Copa Cabana

We went to the cabin last weekend, it was loads of fun. We had yakiniku too.

Nicolle painted a bunch of our apartment before we left for the cabin, and we made a trip to Ikea, so we have quite the nice little apartment now. Our drive to buy a house is somewhat weakened by finding out what it actually entails. For now it seems we're content at our place, but if the perfect magic house/situation appears we'll be open to that too.

I'm trying to learn how to balance my obsessive behavior and work and family, anybody who knows me knows how obsessed I get about things and how much trouble I have balancing. I'm very excited about the opportunities I have with music, but need to learn to balance better. Thanks to my practicing in the mornings at 7am at the school before starting work, I feel really great about my progress and it's a great solution to the practice/wake up the kids /make Nicolle miserable problem.

We've fallen in love with the RedBox dvd rental machines all over town. For $1 you can rent a dvd for one night, and so we've seen some interesting movies lately. Yesterday I watched "Letters From Iwo Jima". It was cool to see some of the Japanese actors I recognized from movies in Japan. I'm sure everyone's already seen it or heard about it, it was told from the point of view of the Japanese soldiers. Brutality and kindness are shown on both sides during the conflict, and some soldiers (both american and japanese) came to see that the enemy isn't so different from them. It's by no means a warm fuzzy movie however, there's needless killing, boredom, insanity, etc. It made me think of friends I have fighting in wars. Kendall from Hawaii wrote me on Thanksgiving from Afghanistan. He said that after a morning of drills etc the commanding officer told them to get lost, and they were allowed the rest of the day off. They later had pizza for the soldiers, but Kendall said he was more excited just to not have to work. He didn't remember it was Thanksgiving until the officer let them go for the day. My life is so different from his life and many people's around the world, people I have contact with every day at my job who are desperate to get out of their present situation. I feel incredibly blessed and am amazed at my situation, I'm very lucky.
We also watched "Disturbia" a fun thriller rear-window-esque. The kids were actullay both asleep for a rare moment so we watched it together and Nicolle held me while I jumped at every scary part, as usual. I'm kind of a chicken with horror movies.