a few things

i am sorry i forgot to share, but Taco-San is out of prison, he's been home since we got into the house last week, or was it two weeks ago..... shit this lockdown is getting to me. 

and speaking of lockdown, yeah were stuck on base because a few Marines and one Soldier made some bad decisions over the last few weekends, so we are all being punished, all SOFA status personnel (that means everyone here who is american and on any sort of orders, Civilian, Military, DOD) are all enjoying our period of reflection which entails not being allowed in town, we can drive from one base to another, but we cannot stop anywhere inbetween, no dinner, no shopping, no nothing. we cant even go for a jog off base.

 i have heard that there was a couple that was caught off base having dinner and they were given 48 hours go get there asses off the island, now i dont know if its true, or partly true. but regardless Paul and i are taking this seriously. 

now its not a HUGE deal to us, we dont know what we are missing, we just got here three weeks ago, but it does make for long days and nights knowing you cant go out in town. and now i am not getting any exercise, before we were walking to dinner a few times now well we cant walk any where since our base is just housing and we cant walk off  base....

here is a tidbit of info i found interesting from American Girl in Japan

"As a sidenote, the articles fail to mention a few other facts you might find interesting. Fact 1 - the weekend that 2 military personnel received a DUI, 27 Okinawa nationals did. Fact 2 - According to a studydone by the World Fact Book and another study by the DOD, the actual % of crimes committed on Okinawa in the last 10 years by service members equals to .82% of all crime committed on Okinawa. Wait a minute. Read that again. Thats POINT 82. LESS THAN 1 %. Go forth and learn percentages and averages oh ye host nation. Naturally, that's all I have to say about that as I have no comment. I mean, I'm just sayin'."

with this i will leave you Paul is home and we need to decide wether to unpack or to spend more money. ha! like we need to spend more money.

note to self

remind me, next time we PCS to send a wine bottle opener in our express shipment,  see the following picture with the cork floating in the bottle? well this is what happens and you have no way to pull the cork out, left with the only option of pushing it in. fun times at the McCawley residence!

dont you just love my super dooper cheep plastic wine glass from the px, it was like 75 cents or something.....

and we'll end this post with some beautiful flowers that we saw walking home from dinner a few nights ago.

what's it like to cook your own food?

before we go onto dinner, we'll start with drinks, the following picture you may find disturbing, it is real, there is a real snake in that bottle of sake, i am under the impression it is called habu-sake. 

yeah gross. 

a few more quick notes.

1. there is KFC on other continents, and islands, here is proof:

2. i am silly (but i think i look pretty in this pic so i am sharing it.)

and now dinner, we found this cute little place that lets you cook your own food, its really neat, you order tons of raw food; beef, pork, veggies. and you cook them on this burner. COOL!

this beefy stuff was really good

here we are cooking our veggies, they were delicious, i cant wait to go back for more

and my steak, i didnt realise we ordered so much food, but it was fantastic. we had so much fun, that is until i made a total ass out of myself.

here is Pauls salad yum!

okay i guess we'll go onto the 'how to make an ass out of yourself in Okinawa' story:

we are sitting at the table before our food arrives and we are inspecting the sauces, other menu's (the ones in kanji) and other things at the table. and there is this little egg shaped thing, it actually come to think of it looks like a cordless computer mouse. except the top is clear, i was thinking it was like a magnifying glass that you slide the menu into and it magnifies it and lights it up so you can read it if you are old. so i am farting around with it and this kid comes to take our order. i dont know how to tell him that we already ordered, you know since i dont speak japanese and all. thankfully right then some of the food arrives. and i motion that we already ordered and he smiles and leaves. Paul figured he came because i had the menu in my hands. so we eat our lovely dinner. it was weird because we kept hearing this dinging and the waitstaff would run over to a table and take their order or get them re-fills. we couldn't figure out how people were dinging, and how the staff knew where to go. so we go on and finish our dinner and are finishing our beers, getting ready to walk home and i still want to know what this egg thing is, so i start screwing with it again, and it doesn't do anything! then i notice that in the background every time i squeeze this thing i hear a ding. ding, ding, ding, ding. i have now dinged the waitstaff, about 15 times. now as i look like a total ass, the waitress runs up and smiles, of course she doesn't understand that i didnt know what the egg thing did, and i dont know how to tell her, so i turn bright red and order desert.  i was mortified. here i am the stupid american looking impatient and like a total jerk. 

i will still go back and now i at least know to not mess with the egg thing.

driving on the wrong side of the road

now this my friends this is some scary shit!

