For My Mother(s)

Long-promised pictures. I am shame-faced. For weeks I have forgotten to post these. Sorry mom, and mom-in-law.

This is the coat I received from the HSL-51 spouses' club. A week after we got here coincided with the once-a-year party they have to officially welcome everyone new. So, even women who had been here a year or more hadn't attended because if you can't make it, you have to wait another year. It was a lot of fun and after our little ceremony and party, the guys (in some cases gals) got to join us at the CO's house for a barbecue.  Note: this picture was taken in the lodge. SO glad to be out of that room.

Now on to the next: bikes!

These are our bikes. They allow us to get to the train station or grocery store in under five minutes. Also, handy baskets and sweet luggage racks. These were taken at our house (more pics to come of that). The big yellow square is our mailbox. It says "Post" on the front. The homeowner planted some johnny jump ups in front. The little box to the upper right of the mailbox is the doorbell. It's got a camera in it, which is awesome. Of course, the box inside looks like this:

In case you can't make that out, it's written in Japanese... which means I can't make it out either (ha!).  The button on the bottom is obviously the button you use to answer the door bell and see who wants to pay you a visit. The other buttons were mysterious orbs of mystery.

When Blake and I moved into the house, we knew things would be different. Even the way you hang curtains is different and don't even get me started on the toilet that I'm sure will become self-aware any day now. It didn't occur to us that there were things we wouldn't be able to figure out with a little intuition and a little trial-and-error.

So, we rounded up the instruction manuals for the door thing, the AC units (3), the dishwasher, the stove, and the water heater control panel/tub control that's in the shower room and sat down with a woman at our landlord company for half an hour while she tried to explain what the heck everything did. Some translations were easy: "this button is on/off," and some were not: "this button makes the AC good for your skin." What? Turns out the AC/heater downstairs is very fancy, and it has the four-billion buttons to prove it. It will regulate your AC, heat, humidity, has a setting for sleep, energy saving settings, a setting to keep the AC from drying out your skin, and it has a digital display in front that shows you the inside and outside air temperatures. Oh. And it talks to you in Japanese. The bathtub talks in Japanese too, so if you set the tub to auto-fill itself, it will give you an alert when it's almost ready, and will let you know when the tub's full.

It's a pretty sharp learning curve around here. It's the house of the future.