily enjoying the arrival of our household goods

--For pretty much the rest of September Brian was studying his butt off for his Pediatric board certification exam. It was kind of a big deal and ate up a lot of free time. We did manage to still have quite a bit of fun in spare moments, but no big trips or major adventures since he had to keep studying away. Spoiler alert: He passed!!!! No more big tests for a long, long time.

--October included our first trip to Tokyo and mainland Japan.  Tokyo highlights were Shibuya Crossing (the famous pedestrian scramble), a giant (lifesized) Gundam statue, an Oktoberfest beer garden in the shadow of the Gundam statue, a cat cafe (look it up), and the Imperial Palace grounds.  Later in the month we went up to Osaka and Kyoto.  We joined up our friend Drew Hill and met him at Hogsmeade....at Harry Potter World, Japan!  We also got to go Back to The Future and it turns out Japanese Biff Tannen is just as much of a jerk as American Biff Tannen.  We then sampled Osakan delicacies like Takoyaki (fried octopus balls), Okonomiyaki (best described as a dinner omelette), Kushikatsu (fried stuff on sticks), and Brian's favorite, fish shaped pastries filled with bean paste.  We then took a train out to Kyoto which is basically the cultural capital of Japan.  We went to many temples like the Fushimi Inari shrine (known as the temple of the thousand Torii gates), the hillside temple Kiyomizu-dera, and the bamboo forest Arashiyama.  We also visited the old imperial palace "Nijo Castle" that had amazing carvings, murals, and nightingale floors (the floorboards sing out when you step on them).  An amazing trip.

--In November, Maureen started work. It turns out that teaching Spanish to Kindergarten-aged students is a whole different beast than the middle school and high school ages she was used to, but she's liking it so far and it seems to be going well. At the end of the month we hosted Thanksgiving for our little cul-de-sac.  We ended up with 9 families coming by and everyone brought a ton of food!  The counters runnethed over with smoked turkey, roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, homemade cranberry sauce, gravy, several stuffings, green bean casserole, cornbread, pasta salad, and a variety of pies.  It was a blast and got to know our neighbors better as we stayed up late putting the new firepit to use in the backyard (best new discovery being our friend from Arkansas knowing all of the words to "today was a good day").  November also saw us stay up until 2am one night to try for Comic con tickets and we got 'em!  We'll be putting the International in San Diego International Comic Con in 2016.  We should make it back to San Diego for about a week in July 2016.

--December has seen us continue our tradition of popping a bottle of champagne and putting up the christmas tree (Brian NEEDS the bubbles to become properly motivated to trim a tree).  We went to the Hospital holiday party, which was surprisingly fun.  Maureen won a massage from a "12 days of Christmas" scavenger hunt (unusual but fun game), food was great, and everyone was cleaned up nice.  Then we had our first inaugural Pred-Nog party.  A friend of ours apparently remembers always watching Arnold Schwarzenegger's critically acclaimed feature film "The Predator" around Christmas time while drinking egg-nog.  This seemed like a good excuse for a party, so we invited over a bunch of friends and sampled various 'nogs while watching The Predator in alternating states of awe and amusement.  I say various 'nogs because Okinawans do not carry cartons of egg-nog in their grocery stores and the Military Commissary has not carried it either.  However, the military liquor stores do happen to have multiple bottles of alcoholic egg-nog from your typical household brands of "Old Nelson", "Christian Brothers", and "McCormick's" (JK I have never heard of any of these before).  Our friend Mel found a recipe and home made some egg-nog, and her's was by far the best.  A successful night all the way around.