Married Conversations

Me: "I swear, sometimes I feel like your mom having to take care of you."
Victor: "And sometimes I feel like your dad having to take care of you."

Touche.

Oh, marriage.

Happy Sunday from Cape Chinen

This weekend the city of Nanjo hosted the Okinawa Herb Festival. A whole festival dedicated to herbs?? Oh, Okinawa, I love how you celebrate everything. I'm serious. As I share this post for my "Happy Sunday" series, I was thinking of how coming here to this beautiful park on the ocean to look at herbs could be applied to what I usually write about on my Happy Sunday posts: celebrating God and this beautiful earth. 

I realize now how much the Okinawans teach me about being grateful. They remind me and make me more aware of the wonderful things of this earth like herbs. 

My favorite holiday is this week, and today at church we heard wonderful talks about gratitude. So that's what is on my mind. I just have so much to be grateful for. I don't participate in the daily sharing of things on facebook because I don't like over posting that much and clogging your feed, but let it be known that I AM GRATEFUL. Grateful for my life, for my God, for my family, and for so many more things.  

Hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving week! I love you all. And I am grateful for you too. 

Chatan Food Fest

We love the area that we live in. We live on a base that is a 5 minute bike ride to the beach, and is surrounded by so many yummy restaurants. This weekend, those restaurants competed in the Chatan Food Festival just down the road from our hood (our base). They all came with their signature dish, and for a $10 ticket, you get to try three dishes and vote for your favorite with the set of chopsticks they give you--it was so fun watching them try to persuade you to come to their stand. You can eat more and vote more if you want, but we just stuck to three.



First we just had to start with one of our favorite restaurants here, because they we giving out their incredibly delicious cheese fondue.

Then we tried out this yummy beef stir fry from a restaurant we've never heard of but plan to visit now! And after that we tried a really yummy garlic shrimp dish.

 We enjoyed watching some fine entertainment and spending time with fine friends, in some oh-so-fine weather. Okinawa in November=heavenly. That's pretty much the recipe for a very fine day overall.

Hope your Saturday is or was full of delicious food as well!

Stuff You Should Watch on Netflix

Sometimes trying to find great things to watch on Netflix is as useless as searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie. (If you know that movie quote, we are besties). Here are some of those lesser known diamonds in the rough that you should watch!

Arranged: 

My friend MaryAnn recommended this movie when she was visiting, and I LOVED it. It's such a sweet movie, and it opened up a culture to me that I really had no idea about: the way that Orthodox Jews and Muslims arrange marriage, which are both very different. I personally prefer the Jewish way, which is through a matchmaker. But anyway, you really should watch it. It's not a documentary. 

 Bernie:
How had I never heard of this movie??? I loved it. Jack Black was perfection. It's also a true story, which is crazy.

 Derek:
This is unlike anything Ricky Gervais has ever done. Well, it still is a mockumentary style, but Ricky Gervais's character is so different. He plays an autistic man who loves his job at a retirement home. This series is so funny, while being so thoughtful at the same time.

 Lars and the Real Girl:
Finally watched this movie! Ryan Gosling is awesome. This is probably my favorite movie with him, because he's not the hunky action guy he usually is.

 Outsourced:
Before it was a tv show, it was a movie, and a cute movie at that. It's about a guy whose company sends him to train employees in India since the company is outsourcing all their business there. Will he accidentally find love along the way?? ;)

And, my favorite documentaries on Netflix, ever since my other fav one got deleted (I HATE how netflix does that)---remember I wrote about it here??

Inside North Korea:

Mind blowing. Before I watched this a few years ago, I never realized the situation over there. 

China's Lost Girls:

All about the adoption of so many of China's children because of their laws concerning how many children you can have. It also talks about other interesting factors of those laws, like how for the first time in the history of ever, childhood obesity is on the rise there, since parents dote and spoil the one child they're allowed to have. So fascinating. Watch it!

Do you have any suggestions for me? Please share, because my husband works so much (poor guy), so I confess, I watch a lot of Netflix.

Life Lately

Fall in Okinawa means cooler temperatures. It means the water is colder, but I still try to snorkel when I can. 

