These photos are from last Thursday, before we left on our weekend trip out of town. Check out Mio in full fabulous glory.
Already Fabulous…
Miwa
Mio Arrives in Virginia
Mio and I arrived in Virginia early Thursday morning, exhausted. Mio cried inconsolably for about fifteen minutes towards the beginning of the overnight flight, and although it was only fifteen minutes, it was the longest fifteen minutes of my life. I’m still uncertain about what was wrong with her, since I made sure to nurse her during takeoff and landing to make sure she didn’t get ear pressure problems. She slept for the last three hours of the flight, though, but I couldn’t sleep because I was afraid she’d slide off of my lap. The cabin of the plane was really hot, too, which made for a very uncomfortable five hours. Boy, was I relieved when we finally landed at Dulles Airport…. When we got to my parents’ house in Vienna, we just slept for several hours through the morning.
Mio got to meet some new members of Mommy’s family this time — my father, sister Miwa, and brother Kosei were all seeing her for the first time.
I’m really happy to be back home in Virginia and am looking forward to the next two weeks that we’ll be spending here. We hope to spend a lot of time with family and friends, and just relax and enjoy our time here. It’s definitely summer here — hot and humid! I actually kind of missed the humidity of the Mid-Atlantic region, since this is the type of summer weather I grew up with!
My Mom is Kind of Adorable.
While we were on vacation, my sister Miwa sent me an email with a series of random photos of her and my mother posing with a scarecrow. No explanation, just the attachments. Along with a subject line that read, “Noriko the Scarecrow,” with the email CC-ed to the whole family. So when we returned yesterday, I sent back an email expressing my confusion, and my mother responds back with this email:
Misono-chan,Welcome back! I made a flower garden in the place where we used to have a tree-tunnel but deers kept coming and eat my flowers like roses,strawberrys,geranium. Since I put so much love and care into my garden I was so upset about deers and decided to make a scarecraw to chase them away and assigned to Miwa to make it.Did you like it? Now they don’t come any more.Try to rest and start to work tomorrow!
My mom only started actively using email about a year ago, and she is not exactly the savviest lady in the world when it comes to technology. I can sense the awkwardness of the email, from the subtle misspellings, slightly-off grammar and sentence structures, to the funny nuances that give away some of her fobbiness. (I don’t think she has figured out how to type in Japanese just yet.)Â I can also tell that it probably took her about an hour to type the email.
Here are a couple of the photos of said scarecrow:
Reading the email and seeing the photos, I couldn’t help but chuckle.
(Still trying to figure out why the scarecrow is named Noriko though…)
Charles Chocolates
Last Saturday, we went on a chocolate factory tour at Charles Chocolates in Emeryville. My sister Miwa (who recently relocated to the area) is doing a research paper on cocoa and chocolate, so we went in the name of “research.” It’s confirmed for me that chocolates — not diamonds — are a girl’s best friend.
(For more chocolaty goodness, click over to my Flickr album.)