My Hood...

So, you may be asking yourself, where exactly does our favorite little white girl in Okinawa live? Hey - you don't know that many people in Okinawa so I'd BETTER be your favorite girl on this island chain! Well children, we live in Government Housing on base (the base we're on is called Camp Lester and I'm sorry but that name gives me the creeps). We are living in what I refer to fondly as a monkeyplex (or for those of you who can't make the leap - multiplex) . There are four units and ours is wedged somewhere in the middle. It seems that military families really like to have babies because we are surrounded by families with young children. There are 5 children in our monkeyplex and considering the fact that we don't have any kids living with us, that's a lot! We lucked out and got unit "C" (I like it because my name starts with C - so I can always find my way home... As long as I can remember my own name, that is). It's a 2-story 3 bedroom, 2 1/2 bath with a living room and sliding glass doors, dining room, a washer and dryer, a kitchen with lots of cabinets and even a dishwasher (My other dishwasher, that would be Joe, is very pleased about this). Our house has lots of space to frolic in. What? You don't frolic in your home? Well try it sometime! We turned one room into a dressing room (a Diva has to have her dressing room dahhling) and the other room into an office (a Graduate student has to have her study space after all). Hmmm... It seems all the rooms are pretty much mine except the final one. You'll never guess what we turned the last bedroom into... Ooh you got it, a bedroom. Sedona (you remember, the not-so-vicious Golden Retreiver) demanded her own room since we have all this extra space. We told her that she could live in the shed out back if she was going to start in with that attitude. She has since become very agreeable and sleeps anywhere we tell her to. The inside of our unit is painted a not-so-lovely nicotine smoke yellow. With the price of paint on the island at $43/gallon I believe the walls will just have to stay that way (I'll just put up lots of pictures to distract from the wall color). The floors are covered with industrial grey and off-white linoleum. Luckily we have almost enough rugs to cover up the majority of the ugliness. The stairs had metal treads on the edges so that if you walked down the stairs barefoot it hurt your feet. I know you're concerned about my delicate little feet so I'll tell you how we fixed that little problem (and NO, wearing shoes to go up and down the stairs was just not an option)... Every Thursday is bulk garbage day and everyone leaves all their junk at the end of their driveways. One day on his way home from work, Joe found 2 entire still factory sealed boxes of self-stick carpet squares. No, don't worry, he hasn't become a trash picker (but we are on a budget now so never look gift carpet in the mouth). They weren't exactly pretty (think vomit and dirt mixed together) but they covered the stairs nicely so I can go back to frolicing barefoot up and down the stairs without hurting my precious little feet. I do have some major complaints here now (what and the other stuff I was rambling on about wasn't???), so if you don't want to hear me whine and bitch I suggest you just skip to the end. Here's my gripe: We paid $1000 up front for a year of cable TV (including HBO and Showtime) and internet. We figured that was a small price to pay for our entertainment and amusement. But wait, it gets better... After trying desperately to figure out what's on, we come to find out that there is no actual television schedule! The movies on the pay channels are about 2 weeks behind the states and there is no TV guide except the one on the TV that only covers up to one day ahead of time. You have to sit and watch until the hour you are looking for rolls through and if you miss it you have to sit through the whole thing again. This my friends, is not what I would call entertainment! Even this schedule is not always right and we have tried to watch several movies that turned out not to even be on at the time posted. After ripping most of my hair out of my head (my new style is now sort of punk rock meets Mr. Clean), I went back to the company to find out what was going on with the cable craziness. When we confronted the company about this they said, yeah, that's just how it is. Do we live in a third world country? I could've sworn that somebody once told me that Japan was more technologically advanced than anyone. What happened to that?! Humph! We canceled the two pay channels and instead of giving our money back they told us they'd put it towards next year's bill. What kind of back alley operation is this??? Oh well. Lesson learned. Next year we're not getting any cable and will just put the "refund" in our account towards our internet account. O.K., the whining has now ended. Also, this post has now ended. So if you skipped to the end, well let's just say you didn't get your money's worth (wait a minute, I thought this was free...)!