1. Lose weight
2. Get organized
3. Spend less, save more
4. Enjoy life to the fullest
5. Stay fit/healthy
So I have to admit more than once, these things have been on MY list of New Year's Resolutions. And before I even saw this list I had decided on my resolutions: DIET AND EXERCISE! What?! We are missionaries and I still have the same resolutions I have EVERY year?! Well yes. It seems that in my life if I can stick to the diet and exercise routine, everything else falls into place.
And in defense of "spiritual goals" I have to say we are inundated with spiritual goals (after all, we are on a Church mission!). You see, I think I mentioned in a prior blog we have mission goals, zone goals, district goals, stake goals, branch goals, companionship goals, and personal goals. Sometimes I think if I could attain even half of those, I would be pretty much translated!
So I do have a diet/exercise plan. It includes walking at least five days a week and eating healthy. We have actually done fairly well in the walking since last June or so but the cold weather has dampened my spirits on walking so this will hopefully be my added incentive. Wish me luck!
Oh, and I will mention that Elder Sakamoto (Calvin) said his New Year's Resolutions include: getting through the Doctrine and Covenants in Japanese, reading the missionary Gospel library (Jesus the Christ, True to the Faith, Our Heritage, and Our Search for Happiness), and creating missionary lessons in Japanese. (You can tell who the spiritual one is!)
Christmas Week in Ishinomaki
This week we had a great time skyping our family and even watching them open the presents we sent them! Sounds like everyone had a good Christmas.
Calvin has been sick most of the week so we kind of took it easy but we did have some fun times. On Christmas Eve we went to the Church with about twenty others and our branch president cooked us dinner: roast beef and salmon! It was delicious and everyone had a great time. We played the candy bar game!
On Christmas day we went out to eat with two other missionary couples from the mission home to an all-you-can-eat place near Sendai. They have wonderful food! The Jahanas and Thomas' will be leaving in the next month and we will miss them so much! They are pretty much the only missionaries left that were here during the big earthquake and tsunami. In fact, the Thomas' were here three days when it hit! What a ride they have had!
On Thursday we had district meeting and they surprised us with a photo of us:
We have really grown to love all of the missionaries we work with:
Thursday night we went out to eat with the sisters and a couple of branch members to Sushiro--one of the 100 yen a plate sushi places that are so popular around here. You can order plates of sushi (usually two on plate) or take them from a belt that goes around next to your table. This is what our table looked like AFTER we ate:
This is the real explanation: There were seven of us. You get the dishes and at the end the waitress counts your plates to see how much you owe! Notice: there are about 60 empty plates plus several other dishes that had desserts, soups, etc. in them. So each sushi plate is 105 yen (soups and desserts could be more) which is about $1.25 American dollars so you are probably looking at at least $100 but I guess not bad since it WAS sushi! And I probably mentioned before: NO TAX or TIP! That is actually quite a big deal since tax and tip would probably add another $30 to the tab!
One day we drove the sisters around to visit less actives. It turned out to be a rather long but productive drive. We updated lots of addresses, statuses, and visited with some.
And yesterday we were invited to the Saitos (sorry no photo) for dinner. It was really good. We had do-it-yourself sushi and tako-yaki. I had almost lost faith in tako-yaki which are balls kind of like popovers with octopus, and a few other veggies with special sauces and toppings since every time I have bought them they haven't tasted that good. But last night's were wonderful--and we even got creative using fish, shrimp and even cheese in some!
Right now I am at the Church doing this blog and two hours after Church has formally ended, there are still a lot of people here. And we were given a great take-home gift: MOCHI for the New Year! We'll have to go home soon and have some (BEFORE my diet starts!).
Okay, another resolution has to be: Be sure and take our camera with us all the time since we missed some good moments this week!
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!
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