Welcome Back, Blogger

So, Blogger has been down all day yesterday and then it decided to delete my last post and bring it back. The problem with Blogger is that when it doesn't want to work here, it tells me in Japanese. Translation software on most browsers is terrible, so it's hard to figure out what's going on.

Again, sorry no pictures. John has been really getting into the swing of things at work and the whole week is comprised of him going to work and coming home and going to sleep. During the day, I stick around on base, because my confidence to wander out in town alone is not there yet. Plus, it's never ever a good idea to wander alone in a foreign country.

I've been frustrated lately. So much of what we have to do here right now depends on someone else. It's tough being this dependent on a system. In the US, we can do what we want because no matter what state we are living in, we KNOW how to do simple things, like, drive, choose an apartment, pay our bills, get a car, etc.

For example, right now we're trying to buy our first car. It's a 2000 Toyota Vitz (basically a Yaris). It's small, gets good gas mileage, has about 54k miles on it, blue, $2500. I went to apply for the loan, got approved only to find out I applied for the wrong type of car loan because Navy Federal does things differently overseas. So, they had to cancel that loan and had us apply for a new one. Now we have to wait and see if the new one gets approved and while I don't think it will get denied (since the "wrong" one was approved), it's something I worry about.

If we want to move out of this hotel room, that depends on when the higher up at John's work feels like approving our request to start our overseas housing allowance. If we want to stay in the hotel room, it depends on the hotel and the housing office approving our request to stay for 10 day increments (that's right, we have to request permission to stay every 10 days and it is a paperwork process).

If we want our driver's license, we have to depend on a strict Japanese official to pass us and give us our license (which thankfully he did). If we want our household goods, it depends on when San Diego feels like releasing the shipment of our stuff. We told them to go ahead and send the stuff and they didn't. We had to go to the household good office here and get them to prod the San Diego department to send our stuff.

If we want to get paid correctly, we have to depend on John's office to figure out why they didn't pay John the full amount he's entitled to.

So, as you can see, it's an extremely frustrating position. I could really go on and on and on about the ways in which we've been forced to become dependent on the system. I think the most frustrating aspect is that there's nothing we can do. We can just wait for the most part.

I'm looking forward to the day when we're all settled in and there's no more of this dependence on anything.