Wrapping up my time on Ford Island

Let's take a few minutes to look at some fun images from Ford Island. We'll be leaving here on Tuesday so I'm already getting nostalgic. I'm growing rather attached to the place.

This is my air raid shelter. It houses 200. What? You mean you don't have an air raid shelter across the lawn from you? Odd. There's a second one just down the street from this one. They're apparently common here. You might want to check with your landlord. I think you should probably have one of these.





The trees here have flowers. They're pretty. Pink ones, yellow ones, white ones, red ones. It's weird to have flowers fall instead of leaves.










I don't know what this is, but it's pretty. At some point I will have to invest in two field guides for Hawaii, one for the plants, one for the birds. They have neat birds here. They don't stay still for photos like the flowers do though. So the flowers get the publicity. Tough luck, birds. Quit moving around so much, and maybe I'll blog about you.












These are coconuts. That's about all I got to say about this one.

















More pretty flowers. I don't know why, but I'm compelled to take photos of flowers. I have a couple hundred photos of flowers on my external hard drive. I don't know what I plan on doing with them. I just like them. Color is a big thing with me.








This is the USS Utah memorial. It was sunk on Dec. 7, 1941. They salvaged some of the ship but let the rest of her lay where she went down. Each year the salt water wears away a little more of her, but when you're up next to it you can still see all the details of the ship. It's so weird to be in the middle of a working, fully operational military base and at the same time there are national monuments everywhere and sobering reminders of what has happened in our past. Just down 100 yards from the Utah is a Navy oiler (not shown in this picture) doing what oilers do when they're at the pier. Weird.

Old housing. This is the classic housing on Ford Island reserved for officers. It's the kind of architecture that you think of when you think of old Hawaii. At least it's what I think of. It's what I'd see in movies staring John Wayne and Elvis. Not together. I don't think they did movies together. Maybe they should have.






This is a hibiscus. I think it might be the state flower of Hawaii. They come in different colors, but they're all beautiful.







Why wax nostalgia? We got a house and we're leaving the Navy Lodge and Ford Island tomorrow. We will be living in an area called Pearl City Peninsula. The military has privatized (surprise, surprise) housing for soldiers/sailors. Here in Hawaii the company/agency that runs it is called Forest City. When a sailor arrives here and wants housing here that sailor can choose one of two options: 1.) to accept BAH, a monthly check deposited to his/her account that they spend on housing wherever they want, or 2.) accept Forest City housing where the money is given directly from the military to the housing agency. Like anything, there are pros and cons to both. Since Zac and I didn't want to spend a lot of time house hunting, and because we have a dog, we decided that we would just go with the Forest City housing because it was easiest. We can change our minds in the future if we want, but for now it seemed like the right choice.

One part of Forest City housing is that the neighborhoods are arranged by rank. So this neighborhood is E1-E6, that neighborhood might be O1-O5. (Enlisted, officer.) Most times they are divided into junior and senior neighborhoods. So the E1-E6 will be together, and the E7-E9 are together. They might all be included in a larger neighborhood/housing area, but the houses are clustered based on rank. Yes, it is a little elitist and flies in the face of egalitarianism and democracy, but this is the military. That doesn't work here.

They have a shortage of E7 housing right now, so they offered Zac and I an E6 house. It's a nice place, attached, sharing one wall with the neighbors. It was built within the last ten years, lots of electrical sockets and phone jacks. Lots of windows and bright. Nice little back yard with a patio. Air, all major appliances. It's really nice. But it's not E7 housing.

Zac has had a really strange road becoming a Chief and then for the first year he was a Chief. He did all of it while he was essentially alone down in El Salvador. There were, at max, three other Chiefs down there with him. Part of the learning curve of becoming a good Chief is learning from your fellow Chiefs. They emphasize that it is a brotherhood (siblinghood?) where the best resource that they have is each other. Zac has been missing out on that a lot since he was inducted. Now that he's here at a larger installation, he'll have more resources to draw on.

I really wanted to have E7 housing so Zac's immediate neighbors would be his peers. So he could walk next door and have a beer with a fellow Chief and chit chat about things. So he could establish some of those relationships that I know are critical to his professional development, at least a little more easily. Outside of work, outside the office.

We have to stay in the E6 housing for at least six months. Then we can re-request for E7 housing and then we'll wait for that to come available, if we want. Maybe we'll really enjoy not being around Chiefs, maybe we'll count down the days til we can leave. No way to know that yet. But whatever comes, it starts tomorrow.