Lockdown

It's been an interesting few weeks weather wise. We had a tsunami warning, though the waves that would have hit us (not sure, maybe they did) would only have been about 2 feet high, then we had two typhoons that looked like they could have hit us. The first one was Parma, which was projected to go towards Taiwan and the Philippines, then veer upward at us, it ended up going more south and hitting the Philippines. Then there was Melor. This one everyone was calling a Super Typhoon. Now two years ago, in '07 we had a super 'phoon hit us. Not just come by, it ran right over Okinawa. It was Man-Yi. I was excited, and nervous, it was my first major storm EVER. I remember thinking that we were going to have damage, and problems when it hit, but little did I know. It was a Category 5 Typhoon, and we sat in our little cement house, didn't lose power at all, and just waited it out. In fact I called my mom in the middle of it to tell her not to worry. As far as I can remember we had 1 casualty, and while there was damage done, we lost half a tree, nothing devastating. I mean this is typhoon alley after all! So when I heard another super 'phoon was coming, and that it wasn't actually supposed to hit us, just sort of graze us, I was excited! Of course, like all the other storms this season, it ended up veering upward, and passing us all together, leaving us with a nice windy day.This is a satellite image of the '07 Man-Yi. That green spec above it is Okinawa. It came right over the top of us. I believe we were in lockdown (not allowed to leave the house at all) for just over 24 hours. This is a satellite image of Melor, and you can see how big it is. Slightly above it you see some green islands, we're the bottom one. Yeah, that's us, Okinawa. Pretty cool huh? So I was pretty bummed that it was going to pass by us, without even putting us in lockdown. The kids had the day off school anyway, for teacher training, so I decided to have a pretend lockdown instead.

This is the face of a kid who just heard that he gets to play games all day long...... We pulled out some fun multi player wii games and played the morning away. (This was perfect timing too, the wii had stopped playing discs, and we sent it off to get fixed. It arrived back home, safe and working just a day before the typhoon was supposed to hit!)

Then the kids chose a fun movie to watch, and they all cuddled on the couch with a blanket and several packets of smarties to eat.

And Rylissa's favorite of all a picnic on the floor while watching cartoons. Shortly after dinner, I think the family "fun" was getting to the kids, because fights were breaking out all over. At this point I think we'd all had enough, and it soon became time to finish homework, clean up, and get ready for bed. Still, I'm hoping that while it was super sunny outside (yeah, funny how that works, the day the typhoon passes near the island, it's sunny out.....) they still had a fun day pretending that it wasn't!