Moved In! - Blake

Well, we have officially moved into our house. It is humble 2-room, 2-story duplex. It has 3 window A/C units: one in the living room downstairs and one in each bedroom. We couldn’t fit all of our stuff into the house so we had to purchase a shed and put it in the front yard. That may sound a little on the tacky side (and it probably is) but we didn’t have much choice. It’s like I told Sunny: if we had a back yard, the shed would be in the back yard. We don’t have a back yard so the shed is in the front. We will just start calling the area where the shed is our back yard and we are good! We don’t have internet yet so I can’t post any pictures. I have access to the internet at work but the Army system will not let me plug in the camera or memory card to download the pictures. We should be getting it this week sometime. I went by the cable office yesterday to sign-up for cable TV but they don’t have any cable boxes left. They are waiting on the next shipping boat at the end of the month. Hopefully that will have cable boxes on it and they can start signing people up for cable. We will probably just end up getting internet and no cable. You can get most shows on-line now anyway.

Paying a power bill again is an experience. Since we have lived on post the past 4 years our utilities have come out automatically. I don’t really mind paying a power bill again but the power here is completely different than the states. For starters, we don’t get a power bill. The landlord has installed debit meters in our duplex. We go down to the power company and purchase whatever amount of power you want. You can get $20 or $2,000 worth. It’s up to you. They will give you a receipt with a pin number. You go back to your house and input that pin into your debit meter. Once the meter is empty, no more power. Power is generated in American Samoa by huge diesel generators so power can be really expensive here. A house with central A/C can easily run you $800/month for moderate use of the A/C. If you like it really cold in the house, you could be spending over $1,000/month on power alone. Needless-to-say, we only run the window A/C units at night when we are sleeping. About 30 minutes before we go to bed we turn them on and it is nice and cool by the time we are ready for bed. I put $300 worth of units on the power meter on 2/2/10. We will see how long that will last.