So much catching up to do! The day before Thanksgiving was my official last day of work at my short-lived job with Navy Federal. I would have loved to come to an agreement with them for a more flexible schedule, but their needs and my needs were just too incompatible. It’s too bad, but I’m certainly happy to be on a plane to Singapore while writing this!
We had a really lovely Thanksgiving with the boys and friends. Casey was up early for a few hours of work in the morning, and I was making some mashed potatoes for the ship’s crew who were on duty for the holiday. The potatoes came out a little on the lumpy side, but I think I made up for it with some bangin’ home-made gravy (I’ll have to get some feedback from the crew to confirm that though). Luckily, the Reily’s, who hosted our Thanksgiving dinner, had all the traditional dishes spoken for, so I only had to bring a small side dish and drinks to share. I tried a recipe from a friend of ours aptly named “Peas & Cheese”. Which was simply peas drowned it a tasty swiss-cheese sauce. Just as I was packing up my crock pot to bring the potatoes down to the ship I got a call from Casey that the duty officer for the day had to go in for a medical procedure and did not arrange a replacement, so he was going to be staying on the ship for the whole day to cover. Tears. I was pretty upset that I would have to mingle with the brothers and ship friends sans-husband, but I’ve learned that I should only spend about 5 minutes being upset, otherwise I’m just wasting time I could be trying to find the positive. Things like this always happen in the Navy. So I started looking around for the various uniform items Casey would need for the remainder of the day and trying to finish packing up the dishes for the meals. Luckily, at the last minute, one of the chiefs, who’s family is state-side, was kind enough to step in and pick up the duty. Talk about being thankful!! Casey was home by noon and was able to spend the Thanksgiving meal with all of us after all! It was a great day spent with the family and new friends, and 3 super cute little girls "attacking" all of the boys at the party (which included being fake-eaten by a purple hippo).
We spent Friday trying to secure a hotel in Fukuoka for a weekend stay. Casey was flying out on Monday for his conference in Singapore, and the boys were leaving Tuesday to head back to the states. I was also leaving Tuesday to meet Casey in Singapore. Apparently, Fukuoka does not make reservations for same-day stays. We literally called about 30 hotels trying to find somewhere to stay. We settled on making reservations for Saturday instead and taking the train up to Fukuoka early on Saturday. We were bummed we didn’t get to spend an extra night in Fukuoka, because they have some really great downtown bars and restaurants. We were lucky to get the hotel bookings we did though, because we got a great price and we were close enough to all the action that we got to see so many things! Before Casey left we even got to see Sumo! We were convinced the tickets would be sold out, but we managed to get to the ticket window just after it opened and we got “open seating” for the equivalent of about $25.
The Sumo matches didn’t start heating up until later in the afternoon so we ventured into downtown Fukuoka for some exploring and shopping and eating. In classic me-style I managed to rip the belt loop off my pants right in the morning, and every time I sat down it was tearing a bigger hole across my bum! We made a hasty shopping trip to Uni-Qlo to get some new pants, which are cute jegging-things (Heidi got me hooked on the jeggings). No longer showing my undies to everyone, we got some really yummy coffee and egg-salad sandwiches for breakfast and spent the rest of the morning trying to tolerate Jessie and hopping from shop to shop. Jessie walks and moves like he weighs around 600 lbs, so going through the subway tunnels got a little obnoxious, and since it was so cold out we took the underground tunnels a lot! On a happier note, we re-located the Crocs store, and I got two new pairs. One pair, which I like to call the sparkle-sparkle crocs, is just a tiny bit glittery/shiny so I can wear them with a cute dress or something, and the others are little blue/gray numbers that are more like a little sneaker for a more casual outfit. I’m pretty excited about them, since the crocs I bought in San Diego (only about 4-5 months ago) are already extremely well loved. Jimmy bought some neat hats and a much needed fleece (it was a lot colder than we expected). Despite the cold, Jessie managed to buy mostly ice-cream. It was probably good though that we didn’t buy too many things because before we left the house everyone had packed up to go other places, so there wasn’t a lot of room for extras in our many suitcases (seriously, where did we get so much stuff!?!).
Sumo was awesome. Originally I was realllllly sad about losing the base-sponsored tickets to the event, because we were under the impression that everything else was sold out. Luckily, (thanks to Google’s auto-translate feature) we found out that open seating goes on sale at 8 AM on the day of the matches. This was still no guarantee of course, that we could get in, because it’s 2 hours on the train up to Fukuoka, so in order to get up there on time we had to take the first train leaving that day at 6:20 AM (which is why we were trying for the extra day in the hotel, so we could leave at a more reasonable hour and already be there). We made sure everyone was packed up the day before, laundry done, and uniforms double-checked, but it was still a pain to get everyone loaded up and taxied to the train station before 5:30 AM (flash-forward to life with kids???). Jimmy almost punched me in the throat when I went in to wake him up, but mostly because he thought I was Jessie trying to mess with him. But, it turns out that the base sponsored tickets were literally there-and-back, with no built in time for enjoying the city or the sites, and if you were with the base you couldn't have any beer at the event! We really lucked out on that one!
Here’s a link to the pictures from their trip! The pics are added at the end of our Japan album, so you may have seen some of the earlier pics already! Enjoy!
Up next: Fukuoka explorations with the boys, saying goodbye, and Singapore!
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