Post Typhoon Skies

The typhoon blew over without any damage really, branches and stuff like normal fell down, but nothing major here where we live. Something that is pretty awesome is the skies after a typhoon. It's always more beautiful than ever. Toward sunset it's almost totally purple and I got a few pictures of the sky.

Last Typhoon Of 2016

I was just saying the other day that luckily Chris wasn't gone over typhoon season! It would have been impossible to take down our awning by myself. We have to take that down then, otherwise it would tear apart from the strong winds. It cost us a lot of money to get that shade, and I certainly wouldn't want it to break.

Anyway, I was trying to look up when we had the last typhoon, and found these pictures. Chris was at work ofcourse, and we were about to go into stage TCCOR-1 which means that you are more or less grounded and the typhoon is about to hit. The winds were pretty strong, but the rain had yet not started, so I decided to get the kids out of the house to run off some energy before being closed up inside for maybe a day or two, depending on how long the typhoon would go on for.

Took them to our climbing park here on our base, awesome park and the kids had some much needed time outside before it started to rain!

The sky was here not yet too dark, but it did change very soon. After just about an hour after this, it was dark outside and the rain started and the typhoon was coming in strong. We had really bad winds and rain over night, but luckily no power outages and that was all we needed. Still able to make dinner, watch movies and wait it out!!

Beach Time

Due to the typhoons warnings and stormy weather, we haven't been to the  beach for awhile. We have had a very slow typhoon season here in Okinawa, last summer we had several typhoons, but this season they have all passed us. Lucky for us, not so lucky for poor Taiwan and coast of China that has been slammed lately, with the last couple of typhoons bashing in on them.

We were thinking the whole weekend that we would see more of tyhoon Malakas, that has been back and forth in the radar and making it very unclear if it was supposed to hit Okinawa or not. As far as the predictions were, we weren't going to have school for the kids today on September 19, as it would be the strongest winds and rain coming over us then. During the weekend, we went back to Storm watch meaning that the typhoon more or less have missed us again. We do see some winds and it's dangerous to be close to the coast line as the waves are strong and easily can swipe you out to sea. I saw a videoclip from someone that was out walking his dogs by the seawall, and he was filming waves that were reaching higher than 10 meter reaching in and over the seawall and over to the streets! So it will be no beachtime for us the next couple of days that's for sure!

But, as I haven't shared any beach pictures lately, and I've been too busy this weekend with everything going on to go through my pictures from school etc, so I'm posting these from August, when the sun was shining and no dangerous waves were in sight!

Crazy Weather

Not just the US got it's share of crazy weather these last weeks, but we also got more of a winter than we had expected here on our little tropical island! It was a cold week, and even if it doesn't sound too bad with temperatures that are still over freezing, it sure felt like freezing here!

First, it's windy here on the island, and the rain was just getting you even colder. Wet, cold and just very unpleasant! Also, we don't have any heating inside! These apartments, houses are not made for winter! Normally it doesn't get this cold, and as it's tropical heat most of the year, you wouldn't think that it can get this cold inside! But brrr, it did!! We have two space heaters that were working hard, moving them around warming the area up where the kids were playing, making sure that one was heating up Cassie's room before she was coming home to sit and do homework in her room.

Bundled up kiddos waiting for the school bus in the morning.

When it said "feel like 34F/1.1C outside, it's not far from how it felt inside without heater!

We didn't see any snow/sleet, but we weren't really driving around either, but stayed at home as much as we could this weekend. The ones that reported sleet, were driving and having it coming down on their windshields before melting. Pretty cool!! And everyone was going crazy with reporting hail, snow, sleet etc....As many here on Okinawa never have seen either of them, it was hard for most to understand the difference. But the weather channels made it easy and categorized sleet as snow!

It was all over the news here that the weather went from one extreme to another within the same week! It was actually the lowest temperature recorded EVER on Okinawa Sunday January 24th and the same week, we reached 77.4F, which is the highest ever recorded for the month of January. Crazy to say the least!

Last Friday, we had these temperature, the highest ever recorded here in January!

We ended the month of January at the playground yesterday. The kids were enjoying running around in shorts and tshirt, and it was nice and warm to hang around the park for a few hours!!

Not Black But Cold Friday

Black Friday was spent inside the house pretty much all day. It was cold, well I know that is questionable, and a matter of opinion, but to us that are used to summer temperatures all year around pretty much, it felt very cold with the 64 Fahrenheit/17 Celsius temperatures. But a welcomed cold, with a chilly breeze that we haven't felt in a long time.

We had a long family movie marathon in the afternoon watching "The Chronicles of Narnia", a movie that we all love. This was the first time that Benjamin and Isabella watched it, and they really enjoyed it too. Chris had to go into work for a bit in the evening, when does he not??, so I said that it would be good to go for a walk and catch some fresh air before dinner and sunset.

Said and done, we got the kids' bikes out and Cassie came along to get to the skate park and playground nearby.

A teenagers way of catching some fresh air! Texting outside instead of inside... She looked so cute though in her new beanie and I couldn't help but take a few pictures of her! The little ones were biking around and their bikes clearly are getting too small. I don't think that Santa will have time to get that delivery here, so it might have to wait for their birthday..