church and dr appt

lets start with yesterday...i finally found my new branch for church! i was able to get a contact number, made a couple phone calls and was able to get a ride to church yesterday. we're in the zama military branch, which isn't actually on camp zama, or even very close. ok i guess it kind of is. it's about 6 miles from post, but takes about 30 minutes to get there with traffic and such. (honestly the roads here scare me, but we'll save that story for later) so i leave for church not really sure what to expect. i'm thinking it will be similar to ft. irwin, kinda small, but not too small. lots of kids. yeah, not quite what i had pictured. there are maybe a couple dozen families at the most. yeah, the primary, 20 kids. i saw that and thought "that's the size of my last primary class!" ok so i only had 13 kids in my class, but not much different. in my home ward we had more kids in the sunbeams and ctr 5 class alone than in the whole primary here. it was so weird to not see a hundred kids running around. it made for a quiet sacrament mtg though. i met the branch president too. seems like a good guy. he spent a couple years in idaho, graduated high school there. i met the relief society president too. her husband is a chaplain here on post. he really knows his scriptures. sitting in sunday school yesterday, was just like wow. smart guy. relief society was a little different. not in a bad way. it's just there was only 6 of us total in there. kinda weird going from my parent's ward where there is atleast 30 and if you're not early you don't get a seat, to feeling like there's no one in there. it was good though. i think it will be a nice branch. the only problem i see coming is several of the families will be leaving before summer is over. everyone was pretty excited that we were there. i guess it's not very often we get new families in the branch. so i'm sure it won't be long before we havce a calling or two or three... =)
now today... we went down to yokota for ben's dr appt. you could say it was a waste of time. they took some xrays (not sure why as he is having problems with the muscle, not the bone) and basically told him the mri he had done at ft. irwin wasn't good enough and needs to have it done again. except this time they'll use the contrast dye. the only problem with that is that our insurance has to approve it first, and then they have to schedule it, which will more than likely be done at a japanese hospital. i'm not sure why that is though. you'd think one of the several military posts around here would have an mri they could use more than once a month. yokota has a mobile mri and they schedule appts one day a month. kinda dumb, but whatever. so depending on when we can get his mri done depends on when we go back to the dr. probably 3 weeks or so. so yeah, really didn't find anything out today. other than it makes me sick to see my husband in so much pain. just the look on ben's face when the dr was making him move his shoulder and whatnot made me sick to my stomach. so needless to say, i don't know that i'll go to many more dr appts with him. so for now, we don't know much else about that.
i guess the only other big news is that we have a house and will move in wednesday. they offered and we accepted a house on friday. it's a new, two story, 3 bedroom, 2 1/2 bath home that is absolutly beautiful. i can't wait! we do our inspections/walk-through, sign some papers, and get the keys wednesday morning. then our household goods will be delivered that same day. transportation doesn't usually do that, but they got it worked out so they could do it for us. i'll try to get pics posted by the end of the week. only two more nights on this hard hotel bed before i get my own sink-in-soft bed again. it will be great! yeah!!!

yeah!

so it turns out ben won't be heading back to the states next week like planned. his unit is heading to virgina sunday for some training for 3 weeks. for those who don't know, he is supposed to deploy to kuwait later this year. so his unit is starting their training for it. we weren't too excited to find out he was supposed to go to virginia as we just got here, and not only because of the long flight and huge time difference, but i didn't want to be left alone in a foreign country right away. but anyway, he has gotten out of going to virgina. his shoulder has really been bothering him lately and he was able to get into the dr last week, and they gave him a referal to the ortho surgeon at yokota. (camp zama isn't that big, so pretty much all the specialists are at the naval bases). since we were in class all last week, we never heard back as to when his appt would be down there. so he called this morning, and oh darn, his appt is scheduled for when he's supposed to be gone. so we go see the ortho surgeon next monday and he has his first appt with physical therapy tuesday. so he's not going to virginia. now we just have to see about keeping him out of kuwait. and actually they are talking of moving him to a different unit here, so he won't go. a big part of it will be when they end up doing the shoulder surgery. once he has it, he will have 30-60 days of recovery. so if they put it off for too long it will run into his unit deploying. and there's no way he could deploy and do his job effectively with a bad shoulder. so we'll find out monday. i mean if he has to deploy he has to go. doesn't mean i want him to, but that's part of being an army wife. i don't know many who haven't had to deal with deployment at some point or another. if he goes, he goes. but if he stays here, all the better. :)

A Few More Pics From Odawara

odawara castle field trip

so as part of our in processing we had to do a japanese headstart class. it was basically we learn beginning language, customs, etc. it's a week long class, but it really should be two. we cover so much stuff that you go home the end of the day feeling totally overwhelmed. it's a good class though. and i did learn a few things. it's going to take a lot more practice though. but anyway, on thursday we went on a field trip. we went to odawara castle, which is a couple hours from post out in the country away from some of the bigger cities. this is the castle. yeah, it's really that big. there was a million steps up to the front door (ok maybe not that many, but there was a lot). and then there was 4 floors with artifacts and such, and then the 5th floor was a little gift shop. it was pretty cool. couldn't understand what any of the name plates said, but it was still fun to look at. also on the 5th floor you can go outside and it's like an observatory deck. normally you can see mt. fuji, but it was too cloudy that day. we did see the ocean though. so i can now say i've seen both sides of the pacific ocean. japan is a beautiful country. yeah there's a million people in the cities, but when you get out in the country it is breath taking. i wish i could have gotten more pics of the country side. i'll have to take some on post. before they built the base 50+ years ago, they had to come in and clear out some of the jungle. the trees and vegitation are just awesome. i'm loving it here. it rains every other day, if not every day. in the almost two weeks we've been here it's already rained more times than it ever did in the two years we spent at ft. irwin. it's usually a mist like rain, but i love it. but anyway, after our tour of the castle we went to lunch. yeah, that didn't go over so well. the sensai had to try to explain what everything was (the menu was all in japanese) and once i did get my food, the only thing i could get down was the rice. yeah, lunch made me kinda sick. not so fun. it didn't help that they didn't have any chicken or beef of any kind there. yeah i know i'm a bit of a picky eater. ben seemed to enjoy his meal though. i'm sure we'll go out and eat again sometime. i just need to work on my japanese so i know what i'm ordering. after lunch we went up to the train station and took a train back to post (we took a bus up). the ride wasn't too bad. we only had to switch lines once. and come to find out the train station is only a couple blocks from the walking gate on post. so it's fairly close and it's really pretty cheap. and we can take it just about anywhere we want to go. it's cool. i think today we're going to go walk around town outside the gate. it's not raining right now. that's all likely to change though. so i should get going before it does start. if nothing else to go see my puppies. hopefully we'll have a house soon so i can bring them home instead of leaving them in the kennel. anyway, i'm off. later!

first blog

so we're going to try this. yes i'm totally stealing this from my friends jessica and morgan. i was thinking i wanted to do something like this to keep everyone up to date anyway. just some place to post pictures and keep people informed. i'll keep emailing you if you want, but this way i don't feel like i'm bothering everyone all the time. so we'll see how this goes. hopefully i'll be better at updating this than emailing everyone. wish me luck!