Fun Times at the Oki VTF!

Ok, so I know I tend to complain a lot about my job, but in all honesty, it's a lot of fun and I get to learn something new just about every day. It's stressful, we're always understaffed and overbooked, and people are generally not too happy about having to wait to be seen, but all in all I really do love it. I figured since I apparently spend way too much time griping about how horrible I always feel when I get home and how my life apparently sucks, I would show everyone the lighter side of things and why it's fun!

For example, this little dragon up above it wicked cute, and how often do you get to play with one of them? You cen tell his front right leg just isn't quite right, but after xrays were taken, the doc thought it may be neurological. All he knows is that he was fed so many meal worms by us, he probably felt worse going home then he did when he came it... what can I say, we kill with kindness!! Ok, not really, we try really hard not to kill at all actually!!

This little one was a tough case. Little kids found this poor little wild bird, which ended up being a Starling which are anything but nice, and he had a pretty severe broken wing way up almost in his little shoulder area. He was in some serious pain and there wasn't anything we could do to help him. He was wild so they couldn't keep him, and no animal preserve would want to take him in we thought. He ended up passing away shortly after this picture was taken, but it was cool to hold a wild bird.

This is the money shot... quite easily the number one reason why I love my job. Look what I get to work with all day, that's right... PUPPIES!! His name is Charlie, just like my boy! I wanted to hide him and not give him back to mom and dad, but alas, he had to be returned. He was quite possibly the cutest puppy I have ever seen walk into the clinic, hands down!

And yet another reason to smile on the job, look at this little face. Yuki here has been through quite a bit in her lifetime. Her mom and dad are in their 70's at least, and actually, I think their tongues hang out just like this too! Just joking... although I think they all had just about the same amount of teeth, which aren't many as you can probably tell. She has a crazy problem where her gums grow really fast and almost calcify, or get hard, almost bone-like. The doc pretty much had to shave down her gums almost a half inch or so, so all her teeth were exposed again, not covered by nastyness. Her little face was probably pretty sore at this point, but she was a real trooper through it all!!

So yes, I know I complain a lot about my job, and you would too if you worked in the madness we did too. Just some quick statistics for all of you out there... we have over 9,000 ACTIVE clients, with people constantly coming and going from the island and getting new fur kids. That number doesn't even inclue all the working dogs from all the branches we see too. On an average day we have 2 sick call rooms running with 30 minute back to back appts, 2 vaccine rooms with 15 minute back to back appts all day, a drop-off sched with 5-7 pets almost every day, and depending on the day up to 16 surgeries daily... so yeah, it's hectic. But I love it!

I have more pics of work to come. I got to scrub into a surgery this week called and FHO, or femeral head osteo-something or other... which was basically removing the head of the femur bone from this little jack russel. It was very cool, but unfortunately in my poofy hate and HUGE gown, I look fat and not really like me... but ah well, it was cool none the less. The doc let me close up... which was basically using the stapler, but cool regardless. Those pics to come soon! Hope you enjoyed these few for now!

Shuri-Jo Castle

Yokoso!! Or Welcome to Shuri-jo Castle Everyone!!

This is the Emperor's crown... I thought it kind of looked like a lite-bright!

One of the many gates throughout the castle grounds...

Where the Emperor rested his fanny...

A picture of the G8 summitt held here in Okinawa a few years back... well, quite a few actually becaus eif you look close enough, Bill Clinton is in the picture.

A huge umbrella!! The Emperor would sit under it while on the grounds... the material is a super thick satin type of material and all the decorations around it are hand-sewn... it's really really pretty up close.

A side view of the grounds... this building held a museum about the castle and some re-created areas that existed, like a tea room and a meeting room....

While standing in front of the Emperor's throne, you can see down into the original castel's ruins. The original castle was blown up by, you guessed it, us back in WWII, but they have pictures of what the grounds and castle looked like in the museum and mostly everything has been re-created. This plexi glass window shows down into the original structure.

The Castle, which sadly was under construction on this particular day...

A view of the West side of the Island and Naha city from the grounds, which are at the highest point on the island...

And this is the main entrance... all in all a very informative venture and I would recommend people come here. We missed the dancers, but a few times a day they have Aisa dancers and the drum players who perform...

