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26 May 2005

Shisa

Counting Cars

Playground

Huis Ten Bosch Tower at Sunrise

Homes in the Hills

Onions

Phone Mail

Shellfish with Wheels

Schoolgirls

And You Wanna Complain About Your Working Conditions?!?

Well, nothing special has happened in the last week or so there's not a lot to write about. We've been keeping busy, spending some time with Kay's friends - we recently went to a barbeque and took the kids to a local park.

Luna entered a talent contest at school and ended up doing a really good job singing the national anthem to begin the show. I'll post the video on the "videos" page in the next week or so - once I have a chance to download it from the camera.

Here I'm going to start a new periodic feature called "Only in Sasebo" to highlight some of the special things that happen here. I'm not sure what it is, but this Navy base seems to be caught somewhere between the Twilight Zone and the Outer Limits -- I get the feeling that some of the people here are truly from another planet. People make up their own rules as they go along, common sense seems to be a foreign concept, and nothing seems to go as planned. From time to time, I will share some of these experiences with you...whether you like it or not.

"Only in Sasebo"

When we moved into our townhouse on base last winter, we immediately discovered that the back yard was in horrible condition, since the previous owner had two large dogs who had dug holes all over the place. So when I asked the housing office if they could do something about it they obliged and added me to the list. Well a few weeks ago the Japanese contractor came by to tear out the old lawn and lay new sod. Well, the first thing I noticed was that they laid the sod with a two inch gap around each square, then filled the gaps with a mix of sand and gravel (more gravel than sand). Now the kids won't play in the backyard because gravel gets in their shoes as soon as they walk on it and housing says there's nothing they can do because "that's how the contract was written."

But it gets better! Over the next couple of weeks the old lawn starts to grow back from under the sod, pushing the sod up (thereby killing it) and leaving huge gaps where the sand/gravel mix has now washed up under the sod. Housing's solution to this problem? They offered me some new sod to replace the sections that died and grass seed to fill the gaps between the sod!

The moral of this story...be careful what you ask for, because you might just get it. Although I asked for them to replace the lawn, I didn't ask them for a better lawn. So they replaced it with a worse one.