This is Joey and Daniel's version of "I Love to see the Temple" (a little combination of the 1st and 2nd verses I think)
A Saturday in South Bend with Ashley and Ryan
Christmas morning with family
Spending a week with the grandkids while Janny and Ryan celebrated 10th anniversary
Teaching your family the gospel
A week with our family before leaving for Japan
The twins at preschool 'graduation'. We're certain you would have been there if you were here! They still pray everyday for your safe return.
I promise! No more pictures of flowers for a while. This is a picture of a parking lot, not a picture of flowers. We've heard that June has been an abnormally wet month at home, so I thought I'd share just a few pictures about our rainfall. Sendai averages 46 inches of rain per year with most of it coming during the summer. In May we get 4.25 inches, followed by 5.43 in June, 6.29 in July, 6.86 in August, and then 8.6 in September. That accounts for over 30 inches during our rainy season and it makes the flowers bloom.
My sweet wife tells me it takes all kinds of people to make a world, but that I'm in a class all by myself. However, I learned something else this week about the weather and need to share. We had rain every day this past week, sometimes heavy, but mostly a slow drizzle or a mist. When it finally got wet enough, and the humidity was near 100% I noticed that the water droplets on the fences would stay for more that a half hour after the rain ended before they evaporated.
Furthermore, I learned that the water is most abundant near the bottom of the verticle pickets and that rust sets in. Thus, the title for this picture is going going ----.
And this one is gone. The bottoms of the pickets have disappeared, a victim of water followed by rust. Now you know the rust of the story.
Another new experience this week was a game called ground golf. Here you see Ito san getting ready to hit the ball. He's one of our our Eikaiwa students and I went to watch him play on Saturday morning between rain showers. The game is a combination of golf, miniture golf, and croquet. It's played on a large playground using golf rules with wooden balls a little larger than a regular golf ball.
Before they begin, they put out the holes which consist of a wire base that serves as the hole with a short flag sticking up that shows the number. They space them just like in regular golf so that there are long and short "fairways." The players get good and can control the ball quite well on this uneven surface. Regular golf in Japan is very expensive and this is free. They were having a great time.
We completed transfers a week ago and have two new office elders. This is Elder Kawabata. He's very polite and can speak some English but has a difficult time hearing the words at the normal speaking speed. I'm sure this will improve after he's been here a while. 
This is Elder Takami and he doesn't speak English. He's the commissarian and we work together so I've got to get courage to say more in Japanese. I have Elder Kawabata's problem of hearing Japanese words spoken at normal speed, only my ear is much slower. Well, it will be an interesting next few weeks as we work on communication. We had another baptism in our ward this past weekend and baptisms are up throughout the mission this month.
The weeks are flying by! It's hard to believe that early summer is here and that we only have a few months left. It's time for another of our busy weeks when transfers occur. This week seasoned missionaries return home and new ones come to take their place. Unfortunately the new ones are never enough. The mission is slowly losing missionaries and by the next transfer President Tateoka may have to close one or more areas. Our mission is having more success right now than we've seen since we've been here. There are currently about 25 investigators with June baptismal dates. We don't put in many pictures of missionaries since you don't know them but I pulled this one out because Elder Gary Stevenson, pictured above with the Tateokas and the office elders, has been announced as our new Area President. He's been to our mission twice so far and this past weekend he came to speak in stake conference. We really enjoy him and so do our missionaries.
Japan is truly beautiful in spring (and every other season) and I've been taking a few pictures of landscaping. Here is a yard with lots of space between plants.
Here is another landscape where they've made every inch count. When we get home we've got to do something in our back yard. It may be corn if economics stay tight. Do you think we could make corn look like this?
I couldn't resist a photo of this small legume tree with beautiful yellow flowers. There are so many different species of flowering plants that we're always seeing a new one.
This close up reveals the characteristics of these beautiful flowers.
This is the Red Cross Hospital about a block up the street from us. Medical procedures are handled very differently in Japan. Doctors have offices in the hospitals and there are almost no private offices or clinics. After you make an appointment at this hospital, you go to the lobby and line up to get a number and put your hospital card through an automated reader. Next you sit in a large lobby in front of the assigned doctor's room until your number pops up on a monitor. Since neither the urologist, his nurses, nor the receptionist speak English, it is a challenge to understand what they are telling me. (That's why I take Brother Hamamoto with me.) As long as they don't put me in the hospital, it's okay. Hospital stays are measured in weeks here rather than in hours like they are in the U.S.