This is Marit, who has gotten up at 5am to watch the DVR'd Vikings game with Ken, but am also surfing on the laptop. Of course, I click on Minneapolis Star Tribune, so now I know the score and have defeated the whole getting up early! Oh well, I don't have to go to work.

This is my favorite from lovelylisting.blogspot.com.
This is from an actual house listing!
AHHH!

Like many celebrities, I'm trying to get in the habit of making announcements on the blog in order to encourage people to read it. So, for all of you who have been asking about my boards -- and assuming that all of the "results aren't back yet" lines I fed you were just a cover for failing -- you'll be happy to know that I passed. Sadly, this is not the end of my test-taking career. If/when I do the sports med fellowship thing, I'll need to take a test to get my CAQ (easy, Greg, it stands for Certificate of Added Qualification). And, of course, I will need to take re-certification exams for both of those every 5 years.

Ken

We have been having this type of weather for a week now, blah. It is still 80 and humid, but you'll get drenched (as I am now after taking the dogs out). Since the winds are not "destructive" this means everything is still open. I had to go to the hospital today (for my Red Cross volunteer stuff) and arrived drenched! Yes, hi, I just crawled out of the drain, but I would like to work here?? Since I'm doing it for free, they shouldn't care:)

It would seem that the Vikings are not really proving to be worth the effort it takes to watch them.

The time zone difference between here and the U.S. can pose some interesting challenges. Besides the occasional middle-of-the-night phone call from well meaning friends and family and difficulty doing business over the phone in the U.S., it is near impossible to watch a live NFL game....unless you decide to just give up on sleep. In Okinawa, the noon NFL kick off occurs at.....(everyone take a minute to practice figuring out the time difference)............that's right, 2 AM! This poses a number of problems. 1: I need my beauty sleep. 2. If I record the game to watch it after work, well, that just won't work. There's no way I'm going to make it through an entire day at work without looking up the score, what happened....basically everything that makes the game not worth watching anymore. 3. I work with a bunch of people who would love nothing more than to give away the score and ruin it for me.

Solution: I record the game, which starts at 2 AM, and get up at 5am to watch it. I can FF through commercials, etc. and get the whole thing watched in about 90 minutes before getting ready for work.

Don't worry, I've already taken Super Bowl Monday off.

Ken

This is Ken's bud at work, "Doc" Mike McCord and his wife Amber. He completed his FP residency at Bremerton one year before Ken, so nice to have some established friends here.

As with most things, Mar has been in charge of the blog. But since we live half way across the world now, I figure I should start chiming in from time to time too. I mean, who isn't dying to hear what I have to say?

First off, congratulations to Sarah Eggleston on being the first person to make the big math error when figuring out the time zone difference and calling at 5 a.m. thinking it was "Sunday afternoon." Always great to hear from Sarah.

Anyway, you can tell from Mar's previous posts that we are having a great time so far. The weather is great, and there is a ton to do here. I might even get enough golf in to be able to par a hole sometime in the next three years. We are getting used to the driving and all of the other cultural differences in Japan. Like Marit said, everyone here is very nice. Our landlord has offered us the use of his kayaks if we feel like taking them out for some snorkeling. Actually, he doesn't speak much English, but he pointed at them and smiled, which I guess could have meant that if we touch his kayaks, he'll kill us; but for now we're going to assume that he was telling us we could use them.

Work is going smoothly so far. One baby delivered and I'm sitting around at the hospital right now on call waiting for another mother to deliver so I can go home and get some sleep. The vast majority of people we take care of are young and healthy with a few retirees and DOD school teachers thrown in to keep it interesting. Since the retirees and DOD employees are not active duty military, they are not prevented from coming to Japan if they have significant health problems that require more care than we can provide here (active duty members undergo a process called "overseas screening" that is supposed to, for example, prevent someone who needs to see a cardiologist every month from ending up someplace that doesn't have a cardiologist) - so they tend to be the ones who require the most work. Well, that's not true, the MOST work is spent on perfectly healthy people who have nothing better to do (after all, we are on a 65 mile long island in the middle of the Pacific where most dependents don't work) than to come to the doctor's office every time they get a cut, scrape, sniffle, or sometimes for what seems like sheer boredom.

I'll save some stories about the 24-hour access pager (where anyone can call for medical advice at any time) for another time.

Keep in touch! Let us know if you don't have our Vonage phone number.

Ken

1. Car Names
My fav the Honda "That's"
Ken's fav the "Punta"
JoyPop
Fun Cargo
Move
Cube

2. English Misspellings
Johnny's Used Car
Parforming Arts Center

3. No tipping :)

4. DUI is 0.03 and everyone in the car gets one too :(

5. Deiko Cab where they bring an extra driver for your car :)

6. The croquet club next to our house - they treat it like golf, get up at 6am to get a game in!

7. Dried fish parts sold like beef jerky for humans and dogs!

8. Japanese kids lean 3000 kanji characters in school, the official list is 80,000!

9. Everyone is so polite, even on the road:)

10. The fastest speed limit is 60kph = 45mph :(

A Nakijin Village resident adopted a couple goats several years ago, training them to pull him around in a wagon.

When one of the goats was killed by a wind dog, Masao Miyagi found his relationship with the survivor, a goat he named Ryun Run, quickly changing. He still used the goat to ferry him around in the wagon, but the 56-year-old Miyagi began making plans to make goat soup with the animal.

Those plans changed as his affection for the goat grew, and became more complex when Ryun Run picked up a boyfriend a few months ago. “I love her and she loves me,” Miyagi says, “so I can’t eat her. If she and her boyfriend have a baby, I can’t say yet what to do.” Goats are a common meat in Okinawan cuisine.