The place was very cool and had lots of history to learn about, but as an American, I couldn't help but feel badly a little bit for pretty much destroying everything on this island during the war. A lot of places here if you read the signs with say "Such and Such RUINS" and you know it was something we destroyed... which is a lot of stuff here unfortunately.

This is one of the most popular places on the island and I hope that if ya'll come visit, I get to take you here!!

I'm an Underwater Digital Photography Class Graduate!!

So I'm sure you are all wondering why I would take an underwater photography class... well now instead of all our Scuba pictures looking like they were taken from behind a fuzzy blue film, now I can offer all of you out there lovely photos like these! Yay, aren't you excited?? So to begin... here is a starfish!!

And some coral...

And some more coral!

And a sea cucumber...

Ohh... and an anemonea!!

Some more coral...

You guessed it, some coral...

Cam you guess what this one is...??

And we round it out with a little more coral...

Unfortunately it was a little murky where we were taking our pics, and a little lacking in the fun fish department, which was fine by me because I was too busy playing with my camera settings to really have the time to chase down little fishies... I know these are a little bit boring, but I promsie they will get better!

Hope you like these and many more to come...

I'm sorry... so sorry...

To all my loyal readers out there... I owe you a huge apology... so here it is. I am sooooo sorry. I have been slacking hard-core on my blogging duties, and I feel horrible! So much has been going on lately, I don't know where the time goes! Before I knew it, it had been since like our Tokyo trip since I have blogged anything. Seems like we have been on the run the last couple months. Between working full-time, doing all our dive classes, and being the little social butterfly that I am, the blog took a serious back seat.

So, what you're probably asking yourself is what have you been missing out on... and here's some of the stuff that's gone on since we got back from Tokyo that I promise to blog about soon...

First, we went to the HUGE Naha tug of war, and let me tell you, it was VACA!! That's Japanese for crazy, by the way. Mike and I got our night and underwater digital photography Scuba certifications this past month, we went to Shuri-jo castle, an old friend from Mississippi was in town visiting from Korea, Charlie escaped our fenced-in yard and I went chasing him for like a half mile, Chloe somehow caught ringworm, Rob came back from Iraq safely, and I've been a couple more times to get my toes done. Actually, I'm sure there is more than that, but that's all I can think of for now.

The pics above are obviously the kids on Halloween. We didn't really do anything exciting here for the holiday, not even carve a pumpkin actually, but being the good dog mom that I am, I had to put them into something embarassing... so they were my devil children. We live off-base and the Japanese kids were probably too scared to come to our house knowing we vicious man-eating dogs here, or so it seems any time someone rings our doorbell!! We didn't buy a single piece of candy or anything, just stayed in, ate some popcorn, and watched scary movies all evening.

So I have lots of good pics to post soon, I promise. I had something to do every night the past week, but I swear with all the time off I have coming up on this 4-day weekend, I promise to get some blogging done!!

Until then, gomen nasai, or I am sorry.

Devil Dogs!

The only way I could get the kids to hold somewhat still together was offer cookies... and even that couldn't keep the horns on Charlie long enough to snap the pic, haha...

Chloe on the other hand, is an excellent sport. She was more upset about the bandana around her neck. She looks good in red though, don't you think?

I was able to catch Charlie with the horns on finally, but I was on my belly on the ground with him trying to stop those paws from ripping them off... he wasn't feelin' them, poor kid. He has an excellent pouting face though, haha!

I finally convinced Charlie with a cookie to sit up for a minute so I could just snap one pic. Unfortunately it was right in front of our recycling pile about to go out the door.... but not a bad pic.

So this is what the kids are going to be for halloween. I was going to make them either Dr. Seuss' Thing 1 and Thing 2, or put them into a shirt with one having peas drawn on it, and the other with a carrot so they could be "peas and carrots" but with work, training, meetings, etc., I just didn't have the time. I think this turned out well though, and they look adorable in red!

Fall Footies!

Ok, so I know this post isn't anything super spectacular, but just wanted to show off the latest fall feet! I wanted to do something fall and Halloween-ish for the holiday, but make them kind of November friendly as well, so this is what happened in the end...