 It means lovely bike rides at all times of the day rather than just at night because finally you won't be a sweating hot mess. 
It means Halloween parties with my little students. Dang, they're cute.


It means fall concerts: Smashmouth! Good blast from the past. When you live on a tiny island, you take any concert you can get. It also means fall plays at the high school (The Jungle Book) featuring one of my young women from church.

 Fall in Okinawa means the Marine Corps Birthday Ball. I finally got to wear my vintage 60s cocktail dress that I purchased last year while antiquing in Virginia with Holli. I have a love/hate relationship with the Marines, but it's definitely a plus to get to dress up and have a fancy night for a change. So happy birthday, Marines. And we even danced! It's s a big deal, since we're not big into dancing.

 So, fall in Okinawa is pretty good. If I could make it better, I would request that Victor wouldn't be working seven days a week and 12+ hours a day during November, but unfortunately, while the Marines throw a great birthday ball, they don't care much about normal working hours when a job needs to get done.

Happy fall to all of you!

Family Pictures 2013

We just took our engagement family photos for this year (remember my theory?), and I just thought I would share. It's pretty great when you can pick pretty much any spot on this small island and have a beautiful backdrop for photos. I love these pictures. I love my man. And we love Okinawa. 

We had to keep up with the tradition:

 And also a couple outtakes:

Classic faces on the left. Also, I only need a 12 inch stump to be taller than Victor. Short people problems. 

You Are What You Wear

Way way back in the myspace glory days, I wrote what could probably be called my first of many opinion blog posts. I tried to find it, but due to the ever changing nature of myspace, it disappeared somewhere into cyberspace. Such a shame. Anyway, I wrote about something that I still feel very passionate about: the way we dress.

I'm rewriting about it now because in the last few days I have witnessed a few discussions regarding the way we dress. And everything I have to say about it can be summed up to this: the way you dress DOES matter. If you dress like a bum, you will be labeled as a bum: regardless of if you are a bum. If you dress like a slut, you will be labeled a slut: regardless of if you are a slut. It may sound materialistic to put so much emphasis on the subject of clothes, but the fact of the matter is that we live in a society where clothing is not optional, so yes, clothes do matter.

The first discussion I witnessed was in church yesterday, where the comment was made that it is superficial and wrong to judge a person by clothes first, rather than by their actions. That is true to an extent. But before you ever see a person's actions, you see their appearance. And I'm sorry, but if you're not dressed appropriately for whatever that first meeting may be, you will be judged.

This has nothing to do with how much money you spend on clothes. I completely agree that a person should not be judged by the stores they shop at or how much their outfit cost. That's not right. But for anyone who makes the excuse that they can't look nice because they can't afford it? I'm not buying it (two words: thrift stores). Or someone that says that putting an effort into your appearance like spending time doing hair/makeup, etc. is vain and materialistic? I'm not buying it either.

At church, I work with the young women. Naturally, we talk a lot about dress, since it's something teenage girls are bombarded with so much. We talk about dressing modestly, and we talk about taking pride in your appearance, because you are a child of God. My go-to scripture about this (found here) says: "...and they did not wear costly apparel, yet they were neat and comely." There you go. Just because you can't afford the designer duds, or maybe don't want to spend an hour doing your hair (who does anyway??),  or maybe you feel like you don't have a good enough figure to dress cute. None of these reasons mean that you have an excuse to look like a mangy scrub.

The other discussion I was a witness to this week was on facebook (of course) arguing about what is okay to wear at a military ball, which fellow mil spouses and I attend every year. Some girls were getting up in arms accusing these "judgmental and un-classy wives" of making snap judgments by labeling women as sluts who come to the ball dressed as--you guessed it---sluts. It sounds harsh, and yes, judging is bad, blah blah blah, but I'm still on the side of those women who don't defend the women that don't know how to dress appropriately for the appropriate occasion. You're not going to a night-club, you're going to a formal military event.

Know your event, and dress accordingly. That's all there is to it.

So yeah. That's how I feel about that. And on a kind of related note, here is a tribute to two of my favorite things: Harry Potter and songs about thrifting

Thanks for reading!
xoxo Annie