Well, as expected the party was delicious. Lots and lots of food. I took my guitar along not knowing if I would get the chance to play it. Usually a party in Guam has a DJ spinning tracks too loud for conversation. In this instance it was only a boom box and the parents shut it off when the kids put in the hip-hop disk. I don't think the kids really cared though the whined about it. They were having lots of fun in the pool.

As usual for a Guam party the table groaned under the weight of the food. The BBQ was delicious. There was also ham, red rice, daigo, lumpia, shrimp fritters, hot dogs, potato salad, kim chee, and several other dishes with exotic and not so exotic contents. I loaded a plate and pigged out. The dessert table could barely carry the weight also. There was a store bought cheesecake and home made brownies. There was bread pudding with a flan topping. Fruit and whipped cream salad were there as well as watermelon. I'm getting hungry just listing this stuff and I just finished breakfast.

We sat and talked and I played the guitar for a bit. Then I loaned it to Gordon't son so they could jam with his uke and the guitar. I needed to talk to the teachers there about how to handle middle school kids. There answer was universal. To a person they just laughed at me. But then they wiped the tears from their eyes and gave me some helpful advice.

On Friday Wakana and I colored Easter eggs. She had never done anything with Easter and I had determined to give her an Easter like the ones I remembered as a child. We were never religious though my parents did give us the Easter story and we did watch the movies they used to run at Easter time (my favorite was Barabas). But we did color Easter eggs and my parents would hide them and the Easter baskets around the house.

She was fascinated by the process of coloring eggs. When I mentioned using crayons to decorate the eggs before they went into the dye she ran for her set of colors. Subsequent eggs had hearts and messages on them. Some of the colors were way too much for her Japanese sense of value. Apparently Japanese will not eat blue foods. She mentioned that to me once when we were at a birthday party and she saw blue icing on the cake.

Anyway, I had a basket and some jelly beans and some chocolate eggs. On Easter morning Wakana found a basket at her place at our table and then had to find the eggs hidden in the living room. She had a great time. Later we drove out and saw all the cars parked in front of all the churches and I told her how important the holiday is to Christians.

Monday Gordon and I went to run some errands. We needed to deliver our taxes into the hands of the officials, pick up a screen door for my house, visit his new backhoe and let him drop off another payment, and go to Kmart. He does taxes for his son and a friend of ours so we were going to be filing for four people. Being the last day we expected long lines.

Now, Guam has long occupied a set of military surplus buildings up on the old Navy air station. Recently, however, they bought and renovated a big building that used to be a huge grocery store up in Barrigada. They moved all their tax and registration offices into that one building. It's a good idea. Maintain only one relatively new building instead of half a dozen old ones. However, they moved in one week before the end of the tax year! When we visited there to pick up our forms you could still smell sawdust in the air.

Anyway, we decided that I would take all the forms in and file them while Gordon drove up to Dededo to visit his backhoe. I think he wanted to be alone with it for a while to dream of future projects. I expected to spend the whole time in line. I knew this because the parking lot was so full of cars that there was literally no place to park. Some cars just kept driving around and around either looking for a place to park or waiting for someone they dropped off. After Gordon dropped me off it took him 25 minutes to get out of the parking lot!

Outside the building they had a row of tables set up with people waiting to accept the tax forms. They would review the forms and date stamp them and your copy. If you needed to pay your taxes you needed to take the form inside. Our friend had to pay and had included a check with her form. Gordon's son didn't have the correct copy of his W-2 for filing. We had attached a copy of the records copy to the tax form. The woman at the table told me I had to take those two forms inside.

Near the door there was a cart giving away diet Pepsi. I had a cup and then entered the dragon's den… to find it was no dragon's den. There was no heaving mass of humanity. There were no long lines. There was nothing to make me thing I was doomed to stand forever shuffling forward slowly through the long years of my life. I walked down to the income tax window where I saw a sign directing me to the treasurer's window or the collections window. I went down, chose the shorter line and was done in 10 minutes. I walked out to the road in time to catch Gordon and keep him out of that hellish parking lot. Easy and quick. I am still in shock.

Poor Wakana taught her second Japanese class on Saturday. She came home exhausted and haggard. Teaching the older kids in the afternoon isn't so bad but the little kids drive her crazy. She really isn't much of a kid person and their endless need for attention and requests for simple things gets to her. Fortunately she had Sunday off. She had to work at World Bridal on Monday but the teaching job has added perspective and now she sees the bridal job as being, by far, the easier, more desirable job. She was still tired on Tuesday and looked forward to a nice quiet day but her supervisor called her to ask where she was. Wakana had incorrectly marked her calendar. She was supposed to be at work. She raced out the door and headed off to the job. When she came home she was worn and tired. She'd had a full bad day at work and then had her adult students for Japanese. I had done some laundry and cooked a stew for her supper.

So now we have a day off. I will go to the Chamorro village for a canoe meeting and she has her adult students this afternoon. We will dine of fiesta plates of BBQ for supper.