Leaving on a Jet Plane

Lonnie and I are leaving for an amazing vacation in just over a week. We are taking off on the 12th from Crescent City, we fly to San Francisco, then fly for 10 1/2 hours to London. From there we will spend about 10 hours with my sister and her husband James who live just outside of London. Hopefully we will be able to go on the London eye, and maybe to the British museum. It will be really fun to see them and spend some time with them. The likelihood that we will be able to spend time with them while they live there, is slim to none. From there we leave in the evening and fly to Johanasburg South Africa from 11 1/2 hours. We are going to be staying with Lonnie's parents. Travelling through Botswana to Zimbabwe. We will spend about a week there, go back to South Africa, and then the last week we are there Lonnie and I will be going to Cape Town, South Africa. We are really excited for our trip. We will be coming back on December 15th. I have to be back to work on the 18th. We will only be able to have contact via e-mail.

Trip to Portland

Lonnie and I took a trip to Portland. We left on the 18th in order to see my parents and check in with some friends. We drove up there, took a stop in Woodburn to do some shopping, and stopped by the church offices of the church we went to in Portland. We were able to see and check in with a few of the pastors that we know. On Friday I spent some time with my mom, while Lonnie drove out to take a look at his parents duplex that they own. We ate dinner and watched a movie with some friends-Mike and Amy Engle and their son Caleb Friday night. On Saturday morning we went to breakfast with some friends and got to see their new baby who is 3 months old for the first time. Lonnie got a great opportunity on Saturday and Sunday. Last time we were in Portland the Music Director for the church told Lonnie to call before we came up again. Lonnie did that and then he was asked to lead worship for all of the services on Saturday and Sunday. It was a great opportunity for him to reconnect with people as well as use his talents and gifts. We also got to spend some time with the pastor that married us and his wife. Throughout the whole trip it was just so encouraging to spend time with friends most of which knew us before we got married or have known us since then. The most challenging part of the weekend was when we decided that we needed to extend our trip and come home wednesday instead of monday. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were spent at his parent's duplex scraping wallpaper, painting, pulling things down and putting things up. It was exhausting. We drove home, got home at 11:30 at night on wednesday then I had to go to work at 1 am and work until 7am so that another nurse would not have to work for 24 hours. It was a very very long exhausting weekend...I guess now that I am going back to work for the weekend to actually get some rest. It was a great time with friends and family while we were there.

Busy times

Lonnie and I have had a pretty busy couple of weeks. I am now officially a flight nurse with Cal-Ore life flight. I got all my papers signed, and even took another flight yesterday. It wasn't an OB patient but the chief flight nurse wants me to get more experience in being on the plane, so she's keeping her eyes open for easy flights that would give me that expereince. I'm excited to get the experience involved in this, the nurses that I've interacted with so far have been great to work with. On top of doing all of this, and the training involved in it, I have also been working my regular job in the OB unit at the hospital. This last weekend at work we had 9 babies in 3 days. We only technically have 4 rooms to have patients in, but on Saturday we had patients in every room, our triage room, medical unit, and ICU in order to have enough beds. On that same day we had 4 discharged, 3 deliveries, and 5 OB checks (in 3.5 hours). We had four nurses and it was still crazy. At a couple points we had to have our patients sit in the lay-z-boy we have in our nursery because we didn't have anywhere else to put them. Then the next few days were completely empty and boring...no patient's at all. I just can't figure out why babies can't pace themselves out and not come in waves.
We just decided this week that Lonnie is going to start looking for a job. We had talked about it earlier, but his business right now just isn't building up at the rate that we would like it to. So in order to achieve our financial goals and be financially stable enough to start a family we need him to have a job and be making money. So he's been looking into a couple of options, the one we both like the most is the probation officer. He told me that he was going into the school district to test for a couple of jobs, one of which was for a school crossing guard, cafeteria worker, and a couple of other things. Last night I was talking to him and remembered that he was supposed to go in and test, after I said something he told me that he was actually kidding about the crossing guard job. He's keeping his eyes open for any jobs. The difficulty we face is that we have to find an employer willing to accomodate our month long trip to South Africa.
I have to work tonight to cover someone else's shift. This will be the 8th day of work in two weeks. I'm thinking though that with these extra shifts we should have enough money for all of the spending money we need for our trip.
Coming up the the next couple of weeks is more work for me, and more job hunting for Lonnie. We are also planning a trip up to Portland Sept 18-22. Anyways that's all for now.

