Some more pictures...

Okay, I think this will be the last of the pictures of our house, since you are probably bored of it by now...

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A furnished living room... The couch is supposed to have a connecting piece between the sofa and the love seat making a 'U' couch, however, put together, it literally was flush against the wall on the right, pushed against the wall behind the sofa (which has big cabinets that were rendered useless) and the other end of the sofa was flush against the wall on the left. I worried that this would lead to mildew, so we took out the connecting piece, tied cord around it and hoisted it up onto the roof of the sun porch, and through a window to put it in our bed room since it's the biggest room in the house and has plenty of room for a seat...

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The dinning room as it is now. For those of you who know us, yes you are seeing some new furniture. We probably could have used our tax return to get ourselves out of a pile of debt, but instead we decided that rather than sit on the floor, we would buy a new couch (the old one literally fell apart on it's own before the move) and since a really nice one was hardly more than a cheap'o one, we went for it. The table, well, our only excuse for that is that the movers lost all the hardware to put the old one back together again. I know, pretty feeble excuse, but that's all I've got, lol.

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A play room for DD. DH insisted that we buy this playhouse for DD, and my arguments were short lived, so our tax return is officially depleted... The 'cool' little foam mats with the little animals on them are really only cool in theory, because as soon as an 18 mo old realizes that they come apart, they are all over the play room and being chewed on constantly!!! Luckily they were super inexpensive at Livin, cause they may soon find themselves on their way to an ebay listing or something.

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Glass doors leading to the bathroom suite as I like to call it. This is located on the ground floor. Once you walk through them, the shower/Ofuro room is on the left, in front of you is the mirror (which with the touch of a button heats up to remove fog) and drawers with washer and dryer just beside and to the right is the toilet room with the super high tech toilet (not the one pictured in the last blog, that is just a regular toilet with the only amenities being heated seat and hand sink atop the tank). The toilet in this room is equipped with a seat warmer, bidet, some other kind of spraying option, plus an air dry option as well as some other buttons that the housing agent told me 'don't touch', so I don't know what they do. The only down fall to this area was that there were no towel rods, but a quick trip to Livin and about 1000 Yen later, I was ready to install them myself!

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One of our two kerosene heaters. These are AWESOME! They make alot of heat for relatively inexpensive cost. These are pretty nice models of the heaters, and I guess they are probably pretty expensive. I don't know though, because they are on loan from the Navy for the duration of our stay here, as are our dishwasher, washer and dryer, fridge, and a couple of power boosting transformers.

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DD's room, still not put together...

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My sewing room. With doors leading into the master bedroom, and shoji blinds on the huge windows which lead out onto the balcony. This is where we brought the other part of the couch in... This room has 4 1/2 Tatami (ta-ta-me) mats.

The MASTER!! The biggest room in the whole house by far! There in the corner is the rest of the couch... The unit on the wall up in the corner is a heater/dehumidifier/air conditioner, and was finally installed about 3 days after we moved in.

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Here's one of 7 closets in the house (only half is visible due to the sliding doors). 6 are this size and one is only the top and middle section, that's where I'm sitting, lol. The only downfall is none of them are tall enough inside to hang a dress... But I guess if that's as bad as it get's I'm pretty stinkin' lucky huh?

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The 'Man Room', after DH had a go at it. He's not done decorating yet, as we still need to figure out how to hang things on the walls without making the paper/sand mixture coating crumble and fall apart...

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Tatami mats in the man room.

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our house from the back side.

And with the rain shutters closed. There are 7 panels that slide across to enclose the house. Closing these at night would also help to keep the cold out, however, opening the doors to do so lets in alot of cold all at once, so I haven't yet decided which is better...

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The little hole in the wall used to push the panels in and out of their storage area (pictured below). The panels slide into the holding area and then must be pushed forward to make room for the rest of the panels, then to put them back out, they must be pulled forward and then slid out of the little slot and across the doorways. There is also a little wooden sliding door to close this little hole to help keep the cold out.

At last some pictures of the house and such...

It costs a bit to get moved in over here. Here is a picture of the stack of Yen we had to give to the housing agent in order to sign our lease.

