More weed pulling

Japanese in general do a very good job of keeping their streets, sidewalks, etc. very clean.  However, on these steps going down to the path along the river, weeds have overtaken the area.  One morning I pulled a lot of these weeds.  Only problem, I had nothing to put the weeds in to dispose of them.  On this particular stairway, I cleared at least one half to make it more walkable.  In doing so, look what I found hidden underneath a clump of weeds.  A regular size egg.

Potluch luncheon after Sunday service

Here are some photos of a potluck luncheon at the church after Sunday service.  I can't seem to lose any weight.  I wonder why.

Feels great to serve

We have a brother in the Kagoshima Branch that owns a barbershop.  He currently serves in the branch presidency as a counselor.  As a service, he provides free haircuts to the young missionaries.  For us senior couples, since we can afford it, he only charges 1000 yen, which is like less than $10.  He does a good job.  We want to pay more but he refuses to accept more, so we decided to pull weeds from the bushes in front of his shop.  We really don't have gardening tools so we went to the local 100 yen store (like dollar store in the U.S.), which didn't have the gardening tools we needed but we bought couple screw drivers to dig with.  We couldn't find any gardening knee pads either so we used card board boxes.  We did this on a Saturday that he posted at the shop that he was going to be closed, but to be safe from being discovered, we went early in the morning and finished weeding in couple hours before his usual opening time of 9:30 a.m.

Scenes from my morning walks

This is a shrine on one of my walking routes.  It gets too boring to keep walking in circles on a track so I walk around the neighborhood.  One morning when I walked past, I saw some students sitting on the ground inside the shrine.  I went in to take a closer look and found that it was an art class.  The students were on a field trip to draw pictures of the shrine.  I was impressed by some of their drawings.

 This is on a bridge over a river that flows out to the bay.  On the left there are rows of built in benches for people to sit.  Of all the times I passed here, I've only seen couple people sitting down there.  Kind of wonder if there are special events that occur on the river that attract people to come out and watch.  There is a path along the bank at the base of the benches that goes underneath the bridges.  I use it to avoid having to cross the busy roads above.

Luncheon after District Council Mtg

Once again we had the luncheon at our apartment.  It was smashing success.  Main dish this time was lasagna in a slow cooker.

Sisters Orth (right) & Spilling (middle) all thumbs up with the food.  Sister Orth herself ate at least 3 pieces of chocolate chip banana brownies.  

Elder Jacobson (left) & Elder Ehlert (right) & Elder Helm (hands only) flash signs of approval on the food.

Elder Howell shows off cheese sticks.  He loves to eat all kinds of bread so he thoroughly enjoyed eating these.  As you can see, nothing left on the plates of Elder Helm and Elder Howell.  Elder Helm had to cover himself up from laughing too hard.

Anniversary

No big celebration.  We just had dinner at a small restaurant about a block away from us.  On Google maps, this restaurant was rated 4.8, so I thought we would try it.  One half of restaurant had 3 tables where patrons would sit on the floor and the other half, people sit at the counter facing the cooks.  The food was good.  Main dish was different, but both of us really liked the salad.  The only negative I have with Japanese restaurants is that they still allow smoking in public areas.

Branch Home Evening May 13, 2019

We were asked to present the lesson for this particular home evening.  We obliged by giving a lesson on Family History with emphasis on using the tool Memories, an app on smart phones and a feature on familysearch.org.  It is free and can be used to store photos, documents, and recordings of stories.  These memories will then be preserved for posterity.  It already became of use for Kaiya on a school project on immigration.  She was able to download some photos of Uncle Jim from Memories on familysearch.org to go along with the narrative.