Office Party

Hi Everybody,  We hope you have had a great week and weekend.  We just had our once a year office party. The weather was terribly rainy up until yesterday and then it magically cleared so that we could have a warm and wonderful office party.

How's this for a beautiful setting.  It was at Odiba, overlooking Tokyo Bay.

Elder Chandler- ready for some fun.

For our first activity, we had to gather whatever we could that was lying on the ground and make it into a picture.  We were pretty good at gathering and, luckily, we had a creative group to put it all together.

They only gave us a few minutes to gather and to put it together.  Here's some of our group hard at work.

Here's Elder Chandler hard at work!

Almost there. .  . . .

The finished product!  Impressive, I would say.

Next we had to work on our orchestra.  Some of the groups were human percussion, some had kazoos, and we had our voices. We learned our parts and then put it all together at the end.  The only thing I can say was that it was fun and that was also an interesting finished product.

All the time we were there, we had fun watching the boats go by.

The human tug-of-war was great.  This isn't our team because we were too busy pulling to get photos of our own group.  Luckily we had Elder Chandler on our team, and as he was immovable, we easily won!

Here are some of the finished masterpieces from the different groups for the nature pictures.

I really liked the bridge picture; it looks just like rainbow bridge, wouldn't you say?

Time to barbecue!

I think they should have parties like this in the U.S.  This is what you do:  Go to the park, the people at the parks have the tables and chairs all set up for you.  They provide the barbecues, hot charcoal, utensils, plates, food all ready to cook, and all you have to do is cook it!

The people from the office all love to cook and they all pitched in and cooked it together.  This time Gary and I were mostly able to just sit and be served.  Gary cooked a little but let them do most of the cooking.  So good!  There was pork, thick bacon, chicken, and tons of niku (meat).  Last year they had squid, too, so we were a little disappointed. (Not!)  My favorite were the piles of vegetables and soba noodles that they cooked.

Such a beautiful setting for such a great outing!

Notice the chopsticks.  He is right at home using them.  I had to use them, too, as they didn't provide any "foku's".  As you might suppose, one of us is better with chopsticks than the other.

Another highlight was the Baskin Robbin's ice cream.  Notice the flavors. . . .so good!

Then it was time for the raffle and in true Japanese fashion there were some contests to win some of the prizes.  For this one, the volunteers each had a pedometer and whoever got the most miles in three minutes got to pick the first prize.

For the next prize, the first volunteer pumped up a balloon as full as he dared and then the next volunteer had to pump four more times.

It was amazing how many times they kept pumping four times and passing to each other. Of course the winner was the one who didn't pop the balloon and then he got to pick a prize.

For the next prize, three artists were supposed to draw ghost busters.  Without seeing the picture behind them, they all did pretty well, I would say.

Personally, I think the best was the limbo contest.

The one that didn't fall over, got to pick the prize.  Fortunately, there were prizes for everyone.  We picked a beautiful gold package of Ramen noodles. I think the most popular prizes were the electric toothbrushes and the the packages of rice. All rice isn't created equal, and the rice packages they had were quickly swooped up.

We come to the end of a perfect day.  Here we are with our dear friend, Emi, who is also our fellow office worker. She is an amazing person who knows and does so much. She has pretty much taught me all that I know in my office work!

We took one last photo before the party ended. These people who are in the Asia North Area office are some of the very best people anywhere.  These are all active, hard-working LDS people.  Many of them are bishops, in stake presidencies, high council, relief society, primary; you name it and they do it!  For their work in the office, they do translation and printing and finances, etc, etc. and carry on the day to day work of the Church here in Japan.  Many have sacrificed better paying jobs to devote their talents and efforts in doing what they can to hasten the Lord's work here in Japan.  We respect and love them as our friends, and wonderful brothers and sisters in the gospel.  Fortunately, we still have a few more months here, but when it is time for us to go home, leaving our friends here will be the hardest part.                                                                                                   Sayonara for now, everybody!