I would like to know in what world is it okay for a city to
get 8 inches of snow and not plow the roads for 4 days. In this world we drive
a teeny tiny Saturn and slide around foolishly in our neighborhood with a
newborn. Fun. It snowed on Wednesday and the plow came by on Sunday. Apparently
Anchorage only
has 28 snow plows. What the crap? That is ridiculous! We were looking forward
to a ton of snow in this new city ,
but now we are really dreading the possibility of a lot of snow. Even the main
roads sucked for quite a few days. We went to the doctor and we were bumping
and sliding around everywhere. I just can’t believe a city that gets as much
snow as Anchorage
has such poor snow removal management. This is what happens when there are no
taxes. That’s right people. No taxes in Anchorage ,
but try to get to the grocery store, I dare you.
Dan and I had a baby. It’s very exciting. Oskar is a great
little guy and is busy eating, sleeping, and pooping. The labor and delivery
went pretty well. The hospital was pretty busy and there were 2 unplanned
C-sections so it took them longer than they would like to get me back into the
delivery room and get my epidural. They gave me a different pain killer until I
got the epidural that worked really well. I got this pain killer twice because
it doesn't last very long. Then they gave me a longer lasting pain killer that
made me vomit pretty violently. I requested to not have that medicine again.
They finally got me moved back to delivery and got me the epidural and I was able
to sleep quite a bit through the night, having only to wake up to flip to my
other side every hour. At 5 am my water still hadn’t broken and they said they
would break it at 7 to get things moving along. It broke on its own at 6:50. I
think around 10 or so they gave me Pitocin to speed up the contractions and
dilation and that’s when things really started to suck again. More vomiting.
They tried to adjust the epidural but my pain was beyond the help it could
provide. Some may say that with the epidural it’s more pressure than pain.
Lies. All lies. It is pressure in the same way that getting your tooth
extracted without Novocain is pressure. Little guy also decided he was going to
come out face up instead of with his face toward my spine. For some this can be
excruciatingly painful in the lower back, but I didn’t really notice that. I
pushed for maybe a half hour or so and Oskar arrived into the world with what
looked like a donut on his head. Most kids arrive with a cone head. Not Oskar.
In the words of the doctor, “Hm, I’ve never seen that before.” Yes, that is
what you want to hear when delivering a child. Everything since then has gone
well. He scared us a bit at the hospital with some amniotic fluid spit-up and
nose drip, but luckily there was a nurse there at the time and she took him
away and suctioned him out a bit and he came back all cute and happy.
I have thoroughly enjoyed laying on my stomach and back, and
having bad posture. I have not done a thousand sit-ups yet. We’ll wait for a
couple weeks to do that. Even though we need to get up every 3 hours to tend to
Oskar, I feel like I have never slept better in my life. I know that is an
exaggeration, but I was sleeping so poorly before he was born that part of me
believes it. Most of all, pregnancy nose has exited as fast as it arrived and I
love not smelling everything as well as a bloodhound can.
It is official. If you don’t like the pastoral staff at your
church, hire Dan and they will leave. No, I am not saying anything bad about
any of the Pastors Dan has worked with. Actually, I like them all a lot. That
has nothing to do with the fact though that every church Dan has
preached/worked at has lost its Pastor(s) while Dan was working there. This
began with Julie and Bock. He was only assisting on some weekends, but I think
it counts. It continued with Chuck and Anne at House of Prayer and now it has
hit Scott at Gloria Dei. I understand that it is purely coincidental, and for
each of these Pastors it was quite simply time to move on, but the pattern cannot
be overlooked. Scott has officially accepted a call in Marshall , Minnesota Minnesota except us.
This may or may not affect our timeline up here in the last
frontier. We’ve decided that we don’t mind if our year gets cut short. We just
want to be sure to make it up to Denali before
we go. The people in the congregation have been absolutely amazing. They are
all so wonderful, kind and extremely generous. We are
absolutely underwhelmed by anything involving the rest of the city. Drivers are
horrendous, the snow removal is terrible, and I am still upset with the fact
that it took a week to get our power back on after a windy day. There are more
things that bother us, but we will try to focus on the fact that the community
at Gloria Dei is great and just leave it at that. The scenery is great too, the
mountains are absolutely beautiful. Too bad between the gloomtag weather and
the dark days, we can’t see them 80% of the time.
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