Okinawa here i am!

not much to say, i love japan, its great here, been a little windy, and its rained almost every day for a week, but we got our housing assignment and we move in tomorrow, our neighbors are cool, and its just great here. Taco has been in the kitty prison for a week now(the kennel) but we get him back thursday. i am so excited. here are some pictures to show you how great it is here:

the weather the rest of the day was nothing short of shitty, mixed with snow, sleet and other white crap coming from the sky. by about ogden the weather finally cleared and we made it the rest of the way to logan. in logan we checked into our hotel and drove around Millville until we found Paul's childhood home,
then we continued up to Preston ID to see my great aunt and have dinner with her. just as we were getting into Preston, it started to snow, again. sometime during our visit the snow stopped and we made it back to the hotel safe and sound.
Friday morning we awoke in our warm Logan Best Western to more snow, this time about an inch. we had errands to run, so we ran up to Utah State University, to get Paul’s dad a Christmas gift, then to Macey’s (its a grocery store) to get flowers for my grandfather, and an ice scraper. after our errands we went back to the hotel, packed up the feline, and got on the road, first stop was Franklin, Idaho . the cemetery first when you get into Idaho, on the left, all the way to the back, thats where grandpa is, Aunt Vicki has a headstone there but she is in the grand canyon. (yes i know spreading ashes in the grand canyon is illegal but i didn't do it) i said hello, then goodbye. back on the road again.



I convinced Paul to drive up to Reeder Ranch, in Treasureton, ID, i spent several summers up at Reeder Ranch with my grandmother, and the Reeders (my grandmas sister is Naritta Reeder) we drove up to the ranch, which is much further from Preston than i remember, for about 10 miles i continued to tell Paul, its just around this bend. finally we found it and the memories flooded back, running up the hill on the quad. riding horses, playing with the cow dogs. being a kid was fun, i hope my children have an opportunity to have an experience like that. after we drove by the ranch we were finally on our way to Boise.
i slept for about an hour and a half, and now here we are, 44 miles from Boise, outside Mountain Home, on the road, i am writing this in Pages (apples word processing program) and i will cut and paste it into blogspot when we get net usage again. unfortunately
this post is worthless without pics so maybe i can find my USB cord at the same time and put my pictures onto here.


January 26, 2008

our arrival to Boise was uneventful, we got into town checked into the Shilo inn, which was nice, had a shower and then went to Rambo (opening night) with Benny, Pauls friend, went back to Benny’s house and the boys played ‘Rock Band’ and i played with the dogs, that was Boise, well except for the near death experience the following morning, but that was nothing more than some guy trying to make a left turn from the far right lane, nothing to out of the ordinary for us being in Mass, for the last three years. regardless it was actually terrifying to watch a lexus dart from the right lane in front of you, but thanks to Paul’s ‘ninja skillz, and evasive maneuvering we were able to drive away unharmed.
we made it to Moscow, ID after driving through the worst weather of the trip, miles of un-plowed, snow caked, hight mountain passes, and just pure crap on the roads, but we made it, we got the cat settled in here at the house, the first night we went to dinner in town at some nice Italian restaurant, it was great. Sunday night we did nothing more than lay around, i picked up on of Nancy’s books, ‘Wicked’ the weather was foul, we have been here nearly 72 hours and we have had almost 24 inches of snow, thats like one inch every three hours for you uneducated :) and yea thats allot, and there aint no sign of it stopping. we are leaving a day early because of the shit.
Monday, we drove to down so i could get the net and we forgot why, i surfed for about a half an hour, went back to the house (no net at the house) then we remembered that we wanted to make hotel reservations. poop. we had an appointment to bring the cat in at 330 so we left a bit early got the cat taken care of and then searched for walmart & star bucks, both on the same street so i could do the net and Paul could get oil to change the oil in the Jeep. after over an hour we found walmart, and let me tell you this town is about 2 min, long so an hour searching is really quite funny. then we get to star bucks, and did you know, unless i did something wrong, t-mobile, who runs the hotspots for star bucks wifi charges? yeah aint that some shit, so i went on back to the place we were earlier that day got what i needed (phone-numbers) and went back to the house.


