Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Davao City here we come!

Our tickets are booked! 
We fly out of Calgary on Thursday, July 7th at 7:40pm and arrive in LA at 9:50pm, then leave at 11:50pm and fly to Seoul, Korea arriving there on Saturday at 4:20am, leaving again at 8:10am arriving in Manila at 11:00am and leaving at 3:30pm, finally arriving in Davao at 5:20pm. 

I have also been sent my class list and there are 12 of us starting in August, a really small class and I'm excited to meet all my classmates in just a few months.


Kerri

Monday, March 21, 2011

Knee Surgery

After dealing with a painful left knee since 2006, from a repetative running injury, I finally had surgery this morning out in Banff.  Dr. Hiemstra did a left knee arthroscopy and debridement of my patella which sounds worse than it actually was.  I arrived at the hospital at 9:00am and was discharged at 11:15am.  The surgery itself was only 10 minutes long and I was able to watch the procedure on the screen that they had beside me.  It was really neat to see the inside of my knee and thankfully other than having a nasty kneecap, the rest of my knee is perfectly healthy.  I have a crack on the inside of my kneecap and had a lot of rough cartilege which was able to be shaved off and the doctor is pretty confident that this will help with the pain and cracking that I have been dealing with.  Now I just have to be a good patient and rest and allow my knee to heal properly.  I have this week off work, so I will be doing a lot of sitting around with ice packs and meds, and I am planning to start physio next week.  The full recovery time is between 4 and 6 weeks, which is just in time for one last Canadian rock climbing season!

Cheers to a good recovery!

Kerri

Lessons learned and more waiting

We learned two valuable lessons recently:
  1. Never wash passports
  2. If you do happen to wash them, declare them damaged and get new ones immediately
When we were in Utah last summer, I accidently washed our passports.  We didn't really think too much of this, dried them out and other than being slightly wrinkled, they seemed to be in good shape.  When we crossed the border back into Canada, the customs official looked at the passports, asked what happened and laughed about it, never telling us that we needed to replace them.
Fast forward to February when we went down to the passport office to renew Julia's passport, and found out that because they were damaged we would not be able to travel on them.  We had to fill out a report describing how they ended up damaged and then pay to have the documents signed by a commissioner of oaths and then apply for brand new passports. 

During the time that we were waiting for our passports to arrive, we were also waiting on a letter from our church, which we need in order for us to obtain our visas once we are in Davao and thankfully we were able to get that late last week and our passports arrived in the mail at the same time.  We were hoping to have booked our flights by now, and we went to see a travel agent this past weekend, but because we are moving to the Philippines and not just going for a vacation, it's a little more complicated with booking the tickets then we first thought.    

Please continue to pray for all of the various details to be worked out before we move.

Kerri