valentine's day, date nights, and a video

For our last date night, Chad and I went out to a Japanese restaurant on Blue Street. Not sure why it's called that, but it's a pretty happening street in downtown Yokosuka.
We sat in a room with a curtain and you had to take off your shoes and sit on the cushions. The cool thing was that there was space under the table for your legs unlike other Japanese restaurants that simply have a table about 12" off the floor. This way my legs did not go to sleep! There were two other tables in the room but no one wanted to sit with the Americans so we got the room all to ourselves :)
the sushi platter with raw fish, which I actually tried (but still could not get over the fact it was raw). I am however, warming up to the rolled sushi without raw fish, which previously I did not even like.
Sake jug (didn't particularly like this, though just like wine, there are many varieties to try).
Yaki-tori (literally grilled-chicken, are you amazed at my Japanese skills???) These were my favorite. Or maybe I should say the apple chu-hi was my favorite. Can't go wrong with those!
Chad also took Abby out on a date last week, they went to Daiei for dinner at Mister Donut and some shopping (Abby's pick)



A few days before Valentine's Day, I helped the kids make Valentine's mailboxes. Abby had seen this idea at library storytime and wanted to make one. The problem was that they weren't going to be getting many Valentine's to fill it up with! So the day before I went shopping and bought all sorts of treats and made them cards and filled up their mailboxes and left them out for them to see in the morning. Abby was very excited, Jamie was a bit more coy...

Abby is so proud of her "fancy" bag:
This is what Jamie put on the back of his (a big frown face with the words "I AM MAD"), just to make sure that everyone knew he was NOT excited about Valentine's Day!
But I think he enjoyed it, and he even put some red heart stickers on the front...
And Chad brought home flowers for both Abby and I, and again, she was SUPER excited!

Here is a cute video of Tristan playing with Abby while she's in the shower and he's outside the door, nevermind the fact that at one point Abby is literally eating the soap-scum off the shower door, ew...

misc and some videos

These hawks will snatch food right out of your hand, and we've seen it happen (which is why there's a warning sign). And I thought crows and seagulls were bad!

speaks for itself...
this is hilarious (are they imagining themselves as stew?):
This is the stroller sleeping bag that we bought for Tristan:
We love it because now he can't take off his shoes. And the bottom portion folded-over portion will also clasp around the neck and cover the upper body as well when it's really cold.

This is just a random video of lunchtime around here. The kids laugh at Tristan constantly. Jump to about 50 seconds and then 2:15 if you don't want to watch the whole thing.

Here Tristan is learning how to play catch (or fetch) with me:

Tristan loves to get into the recycling (and the garbage too but that's not worth taking a video of, especially the time he was chewing on eggshells):

This is the most that people told us it snowed in Yokosuka, that is until it snowed the next time and dumped a few inches (it all melted the next day). It must be a strange winter.

Enoshima boardwalk

Just outside of Enoshima Aquarium is the beach and nice boardwalk area.
We walked to the right, to the end of the boardwalk where there was a nice little park.
Looking to the left you can see Enoshima Island, which we plan to explore another day...
I loved the (bamboo?) fences that seperated the beach from the boardwalk. We took some nice sunset portraits there.




There were many people out surfing and paddle-boarding although there was hardly a wave to be seen.
And then there was this odd statue (yes, he's naked):


Laters!

Happy valentine's day from Tristan

Tristan says "thank you jamie for leaving your chocolates on the couch"

Enoshima aquarium

From Kamakura, we took the small one-track Enoden line train to the Enoshima station.
On our walk, Chad picked up another questionable street-food item:
The aquarium was not cheap (about $60 for our family), but it was really nice. You can see the school of fish here and the rays and other various fish they had in their large tank. We also saw two lion fish (remember that on our snorkel tour Carrie?).
Jamie had a great time :)
Especially since he got to see these, which we have a book about back at home. Japanese spider crabs, which can get up to 6 ft long. These were probably about 3-4 ft?
more of the large tank:
Some cool jellyfish tanks.
Tristan got to see fish too!
We were all really excited to see the dolphin show, I mean who doesn't love a dolphin show? But when the show started it was not quite what we expected. Girls dressed in odd costumes, donning some sort of hoop-nets, did some weird dancing and singing to some interesting music. (Sorry for the poor pictures, it was all backlit as the sun was beginning to set behind the stage.)
Close-up of one of the girls/trainers.
The dolphins jumped to their dancing.
Then another girl came out in a giant gerbil ball that floated on the water, guided by a dolphin.
And they did some more dancing/singing/ridiculousness.
And dolphins performed a bit more.
Then at the end they disappeared and came back with no hoop-nets (symbolizing perhaps, freeing the dolphins from the nets???) and they danced while hundreds of bubbles were released into the area.
And then they jumped into the water and it was over and all the Japanese were very impressed. Chad had to remind me that we were in Japan and I had to hold it together to not laugh out loud at the whole thing. But the kids seemed to enjoy it so it was all good.

Sized and sharpened for the web

Did you notice a difference between the three photos? The first one is not sharpened at all, it is exported directly from my raw file. The second is sized and sharpened specifically for the web. The third is sharpened specifically for printing and then exported at a smaller size for blogger. Only problem is I don't know if it's really that worth it to spend the extra time on each picture, to have three different versions for different things when they really don't look that much different! What do you think?