952,100 Yen to be exact. Thank God the Navy gives us a monthly housing allowance to cover the monthly rent of 230,000 Yen (way more than they would ever give us in the states!!) and gave us money to cover the Owner bonus, the agent bonus and the agents income tax on their bonus. They also loaned us the money to cover the security deposit which was equal to one months rent. The only thing we had to come up with was our renters insurance which was 20,600 Yen for a year.

Gifts of Chocolate for our new neighbors as well as for the electricians.

Our beautiful front door!

This is the living room. According to the housing blueprint this is a guest bedroom, making this a 5 bedroom house. We chose to have it be the living room. Somehow I had thought it had Tatami floors, but I guess my memory was playing with me. We then chose to have the 'dining room' be a play room and the 'living room' which is right off the kitchen be the dining room...

One of my favorite features is the Ofuro (Oh-foo-roh), a bathtub that is about 3 ft long, and 2 1/2 ft deep. Ours is very new and all you must do is push a button on the touch pad that you see above the end there and it will automatically fill for you with 42 C water and when it's done filling, a little song plays and a voice calls out to you in Japanese that your tub is ready for you. There is also a control for it from the main water heater control panel located in the kitchen, so you can fill your tub from there and listen for the chime. Something else nice about it is that there is a call button from the one in the tub that chimes the kitchen in case you need something while relaxing in your tub, which by the way you could stay in all day without ever worrying about the water getting cold, because there is a thermometer that constantly tests the water and when it starts to cool, begins re-circulating the water out through a pipe, heats it using propane and sends it back into your tub toasty hot!!! AHHHHHH......

The only thing is, you must never use soap in your Ofuro, as it will cake and clog the recirculating system.

The shower and the tub are all in one enclosed room that's probably about 6ft x 6ft. The shower head just comes off the wall in there, so it's a very spacious shower. The shower head is quite low (just over 5ft up). An interesting feature is this waist high mirror... I guess personal grooming is paramount.

A picture from inside what is now the play room into what is the dining room/computer area. Just now, I'm sitting in the cubby there on the left of the picture. I've opened the doors to the cabinet there and put my computer there with my desk just underneath. What a great way to save space! The doors you see on the right lead out to our back yard. The next picture you see was taken from that corner where you see the curtain.

Our sun porch!! This porch is the length of 4 double sliding glass doors, and comes equipped with gold, orange and brown curtains from the 70's to help block out the cold at night, lol!! This entire side of the house is floor to ceiling glass doors and windows, as just on the other side of that stairway is the living room with it's glass doors.

The view from the dinning room. I LOVE the Shoji (Sho-gee) doors that also can be pulled closed to make a whole wall of paper doors, which also really help to keep the house warm at night. Ha, who would think that paper could make such a difference!

Unfortunatly Shoji and DH don't seem to get along very well, as he has already put about 4 or 5 holes in our Shoji doors in just over a week!! Luckily the supplies to repair them are readily available at 'Livin' (Japan's equivilent to Wal-Mart, and infact they sell some of the same brands) for really quite cheap and it looks relatively simple to replace. We'll see. When I undertake that task, I'll take pictures and blog about it in case anyone out there happens to be in need of knowing what not to do when repairing Shoji, haha!

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A portion of my kitchen

The glass encased shelves make a great place to display DH's crystal and china that he inherited from his aunt and grandmother. We just pray that there wont be a biggish earthquake while we're here, though more for our own safety than that of the dishes, but it really would be sad to loose such heirlooms.

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Here we have the other side of the kitchen, and yes that one cupboard door is totally a different color! I find it amusing that the counter tops are just below my waist level, while the upper cupboards start at about 6 1/2 ft from the floor, meaning that I need a step stool to pretty much reach anything that's not just inside the door. The counter space is less now, because we have a dishwasher on there now... (pictures to come)

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Once I get a chance to clean this, this is meant to be a place to store emergency supplies. It opens right up out of the kitchen floor. I guess many Americans use these as wine cellers, since they stay cold pretty much year around. While I suppose drunkenness could make a natural disaster not seem quite so bad for a few hours, I would much rather have food and water in mine...

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Cooking facilities! My two burners, fish grill, and oven. They all run on propane and the oven and burner/grill are two seperate units. Many houses do not even have an oven, just the fish grill that you see there above the oven. I've discovered that the left burner has a great feature. It has a sensor that shuts off the gas when your pan/tea kettle gets lighter than a certain weight, thus keeping you from boiling your pot dry!