Today, well that was the rocking-est day of all, and thus far, for the last nearly six months has been the most exhausting,. today.. we went pheasant hunting, i got to trek around in 3-6 inches of snow for 5 hours trying to shoot a damn bird, and let me tell you... it was freaking great!!! i love it, i cant wait to go hunting agin! (pictures will come soon) i got two pheasants!

one i shot first then Nancy then Paul Sr and then the bird finally dropped, and the second, i accidentally shot early and that shit fell from the sky, it was like when you played duck-hunt on the old nintendo and the bird spiraled from the sky, yep thats how they really fall! it was the coolest thing ever. and the most exhausting, i had no... no idea how out of shape i was until today. well back to the gym for me i guess.

Travel Log continuation 2

and more travel log, with pictures, i will break this up over a few posts so it isnt gigantic because in pages, its about a page and a half of typing.

Jan 25

we awoke the next morning to near blizzard conditions, snow was falling at about the rate of an inch and hour. had breakfast and the woman in the restaurant told us the canyon was still probably open and if we could see anything it would be amazing. so we packed up the car, and the cat, and we entered the canon. first stop sunrise vista, we park get out of the car, the snow is beating down on us like hail, it was most defiantly snowing more here than at the lodge. You
see a thing, maybe 30 feet, at least the paths to the lookouts were plowed with a snowblower so we didn't have to walk 30 yards in knee deep snow. i want one more vista, Paul gives in, we drive to inspiration point.
This time the paths aren't plowed, as we stomp through knee deep snow, uphill i curse myself, “why oh why did i insist on this, this is bs” we finally are approaching the top, where we will be able to see. ‘Inspiration Point’ is a fitting name, especially in the winter, it felt like the snow stopped, the cold left, and i was inspired. there aren't words to describe the feeling when you look over a cliff and see red cliffs, and hoodias, lightly blanketed in white glowing snow. after a round of pictures we went back to the car, and left, the rest of the canyon was closed to traffic, we were ready to go anyway, the snow was picking back up and it was getting late, we needed to continue on if we were going to make it to logan.

continuation of travel blog

i didn't have the net for about a week so here is the travel diary i kept in my new Mac Book Pro. as you can see i got a usb cord but i chose to keep the text as it was originaly wrote.

WEDNESDAY January 23 2007

at about 11 am Paul and i left Tucson for the last time, for three years, we began the last leg of our journey to japan, we are now headed to his fathers house in Moscow ID. the drive was great we went up to Flagstaffand we stopped and saw Montuzama’s castle it was really cool, i’ll have pictures as soon as i find my usb cord. we got to the painted desert just as the sun was setting it was really pretty, unfortunately we just got in it as the sun went down so we missed most of it, we missed the grand staircase national park, which from what i remember (its been about 8 years since i’ve been up this way) it was amazing. i remember sometime after Kanab making some comment about how amazingly lucky we’ve been and had excellent weather since we left Mass. we arrived to Bryce Canyon, it was negative something degrees, but it was beautiful the moon was bright, a few clouds on the horizon, got into our room, got some beer, got settled. me being the paranoid person i am, i decided to check the car, about every hour, to be sure it was still there. about the third check at roughly 1 am i discovered snow. yeah, three hours after my smart comment about the weather it starts to snow. checked the weather on my new mac book pro {i love my new mac book pro} and it said 5-9 inches over the next 24 hours. i sighed and went to bed