July 16th

Wow! This last week flew by! I didn't realize I hadn't posted in several days until Gary mentioned it to me yesterday.  Nothing amazingly exciting has happened, I just got caught up in stuff! Three of my 4 children were moving to different apartments last week, I know the two in Colorado managed to get moved alright, I'm still waiting to hear if the one in Panama has moved yet.  Synchronized moving...wonder if that's anything like synchronized swimming!
****** Random fact about Lisa****** I actually participated in synchronized swimming while in high school.. did a fancy swim routine to the theme song from the tv series M*A*S*H !
Yes, that was 31 years ago!  

                               Now back to your regularly scheduled programing blog!

I've been making friends here. Okay, one of them is actually my dentist, but since I am seeing her every week for the foreseeable future we have been getting to know each other. She's very nice and it's surprising how much we manage to visit in between the drilling and other awful dental stuff going on! Today we talked about learning to ride bikes, childbirth, kids and driving cars in Japan among other things. Also, my neighbor and I have been visiting quite a lot lately. She lived in Michigan for many years and since I'm from Wisconsin that makes us neighbors! She's a very nice lady and I'm hoping she and my dentist may be interested in visiting our church once we get a building.

I've been trying out some more recipes lately, here's a few pictures for you foodies. This one is braised beef with potatoes, not much to look at but was quite tasty and filling.

The second picture is thin cut pork chops on bean sprouts. The pork chops were cooked in a special glaze that I can't remember off hand and since I returned the cookbook to the library I will have to re-check it out and copy the recipe so I can cook it again, but it was very good!

  This third picture actually has two new recipes. A cold spinach salad with a homemade sesame dressing (when I say homemade, I mean, I took sesame seeds and ground them in a mortar and pestle) and I also cubed some ham and fried it because I thought it would be good that way, not sure how Japanese-y that idea was but I liked the salad with it. Also, I did Chicken teriyaki which I have made before ,but this time I added sliced Japanese leeks and cooked that with it. When you buy it like kababs you can get the chicken with the Japanese leeks together so I thought I could cook it that way on stove top too...it worked out well. 

So there you have it! Those are some of the things I've been up to! We survived the latest heat wave and it's finally down into the '80's again though my dentist lady promises me that August will be back into the '90's as that is the hottest month traditionally.
                                                                          Hasta Luego!