Lately

Hey, it's been a while. I've been back on the exercise bangwagon again. It's a shaky ride, but I'm hanging on.

I started Jamie Eason's LiveFit Trainer, a free program that tells me what to do when I'm at the gym.

Let it Snow

Long time, no talk. 

Not a lot has been happening over here. Lots of working. And lots of snow. It snows basically every single day. Normally it's just a dusting or doesn't even stick. Some days - it does.

One weekend, we had 27" of snow. It snowed from sundown Friday to sunup Monday.

We had to run out in the middle of the snow to pick up our car from a friend. You can sort of see the flakes are huge. All the pictures are with Jeff's small point and shoot because I could picture myself taking my gorgeous new camera out and dropping her in the snow.

My sweet husband has gotten even sweeter this winter and wipes my car off every morning before I go to work. When it looks like this, I'm pretty grateful!

A week or so later, 19" of snow fell overnight. There were high winds all night long, making our windows rattle and the howls and screams of the wind kept us up all night. Our windows were all covered in snow, even though we're on the 8th floor. It was nasty. We woke up to a snow day! Well, for everybody else. Schools were closed. Base was running on mission essential personnel only. Jeff got the day off. I worked extra hours. Because even mission essential personnel have children, our center was open for business.

Jeff went outside nearly thirty minutes before me. Once I grabbed something to eat I joined him to help dig out our cars. My black car is on the left, his red car is across the aisle. You can imagine how they looked before he dug them out...

Our parking lot was a mess. Cars were stranded half in and half out of their parking spots. Some very intelligent people thought they could just gun their engines and make it over all the snow and out of their spots. They got stuck, of course. Jeff dug trenches for our wheels and it still took the two of us to get his car out of its spot, after much maneuvering and shoveling. There was a line of cars stranded in the entrance to our parking lot, blocking it completely. Some of them actually looked like they got stuck, some looked like they just decided to park in the way. Luckily we had another exit. It was crazy!

The plows must have been out all night, because the roads weren't bad at all. The snow was up to my hips in the parking lot and I could see the roads while driving. Jeff drove me to work because we didn't know how the roads would be. He really didn't need to, but it made me feel slightly better about working a long day while he got the day off!

With all this snow, we haven't been out exploring too much. The roads off base are nowhere near as nice as the roads on base. They're uneven stretches of ice, which means you feel like you're riding a horse and you're slipping and sliding through intersections. Doable for a run to a local restaurant, not for a trip out of town. We've had plans to go snowboarding for two months, and each month something has come up. Maybe next month :)

I've been reading books like crazy and we've tried a couple different restaurants in Misawa, so I'm starting to make a dent in my Day Zero Project. I'll update about that soon.

Life Lately

I haven’t been updating very frequently lately. But nothing has been happening that prompts pictures or detailed blog posts, so I’ve mostly just gone about my business and called it a day.
Then I got a birthday card from my wonderful aunt who reminded me that some people can’t regularly check my Facebook and look to my blog for life updates (If you’re reading this Aunt Alice – thanks! I meant to send a thank-you card, but you know how that goes.) And even I’m not going to go digging through my Facebook page to try to remember what happened a few weeks ago, much less any longer. I was trying to remember the exact date we landed in Japan, and looking on my blog was way easier and faster than trying to use my Facebook. Better.

So.

I’ve started a new job. I bumped up to a salary job and I’ve bumped down my age group – I’m still working with kids but now they’ll be toddler sized. I haven’t been given a specific age group yet, so it’s anywhere between 6 weeks and 5 years. I’m bouncing back and forth between school age and child development for a few more weeks, and the contrast is refreshing. It’s hard not to love your work when you spend your mornings playing dress up with toddlers (I was a cop, firefighter, and construction worker this morning) and spend your afternoons making Christmas cards with school age kids and talking about anything from where we’ve lived (some of these kids have been all over the place!)  to what we love to do on the weekends. Of course the getting puked on (babies) getting hit or bit (toddlers) or getting screamed at (school age) puts a damper in things, but not for long. Regardless, I’m very excited about my new job.

Jeff and I haven’t been exploring too much lately. Snow has hit Misawa already, so the roads are going to get tricky fast. Japanese don’t really plow, so snow piles on ice on top of snow on top of ice on narrow, winding roads. It’s fun. On base the roads are fine, at least. We’ve also just been really lazy lately and have been choosing to spend our weekends at home relaxing rather than adventuring. We’re hibernating?
We’ve ventured out a few times.

We visited some caves and an amber museum a few weeks ago (I just realized I never blogged about this, I should do that soon!)

Last week, we had Jeff’s command Christmas party. We had a lot of fun, I could probably do a quick blog post about that at some point too…
Next weekend we have my command Christmas party. The week after that is Christmas.

Speaking of Christmas, we’ve been shipping boxes all week. We had bought most of our gifts for family back home well before Thanksgiving with the intention of mailing them all out before the big turkey day. The best laid plans, right? We got them out this week, which happened to be before the priority mail deadline, which was today according to my radio. We splurged on some special gifts for our nephews, and then bit the bullet and paid the price for the hassle of shipping something that didn’t fit in a flat rate box. Ouch! Not happening again! I can’t wait until everyone gets to open their gifts and see what we’ve picked. I’ve loved shopping for unique gifts to give from our end of the world.
I even took pictures of mostly everything I bought before I wrapped and packaged.
Health wise I’m chugging along at pretty much the same place I was at weeks ago. I’ve cut back drastically on soda. I’m now down to very little each week. We usually eat out once a week, and I usually end up having one or two more sodas throughout the week. But that’s miles better than the one to four sodas I’d been drinking daily. Workouts are relatively nonexistant, but I’m working on it. Diet is still mediocre at best, but oh well. You can’t do everything perfectly, right?

Hmm, what else to update on? It’s hard to think of what people will actually be interested in reading. Life in Japan lately has mostly consisted of working and sleeping, which really isn’t very different from life in the states, except for which side of the car I drive in and what timezone I’m sleeping with.
It’s hitting me that we’ve been here for almost a year. It’s hard to believe on one hand. How have I lived overseas for a whole year?! On the other hand, it feels like home. Our apartment is good enough for now, we’re both working full-time, we’ve made friends and we’re involved in the community. We know enough of our town to maneuver the streets and enough Japanese words to at least decipher gestures and broken English. I’ve fallen in love with sushi and the scenery. If you asked me exactly a year ago if Japan would ever feel like home, I’d have looked at you with wild eyes and said “no!”. How things change, eh? (You can bet when one year hits, you’ll get a long blog post about how much change a year can bring!)