Friday, February 29, 2008

more updates...

Not much to report here... still plugging along with the to-do list. We went to a briefing this morning at the family services building on Tim's base. A few new pieces of information, but not much. To ease my discouragement at the seeming waste of time (and effort - 3 kids and one semi-grouchy wife, fed and nicely dressed out the door at 7:30 am, 19 degrees, frost on the car, rush hour traffic into DC), Tim pointed out that, hey, if we already knew most of what they had to tell us, we must be doing alright.
We are still working on the dog situation. One thing that we found out this morning is that, until our airline tickets are printed, we can change the itinerary as may times as we need to in order to get it right for our situation. At their suggestion, we are looking at a different airline (not ANA) to take him from Osaka Kansai to Naha Airport in Okinawa. The trouble now is that they are telling us he would have to stay in Osaka in quarantine for 12 hours before connecting to Okinawa. We also found out that everyone arrives on the island between 7pm and 10 or 11 pm. There is just no getting around that.
It is interesting to note that the social climate in Okinawa is not at its best right now. The entire military community is in a base ordered lockdown as a result of some poor decisions by a few American military servicemembers. As of now, it is indefinite, which is something, not scary, but hmmmm... interesting to think about.
You can read more about this from these news links.

Japan Update

U.S. orders total lockdown of troops

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So...did they address the fact that you are encouraged to seek off-base housing while awaiting on-base housing? But you're supposed to be confined to the base... Interesting. I do know that while a friend of Susan's was stationed there many years ago no one was not allowed to leave the base. Must be an ongoing problem. "An adventure...an adventure...an adventure"
:-) Aunt Beth

Jax and company said...

Yeah! what about that, huh? We have a running list of questions along those lines which we have presented to our contact at Tim's new unit, just waiting for answers. Some things will become clearer when we arrive. I read another news story from that same website the other day that said the Japanese gov't is complaining about the high numbers of us servicemembers who claim that the US gov't doesn't have space for them, and are being told they have to live off base. I'll set a link to it on the main blog.

jax