A Place to Call Our Own

After ten days in Room 311 Melba and I moved out of the Navy Lodge this morning to a housing facility called Goban Tower. It was a good thing too because the A/C gave out last night during a storm. Goban Tower is one of many 9-story high rises on the Yokosuka base and it's only a five minute walk from Melba's school.

Last evening we took off just before sunset to the Navy Exchange to buy some bedsheets and stuff. Base housing is going to loan us a little furniture until ours arrives in October. We didn't know it but a bad storm was blowing in from the north while we were indoors shopping. We should have been watching the Japanese Weather Channel instead of The Simpsons before we stepped out of the Navy Lodge. Loaded down with bags, it had already grown dark on us on the walk back to the Lodge and it was blowing so hard we looked like a pair of Weather Channel talking-heads reporting from the scene of an approaching hurricane. I thought it was funny, but Melba was genuinely frightened.

From our vantage point on the third floor we had an excellent view of Tokyo Bay and the ship traffic crisscrossing on it. The winds had churned up the bay waters so much that there were white caps as far as you could see and the waves produced crashed over the seawall only 50 yards from us. That's when trouble struck. The lights flashed once and then the A/C quit in much of the building. This morning when we were checking out there were a lot of unhappy campers in the lobby.

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I waited in our empty 8th-floor apartment at Goban Tower from 7:30 in the morning until 1 in the afternoon before the truck with our loaner furniture arrived. It's not much to look at but at least we have something to sleep on and a place to sit our butts and eat. I'll send pictures when it's possible for me to do so. We don't have a TV, though. The navy won't loan out one of those, so we may have to go buy one soon. You know... to watch the Japanese Weather Channel.