Missionary Orthopod in the Making

The Lord has truly truly blessed me these past couple of weeks. I know I’ve been gone for awhile, but I’ll try to give a thorough update on everything that has happened.

I would say that the single biggest and most important thing that could have happened to me, occurred on July 8, 2007….I married my high school sweet heart!!!

To be honest, the whole day went by in a big blur. My groomsmen kept teasing me, saying that I was going to cry when I saw my bride walking down the aisle, lol, but I proved them wrong. It WAS a very touching moment when the doors burst open and I saw her walking down, as beautiful as an angel.

So after the wedding, we “chilled” at a crazy nice hotel in Annapolis for a couple of days and when we came back home for a couple days to finish packing all of our stuff into boxes; because when we planned to leave Maryland for the honeymoon, it was for good. We went on a nice cruise of the Eastern Caribbean for 7 days, and I truly enjoyed it. We hit Haiti, Jamaica (climbed Dunn Rivers Falls), the Cayman Islands, and Cozumel, Mexico. To be honest, we slept more than we enjoyed all that the ship had to offer. I guess after Africa, the wedding, and packing for our move to Loma Linda we were tired. But like I said, the islands we visited were truly beautiful. I have to admit that the Cayman Islands had the prettiest beaches, with water so clear that you could see the fish swimming around your feet. Check it out:

So as I currently write this, we are on the plane from Orlando to California, and it is certainly a long flight, but we are so happy. This summer has brought so many new experiences. Marriage is already pretty exciting, but then we have the move to Cali, and buying everything for our first place (apartment) together. I have already conceded to not really caring how we decorate the apartment, I just care about the office [the man’s domain J ]. Moving to Cali has been relatively expensive for the both of us:

Car shipping from Maryland to Cali: $1,095
Plane tickets from coast to coast: ~$900
UPS shipping for all the rest of our crap: $300
Having wedding money to pay for it all: PRICELESS, well not really, but definitely less painful

Our car is already in Cali from the car shipping company, and our stuff will get shipped from Maryland probably tomorrow. My wife and I are truly excited about starting medical school, but we are also pretty scared. It’s like we’ve wanted this for so long and worked so hard to get here, and now we are like, “Crap, what have we gotten ourselves into?!!” I guess a lot of soon to be minted medical students begin to feel this way, but I hope that these feelings subside and I can get right to work. LLU really eases you into school though because our white coat ceremony is on August 3^rd, and for the 2 weeks following that event, we are in the hospital with the 3^rd and 4^th year medical students, so we don’t’ start classes until August 27. I think that by that time we should both be ready to get on with school.

Another advantage of marrying someone who is also going to medical school is that you can share materials. Instead of spending almost $2,000 each for equipment and books, we are just going to buy 1 of everything, and if we realize that we actually need 2 of something, we’ll just go and get it. It’s a nice perk along with everything else J. Its so nice also to log onto Facebook and see my friends who have already started medical school in the pictures at their white coat ceremony. A lot of them say that its not so bad quite yet, and that the beginning is mostly review, so I hope it doesn’t suck for us either.

Once I get settled into our apartment at LLU, I’ll start blogging in a more helpful way, but until then I hope you are caught up pretty well.