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The smallest oven I've ever seen!!! This oven is about 13 x 10 x 13 inches, and workes kinda like a microwave in that you put your food in there, turn a knob to set the time and push start (well presumably start, I don't know it japanese, I just know it makes it go). Then the fire roares and cooks your food for you at whatever temp Celcius you happened to guess was close to the degrees farenheit that you need to cook your food at. When you open the door, the fire shuts off instantly (no heating the house with this oven...).

Side note, our microwave can't be used for longer than 10 seconds at a time without flipping a breaker, which happens to shut off power to half of the lower part of the house, and possible parts of upstairs... Breaker systems don't seem to be set up at all the same here as back in the states. Thank goodness for breakers though, because due to the dry electric or kerosene heat we use, the wood in this house is very very very dry! Sometimes I think that perhaps a few people could pick up the house and move it if they wanted to, since the wood is so dry and many of the doors are hollow paper covered 2mm wood in wooden frames, and some are just paper with wooden cross beams...

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A before picture of part of my favorite room in the house before it became 'The Man Room".

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The upstairs toilet complete with hand sink attached to the top of the tank. Only downfall here is that the water is freezing cold... Not gonna kill many germs that way. There is a sink right outside the door, however, the hot water doesn't work, because the pipes are rusted shut from unuse.

Our super tiny laundry facilities! It's been an interesting trial and error system trying to figure out what cycles do what, as the instruction sheet I got just told me things like 'this button selects which cycle', but no where did it saw what any of the cycles do, lol. Yes, I know I've got my hand in a few of these pictures, thats as a reference point to show size.

Here come the back yard pictures!

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One of two bamboo fountains

Some pics from out front.

My personal addition to the house...

a Japanese Apricot tree that I got at the commisary for $15

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I love this front gate!! The brownish thing on the right isn't supposed to be like that, it's supposed to be across the parkingspot over to the right. It's my fault that it's there like that, as it's our parkingspot it's supposed to be covering.

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Just in front of the front door.

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The 5 ft deep gutter that runs behind the house...

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Trash seperation...

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After my trip to the local market and inability to keep myself from buying the tiny little cute eggs, we had a breakfast of quail eggs. DD LOVED them and ate 9 of them for breakfast. Unfortunatly, she has now decided that chicken eggs are not so good... They taste much like chicken eggs, just not quite such a strong egg flavor. I liked them too, but had a hard time getting past the fact that they were quail eggs. Not sure why it should make any difference at all, but for some reason it just made them hard to swallow...

Well, that's it for this post. I just ran around and snapped a bunch more pictures during short breaks while I was typing this up, and I'll start that blog, but nap time is almost over, so I probably wont get the next one done for a little bit.

Online Again!!

Yipee!!! Contact with the rest of the world again!

Not to negate the joys of becoming familiar with my new neighborhood, but it's great to be able to make contact with friends and family again!

Not 20 minutes ago, I walked my Internet technicians to the door bowing gratefully and stuttering in broken Japanese telling them arrigato arrigato arrigato for my successful connection to the Internet again.


It's been an interesting 8 or 9 days since I last posted, that's for sure. I'll try to cover as much as I can here while trying to refrain from being too verbose.


First off, it seems that when you move into a home here, it is not guaranteed to be cleaned before-hand... Not so much fun to discover that on day one in the new home, about 15 minutes before 6000 lbs of your personal items are to begin arriving. So this week has been quite busy with scrubbing drawers and cupboards just to be able to begin unpacking, followed by double and triple vacuuming of carpets, wall washings and such, not to mention that while it's fabulous to have 7 huge closets (pictures to come later) as well as 7 upper storage areas to put things in, it's not a ton of fun trying to get years worth of accumulated dust and grime out of them (I was told that this home stood empty for some years).


Then about a day into the moving and unpacking, I spent many hours with DD at the hospital because she had a fever of 102 for a few days. They determined that it was just a cold, and miraculously, after we left, her fever broke and she's been getting better and better ever since.


