ChanomiTalk

My family consists of my husband, Mark, and 2 sons: Malachi & Moses. We love being together, going to the beach, surfing, eating, camping, watching movies, and exploring. We are preparing to move to Okinawa at the end of July. There are lots of preparations such as our visas, selling our belongings, packing, finding homes for our dogs, and saying good-bye to family & friends. My husband was hired as a Chaplain for Okinawa Christian School International. I will be working as a Teacher’s Aid. We will be living on-campus and Moses will enter as a freshman. Malachi will continue his college schooling in California. It will be a big change for us all but we are excited. We will all reunite during the Christmas break on O’ahu. Please keep us in your prayers!

Today, I reviewed my entire 4 paragraph story by myself. I felt much better, like my speaking was flowing easier and not so choppy. We reviewed comprehension questions regarding my story and then proceeded onto learning 10 new verbs; past, present, and future tense. We practiced putting sentences together. With each lesson, my understanding & familiarity increases. I am so thankful for the repetition.

We are pleased to announce the first of our planned seasonal haiku contests. Our goal is to promote appreciation of the haiku craft as well as to encourage the development of the English haiku.

Our first step is to choose a topic that relates to summer. Everyone, please, in the comments section of this post, give us a general feeling or topic that relates to summer. We will discuss the ideas as a community and come up with one that everyone will base their poems on.

Today’s yojijukugo is aimaimoko. It means simply “vague and dim”, and can be broken down into two words that can be used seperately, aimai (vague) and moko (dim). In both languages, vague is used more to describe concepts, while dim refers more to physical locations. So, saying something is both vague and dim would mean you don’t understand any part of it at all. For example, after listening to a professor’s lecture, you might say to your friend, “That whole thing was aimaimoko.”

If something is completely clear and comprehensible, you might call it meimeihakuhaku, which is the counterpart of aimaimoko because it’s also a yojijukugo. It uses the kanji for bright twice and the kanji for white twice.

Today’s yojijukugo is gaden’insui. It means “pulling water into one’s own rice field. Because water is something that doesn’t really belong to anyone, we should share it equally. A rice farmer who tries to make more water flow into his field is selfish. In English, we don’t usually use a metaphor, we just say “selfish” or “self-centered”.

The rice farmer metaphor emphasizes that one should try to consider everything around them, not just their own rice field. Basically, it is telling us to widen our viewpoint. So, in addition to what Americans would call selfish, one could also use this term to mean subjective in cases where one ought to be more objective.

For example, consider a twenty-page brief on the state of the economy released by the U.S. Government. In the document, the average salaries of different career fields are listed on page 7. When you receive the document, you flip directly to page seven and see that your career’s earnings have doubled over the last ten years. You are content, but your friend sees this and tells you that your opinion is a little bit gaden’insui.

Finally Found Good Eating
Yesterday my mother and I went to Shirokiya 3rd floor to eat. There are all kinds of variety of foods to eat there、from Sea Food Boulabaise to Sushi, okonomiyaki, Korean food, Curry, Tempura, Udon, Soba, Chinese Food and etc. This time I tried Maguro next to Takoyaki and Chinese. I had the combo, Poke’ donburi and creamy salmon donburi、with miso soup, green tea, shoga and tsukemono. The rice in the donburi was like a sushi rice (round kernels instead of the long grain), so delicious that I couldn’t stop eating it till it was all gone. The fish was so fresh and the sauce on the rice was just right, not too sweet and not starchy. Yamakake is my favorite so I have to go back there again to eat it.

　昨日、母と一緒に白木屋の三階へ食事に行きました。ここには、あらゆる種類の料理が揃っています。例えば、地中海料理のブイヤベースから、寿司、お好み焼き、韓国料理、カレー、天ぷら、うどん、中国料理まで、色々です。この日、私は、まず、マグロの添え物、次に、たこ焼き、最後に、中国の小鉢料理を試してみました。そして、味噌汁、お茶、しょうがと漬物の付いた、ポキとクリーミーサーモンの丼コンボを食べました。丼のご飯は、長粒米（ちょうりゅうまい）ではなく、お寿司に使うような丸いお米を使っていたので、食べだしたら、止まらなくなるほどおいしかったです。魚は新鮮で、ご飯は、甘すぎもせず、ねばねば感もなく、ちょうど良い味でした。山かけは私の大好物なので、今度はそれを食べに、また行きたいと思っています。

I must apologize. I wrote in my last blog about the Patriot’s. I failed to mention that the Patriot’s are a professional football team that plays out of New England. Football is my favorite sport and the Patriot’s use to be my favorite team. Now-a-days I follow the San Francisco 49er’s. Does anybody here like football?