A Fun Experience

Today I got up to go to the gym. I went to the gym this morning (I was losing out on sleep so it was a big deal), and took a shower when I got home to hurry and get ready for work. I saw that my phone said I had a new voicemail. I listened and it was one of the nurses from work saying that they had a mom that needed to transport to Medford, about 100 miles away, and they needed me to go with the patient on the flight. Now I did this once about 2-3 months ago, and am interested in doing this as a 2nd job, but haven't received any formal training yet. So, I got to work and got ready to take the patient to Medford. I was going to be flying with a regular flight nurse that works with the flight company and so she would do most of the stuff and I was there to help deal with the patient. Most of the time if at all possible we try and transport a pregnant woman with an OB flight nurse just because more than any other nurse in another specialty we would understand the needs that are unique to pregnant patients. We got the patient there safely. It's only about a 20 minute flight but takes about an hour to get there. It takes some extra time because we have to transport from our hospital to the airport, fly, and transport from the airport to the hospital and get her checked it. We love to deliver the babies to the other hospital in utero, because it's really hard to have a situation when we need to deliver them at our hospital.
Anyways, I thought I would share this. I am going to be meeting with the chief flight nurse on the 21st to go over what it will take for me to start working with them too. It's really great experience as a nruse and gives me more versitility in what I can do in the future.

Update on life

This week has been fairly uneventful. I did my weekend at work last weekend. We had a steady weekend with only a few busy times (3 deliveries in a day is busy for us). But we had great patients and some quick deliveries. I worked night shift this last rotation because one of the regular nurses was on vacation. I enjoy working night shift. Usually I work from 11am-11pm. Working night shift there are fewer big wigs wandering around and the phone isn't ringing off the hook. I've been working this shift since April and it actually works better for Lonnie and I because Lonnie has trouble sleeping when I'm not at home. I did find it difficult to start flipping my days and nights again since it's been so long since I had to flip.
We got to go over to Medford on Thursday so that Lonnie could meet with a business partner that he was connected to when we lived in Portland. We got to eat a Red Robin for lunch (here in town the only chain restaurants are Denny's and fast food). Then we got to go to Winco and Costco, as well as stop by a couple of other stores to pick up things that we can't easily get in town (which is most things). Until you don't have access to these stores you don't miss them. We got to spend some lazy time here at home and have some friends over for dinner as well on Friday. Our attempt at a BBQ with a bunch of friends didn't quite go as planned when we only had one couple that was able to come. It's okay though because we enjoy their company.
We also started a new home fellowship tonight through our church, it's being hosted at another lady's house, but Lonnie is the one teaching it. We're going through Galatians so it should be an interesting study. We had a good group of folks there tonight so it should be interesting to see how it evolves.

We're Debt Free!!

Apparently there was a bunch of stuff to blog about right away. Mine and Lonnie's great announcement is that we are 100% Debt Free. We paid off $32K in student loan and tax debt in 21 months. Plus I paid my older sister back (5 years later) the $550 that she lent me for summer school. It is just so incredible to have actually accomplished this feat. Now we are free from being any slaves to any lenders. This process all started not long after we got married. We were introduced to Dave Ramsey. I would recommend his books for reading if you want some solid information on handling your finances in a way to honor Christ. We mostly just paid minimums while I was in nursing school and really started attacking the debt once I started working. We had to work really hard, live on a strict budget and put any and all extra toward the debt. God has blessed us so much, much more than we could have imagined. We were thinking that this would take until the end of the year to complete, but because we've been so blessed we were able to finish it before. We are hoping to call the Dave Ramsey show on Friday and shout "We're Debt Free" so that everyone can know and celebrate with us.

This last weekend we went to Crater Lake for our fourth anniversary. We needed to take a vacation as we really haven't had anything but short stints to Portland ever since we moved here. We initially were going to stay at a KOA campground in Klamath Falls, but our first night we didn't sleep well because it is situated in the middle of the city and there is traffic and sirens and all kinds of annoying things around. We were headed up to Crater Lake on Thursday anyways and so we decided to take a look around and see if we could find anything closer. As we were driving up we stopped at a camp and they had openings for tent camping. We were able to get a refund from the KOA for the rest of our stay and moved camp up to the new place called Crater Lake Resort. The campsite was beautiful and situated right next to a creek. There wasn't anyone else around so we had our pick of spots.

Since that day was our anniversary we decided to go up to Crater Lake and go to the Lodge for Dinner at the restaurant. Good food, just really expensive. We got our first look at Crater Lake that day and for anyone who hasn't seen it- it is beautiful!

For most of the rest of the trip we just hung out at camp or we drove up to Crater Lake to hang out. On Sunday Lonnie hiked up to the top of a mountain there at Crater Lake. I couldn't go because I had some mosquito bites on the back of my heel that got blistered when I wore shoes one day. I had to hang out at the lodge and read while he was hiking. We came home Monday and had to get everything put back together. It was a wonderful vacation in a beautiful place!

Opening Blog Note

This is just an opener for the new blog. The intention with this blog is just to update folks on what we are doing around here. We don't have anything in particular like a pregnancy to blog about so hopefully we can drum up some interesting stuff for you. We will probably mention funny stories, or situations or just commentary on life here in the small town. There will likely be mentions of Lonnie's confused grandpa as well.