Monday we took gifts to our new neighbors and, with the help of our housing agent, introduced ourselves. Which worked out well, because on tuesday as I tried to figure out which 'transfer station' I was supposed to be taking our garbage and recycling to, my very nice next door neighbor chased me down to show me the proper kind of cord for tying my cardboard as well as to let me know that the place I was moving my refuse to was also not the place for our side of the block (I had been directed here by a well meaning woman who caught me putting my garbage in the one for her side of her block). I'm starting to get the hang of the garbage system now though, so I'm happy about that. Tuesday is Cardboard, misc paper and food garbage/burnables, Wednesday is unburnables, misc heavy plastics and straws, glass bottles, dry cell batteries and one the 2nd and 4th Wed plastic bottles marked with the 'PET' recycling mark on the bottom. Thursday is styrofoam of all kinds, plastic wrappers, and any other kind of plastic that has a recycle symbol on it. Friday is the same as Tuesday. You can always tell when you've missed the garbage truck, because over a loud speaker it plays the tune Fur Elise as they make their way through town picking up the garbage. I bet the garbage men hope to never hear that song when they are off work!!!


So far we've had electricians in and out of the house to install more heaters (there were no heaters whatsoever upstairs), and to try to fix a broken heater in our livingroom, as well as a plumber out to fix a leaky toilet and try to figure out what's wrong with our hot water tap upstairs. So far the heaters are intalled and the toilet is fixed. As far as the broken heater and the tap upstairs, there is no answer as to when those will actually be fixed. I do understand and respect that thus far the home owner has already spent his whole 'owner's bonus' from our move in costs on the heater instalation and repairs, so I am willing to give him some time to come up with the funds to finish the repairs.


To add to the fun, I woke up a few days ago feeling like my left eye was on fire. After 4 hours of gritting my teeth through it, I drove to the base and headed into the hospital to get diagnosed with conjunctivitis, and have had the pleasure of putting antibiotic goop in my eye twice a day since and being forbiden to wear my contacts until next Wednesday. I guess some of the dust or something got in there and caused quite a stir.



We've had some pretty interesting weather here. Mostly it's been very cold in the mornings, and by about 10 or 11 am it's warm enough to go out in a t-shirt and jeans, and begins to cool off again by 3pm enough that I close the windows and by about 5pm am closing the shutters or at least all the drapes to try to keep the warm in and the cold out. Last night we had very strong winds which seem to have brought warm weather with them, as even now at just after 3pm it's about 70°F (not sure the conversion to C), and I have clothes drying on the poles. Amusingly, I am so excited to be able to dry clothes outside, and had a field day at my local Yen store, picking out cool do-dads to aid in the clothes drying.
















I tried to add more pictures, but for some reason it totally messed everything up.... grrrr... I'll have to do them later. I was actually supposed to be doing the dishes, but got fully distracted by my new internet access, and now must return to it...

MOVING!!!!

Finally!!

Tomorrow we get to sign our lease for our house and begin moving in!!!!  yipee!!!!  

Sadly, that means that we will be without internet access for an undetermined period of time...  I'm hoping for less than a week, but who knows. 

I know there hasn't really been much to read lately anyway, so I guess it wont be much different, lol.  This last week was very busy and much of my days were spent sitting in Area Orientation, Inter Cultural Relations, and traffic safety training.  However, I finally finished it all on Friday, spent yesterday running a million errands, okay I'm exaggerating, and passed my driven test.  I am now a licensed to drive on the left side of the road driver!!   What in interesting experience it was hoping into the right hand side of a car to drive and having the first time doing so be for my test...  Luckily, all you really need to do to pass is make sure you stop at the line for stop signs and make sure you turn into the correct lane when you take a corner.  They like for you to be able to back into a parking spot, but to my knowledge wont fail you if you cant.

The reason for backing into a parking spot is actually quite smart, and I had never thought of it before.  When you pull out of a parking spot in reverse, your angle of vision is only about 5 degrees or so if I remember correctly from the class, however, if you are pulling out forward, you start with about 60 - 90 degrees of vision and as you pull more forward your angle of vision opens up, making you much less likely to be in an accident while pulling out of your parking spot.  Here on base (where most people still park forward into spaces) 65 -75% of accidents are in parking lots and involve one vehicle that was backing out of a parking spot...  hmmm...  

Okay, there's my safety tip for the day, lol!!

I plan to be back here telling interesting, I hope, tales very soon.