6/14/06 - 4th Letter

4th letter
Wed. 6/14/06 - 11:10am Japan time
There are 10-20 earthquakes here every year. I felt my first one ever in my life Monday morning at 8:05am. Woke me up ‘cuz my bed starting rocking back and forth (we’re on the 4th floor of the hotel). It was crazy! Apparently they have their building on rollers here now. People feel them all the time and it’s not a big deal at all. I guess we’re on a huge fault line. I think this one was a 6-something on the Richter scale but it was in southern japan and then there was an aftershock nearby us in the ocean. I don’t know, I think that’s what bryan said his peeps said at work.
I found out last week that the total weight of all our stuff was about 4700 lbs. Our limit was just under 5700. so we were good there.
so monday we had to switch hotel rooms. but not only rooms, we had to switch buildings. now checkout is noon and checkin 2pm. but we had stuff in fridge and freezer. what the heck am i supposed to do with all our stuff in between, by myself, cuz bryan is at work. we had 5 suitcases, 6 bags of food, 2 backpacks, all his uniforms on hangers, etc. not only did we have a lot of stuff, but we were on the 4th floor and the elevator was broken. of course - it's us, and we're moving. that's how things go on our moving days. so we couldn't bring up the luggage carrier. bryan went and talked to the front desk during his lunch and they changed our checkout to 1pm and said they'd get housekeeping in the room we were waiting on as soon as the people checked out. then he went back to work at 12:30. at quarter-to 1pm i found out about the room being in another building. i called bryan at work cuz there's no way i could do this on my own, and they let him come home for the day. after bryan made several trips down the stairs with all our stuff and i could help him on the last load (our room keys were already deactivated so i stayed in the room with all our stuff) we went to the other bldg and our room was on the 2nd floor and no elevator in the bldg. needless to say by this time i was very frustrated with the hotel. we wondered why we couldn't have stayed in our room and whoever was scheduled to be in it, to be put in the room we were moving to...?!?! whatever. this other room is smaller, but the setup slightly smarter. i could only see the top half of my face in the bathroom mirror in our first room. honestly who puts mirrors that high!! there was nowhere to put your food and the bathroom was cramped. the view was kind of cool, but i forgot to take a picture of it, sorry. the room we're in now is $14 less a night (even though that makes no difference to us cuz it's reimbursed), the bed is smaller (full-size instead of queen -- we can't wait to get our bed!), there's no disposal!, and NO DISHWASHER!!!!!!!! ahhh i thought we'd had the last of that when we moved away from wichita falls! i told bryan we were going to go buy paper products for our dishes. cuz besides that, in the cupboards they only have 2 bowls and like 3 plates, etc. the bedroom was pretty cramped but with a little bit of furniture movement by me, it's do-able. we will be in this room almost 4 wks. yay.
bryan's typical work schedule right now is 6am to 3pm. on mondays, wednesdays, and fridays, he has physical training (PT) where they all run and whatever and he comes back home about 10 min to 7am or so and then has to be back at work at 8. then an hour lunch. so i thought that was kind of interesting - that they don't add hrs onto your day to accomodate for it, you just have less work hrs. how much "work" he's actually been doing though... i guess they can't do much with him yet cuz he has to attend a few safety trainings and stuff first. today he's at the maintenance safety training i think. but like i said before, they have a lot of down time, so they've been fixing mowers and weed eating and stuff. nice huh. starting the 26th he has FTAC (first term airman something) which all new peeps have to go to when it's your first base. it's 2 wks long. after that i think he might actually "go to work." he has 5 or 6 tests he has to do for his "upgrade" training that he has a month for each to do. (of course if he wants to study for his officer test he's got to do them in about 2 mos probably). but they've said he will most likely be on swing shift, which is 3-11pm mon-fri. maybe they stay til midnight i'm not sure. they have the same thing with PT days, where from 3-5pm they're exercising and then going home to shower. also, i've seen some of the swing shift guys at the softball games at night, so i think they let them go for that too! and then they go back to work afterwards. i think. but that's cool.
the "mongolian" restaurant that we went to last saturday (the viking), is NOT mongolian. it was very interesting. you have like this small circular grill built into the middle of the table and you go to an interesting-ly set-up buffet bar. where they had the raw meats for you to cook. they had like pork tongue and pork intestines...almost accidentally grabbed those before i read the label. they had other stuff that was cooked - like mini corn dogs and cinnamon noodles-(yeah what the heck i don't know). but they definitely had some good stuff - the regular noodles were gross, so it was mainly a rice thing. i'm not good with chopsticks so luckily they had some forks otherwise i would have starved to death. bryan resorted to a fork as well. so it was decent but not worth $15 each we decided.
bryan wants to drive somewhere this weekend, i guess his supervisor's been talking about some lighthouses or something, so we will see.
this whole baby thing is already making me physically uncomfortable, so i'm scared to find out how bad it's going to be the last 2 months. i guess i'm 23 weeks today. i need to get back into the gym cuz at night when i'm trying to sleep my lower back kills me and it's hard to find a comfortable position. my body takes forever to wind down and usually after laying in bed 2 hrs i can fall asleep. but there is a definite difference in the belly shape since we've been here in japan.
i think that's all for now. if you have questions let me know and i'll throw them in here - though i know it doesn't get much more detailed than this!
love you all!
julie and bryan and 17-weeks-left brock