*Banging head on keyboard*

It's not all sunshine and rainbows. I'm tired today so I'm sure that's making me a bit more irritable, but the horrid cell phone service is driving me nuts. Okinawans treat red lights as a suggestion, not a rule. We live right by the flightline...it's loud and it scares Thomas. We don't have shopping options...it's just a bunch of little annoyances that build up and get under your skin.

But dealing with the military is worse. Feel free to skip the next paragraph..the basic point is that our pay has been screwed up at every turn and I don't think we'll be leaving the house much for the next two weeks.



So moving to a foreign country is expensive. Hotels, buying a new car, starting a lease, starting from scratch to set up a kitchen etc. The military has allowances and advances in place to help you out...but in our experience it's screwed up every.single.time. It's like dealing with the dmv everyday. I'm amazed I still have any hair on my head.
We should have had one month of advance pay, along with our dislocation allowance before we even left for Japan. We were told it was all set up and ready to go, so when nothing showed up in our bank account Josh had to talk to them. He was told we weren't even in the system and it had to be done all over again. It didn't hit until we were already in Japan!
We also get a temporary lodging allowance, to pay for our hotel. We're also supposed to get per diem, to help pay for food expenses when you don't have a kitchen. We were supposed to get that as an advance...it was never put through. And I had read the regulations that you could take your bill to IPAC (the money people) and they would pay your bill for you. When Josh asked about it, he was told that they don't do that. Okay, so we pay our 14 day hotel bill with a credit card, realizing we will eventually get reimbursed. Josh went today to check on being reimbursed for that and they won't pay us the full 14 days because there was a day overlap of when we signed our lease and when we left the hotel. That overlap happened because we had to borrow government furniture, and you can't have any of your belongings in the apartment when they deliver it. Perhaps if they allowed us to bring more than 2500lbs of our belongings we wouldn't need government furniture.
We're also supposed to get two different MIHA allowances, one to pay the almost $1000 agency fee for finding us an apartment, and another smaller one to help with utility deposits. We still don't have it. We're supposed to get OHA (overseas housing allowance) but they can only put that in the system two days out of the month, and we were one day late! So not only have we shelled out the money for the entire hotel stay, bought a car, paid first and last months rent, an agency fee and somehow managed to feed ourselves and have some fun, but now we have to pay another $2000 on the first for our rent. It will be backpaid, we will be reimbursed....but goodness! This shouldn't be so difficult.

Josh might have gotten a little loud at the IPAC office today. He had four workers helping him and he found out that we actually could have had our hotel bill paid at IPAC...but the person he spoke to didn't know that. No one seemed to care that this has been horribly stressful financially.



And then as I finish my rant, my Thomas grabs a pack of diapers, uses it like a bed and pretends to snore. Cuter than a button I tell ya.