I ended up getting a pumpkin on each of my big toes with some fall leaves, and then leaves and sparkles on all my other tootsies. I love getting toes with black as a background because they seem to last much longer than some of the others I have gotten. I have had my current design for about 2 weeks now and not even a chip... perhaps it's the 10 layers of clear coat they put on them, or the fact they use actual acrylic paint for the designs, but regardless, they are still lookin' good!

So, for all you people who are tossing the idea around of coming to visit me, if this doesn't tempt you enough to get you here, I don't know what will... and for all your guys, there are men in there all the time too!!

Sea Beasties from the Not-So-Deep...

So here's Phil looking as dapper as you can while under water. He hurried and got her certification before the winter months got here and our water dropped to a whole 70 degres versus 90 like they have been most of the summer. I bailed out on the last dive to give the guys some "man time."

Of course, the day I don't go Mike and Phil see a Moray Eel while out at the North Steps... go figure.

He looks pretty angry... I'm kinda glad I wasn't there. They said the pic made him look a lot bigger than what he really was, but I'm pretty sure I would have swam away as fast as possible...

Yuck... gross little sea beastie. This is exactly why I wear a thick wet suit even though the water is still warm. The guys were only about 40-50 ft. deep at this point... and I am sure the deeper you go, the scrarier the critters...

My dad just told me this week he's gonna hurry and get scuba certified before he comes out to visit, so I hope he gets to see some cool stuff like this!! And to Shepp, I bet you don't see these in the Great Lakes... feel free to come out here any time if you want to do some real diving, my friend, haha! Love ya John!

To Tokyo We Did A-Go-Go!

So the long-awaited pics of Tokyo are finally here!! Yay!! Sorry I was so lazy about getting them up here... I knew I had a ton of pics which would require like 5 seperate posts, and well, I didn't know if I had the strenght, haha... but here they are!!

So this is our hotel. It's nothing fancy at all. It's called Hardy Barracks, and literally it's a renovated old barracks building. For all you Army people out there who know what I am taking about, they took the two rooms that are connected by the bathroom, and made one of the dorms into a living room area, and the other attached room a bedroom. It was cheap, close to the metro, and pretty much in the center of Roppongi Hills, which is a big shopping/dining district.

We decided on our last day to do a little random sight-seeing and ended up in the Harajuku district. If you google this street, you can see what it's most famous for... and it's the crazy teenagers who dress in off the wall outfits. They are called the Harajuku Girls and were the inspiration for Gwen Stefani's perfume line and one of her songs... not quite sure which one, maybe Holla' Back Girl... er, whatever it's called. We were out pretty early in the morning so we didn't get a chance to see them, and the street's shops were pretty much all closed, but it looked like it had some potential to be a lot of fun when it was up and running!

This pic is for the Weightman's... it's a super-awesome Japanese verison of a 7-eleven, same colors and everything, just Jap-ified.

This is a night view of the Tokyo tower from Roppongi Hills. The Tokyo tower was kind of Eiffel tower-looking, but apparently it's even bigger than the French version. It was very pretty all lit up at night...

This is quite possibly the smallest Hard Rock ever... seriously. It only fit like 50 people inside, no lie...

This is a scary art exhibit window display... I have no idea what they were promoting, but it was creepy and we had to walk by it quite frequently... note the weird penis... yeah, I said penis.

I was told the Japanese were very intelligent, but this window display proved it...

Us having amazing Belgian Beer... the night ended ugly, but the beer was delicious. My hubby ended up tossing his cookies, Sarah remembers only pieces of the evening, and Derek and I were quite giggly... good times!

On the way home from the delicious beer, I was able to get Sarah to take a pic of me with the biggest lantern I had ever seen. It was so magnificent, I felt it needed a hug..

This is a very weird spider statue in the middle of Roppongi Hills... I'm not sure what purpose it served, but it was cool to look at. If you sat under it and looked up into its "belly," you could see like little eggs in it. At night it looked very "War of the Worlds" but it was pretty cool...

So these are just a few pics of random bits around Tokyo, but lots more to come, including Kamakura and the Giant Buddha, Tokyo Disney, Tokyo Sea, Meiji Shrine, and much more!!