New Year, New Blog layout

I know it's been awhile since I have posted. I figured, if Kristin can pull it together enough to post so can I.

Winter has come to Japan. We are in a chilly part of the country in which the tempuratures typically dip into the 30's at night and up into the 40's during the day. Of course this varies depending on the cloud cover.

So to defray the costs of heating our luxurious 1250 square feet, we have borrowed 2 kerosene heaters from the housing self help office. Given the fact that we haven't run the HVAC units as heaters I don't if we are actually saving that much money because the cost of kerosene is pretty obscene. ($2.98/gallon I think)

Since posting last I have had the chance to goto Hawaii for a couple of weeks. This was not a vacation, but travel for a school (class) that I had to take to be qualified to perform my job. Nevermind that I have been doing my job for the last 6 months without any major mishap.
During that trip Kristin and Ronan both had the opportunity to join me for about 10 days. That was o0ur holiday travel. Kristin and Ronan got to visit with the McCann's and I was able to goto class all day. But on both Friday's I did go and play golf. My first time ever picking up a club. It was pretty interesting. Mike Gabiga, one of my co-workers who was in the same class guided me and his enthusiasim for the game became contagious.

Christmas and the New Year were pretty slow, which was good. President Ford graciously gave us a day off in conjunction with our New Year's Day liberty, so we all had a five day weekend.
I went golfing with Mike again up at Atsugi NAF. That was the first time playing 18 holes. I am now a little sore.. My shoulder doesn't like to move like a golf swing very much, so I have to do some training. Of course my score was hilariously high. I think it was a 144. That's twice par which is on the edge of politely not playing anymore for the sake of the people playing with you.

That's about it for right now. I'll make a more concerted effort to update this thing on a more regular basis.

~jp