ITS COMMING!

CHRISTMAS! yes as if you all didnt know it... Kimberly and I are having to remind ourselves lately because without family around its sneaking up on us SO fast! Ultimately christmas will be what it has never been for either of us before, we will both together be alone. That is setting in for each of us, It seems we are more excited for the break from the village than we are for christmas.

Now i must elaborate on that, The village is great, and the people are wonderful. We are just city folk, missing the family, resturants, dozens of grocery stores with competitave prices in 2 miles driving distance... everything. It will be nice to get taste of it in fairbanks! We are also VERY excited to go to the interact missionarys church in fairbanks. The AMAZING couple that picked us up and made us feel at home when first arriving in fairbanks. I have pictures of the church on my photobucket account (see past posts for a link).

We love everyone so much, we REALLY appreciate the christmas cards we have recieved! They do mean alot, Everyone in Kentucky has been amazing to Kimberly and I... And just to put a bug in your ear, Kimberly and i are thinking of maybe a short time after we come back to portland going on a road trip out that direction. We really appreciate all the love of ALL of out family!

As for the other stuff like weather and what not... Its been cold and cloudy... it didnt get light today at all because the clouds are so dense. The temperature has dropped we are now getting back into the - degrees.

*update* Well i wrote the above on sunday morning, I got up to snag some lunch then Kimberly and I were off to go run some dogs. We jumped on the snow machine and took off. To save from a bible long entry I will skip some details about the setup of the sled, the dogs, and get right to the ride. It was amazing, the dogs just GO. Ultimately i know i was probably lucky to hit 12-14 mph with them but it was really cool. The man that took us lead the sled with Cynthia and Dales skidoo (kimberly rode on the back of that) and he took intermittant stops to allow the dogs to rest, unfourtunatly going up a big hill he took a bit too long of a stop and the snow machine overheated (its air cooled and with no cool air flowing into the motor there is no cooling going on) I am fairly certin that it did no damage to the machine as it had done it before and i dont think they would make it without an automatic kill of some sort if it gets too hot not to mention the fact it did that about 2 weeks ago when kimberly and i went out... we stopped and walked away from it only to come back and have it not running and take awhile to start. Well the man took his dog team to turn them around as we were just about at the turn around anyway thinking i would have it running by the time he got back to us. I didnt... not only that but it finally started then began to die, i tapped the throttle and it backfired and died anyway... that backfire blew the exhaust manifold gasket. Fortunatly an amazing man in the village just happened to be comming back on his snow machine from getting water from the creek a couple more miles out the road. That totally bailed kimberly and I out because at that point i still couldnt get it to run and only one of us could ride back in the sled... I would have to have been the one to go with him because i was the only one comefortable starting any other machines to get back out there and there was no way i was going to leave my wife at least 5 miles from town in - temperatures by herself. So the guy with the dogs took kimberly and the other guy waited a second for me to try to get the snow machine running, it started but it was ungodly loud and scared the crap out of me... especially because i didnt know if the exhaust manifold was the exact problem or something worse... so after driving it about 100yards i stopped and just jumped on the other guys snow machine. He drove me back into town where he dropped me off at the store to grab a quad and he actually dropped his water off and grabbed rope and drove out there ahead of me to tow it back himself. I get back to the mushers house to pick up kimberly and get back on the road to get out to the snow machine... we get out there and the guy is all tied up and ready to start towing it home.

All i can say about that is god was looking out for us. the planets alligned and it worked just right, just the right man happened to be on that road at that time who could help us that much... god and that man are so good (haha)

then we come home, the musher told us that a neighbor of ours asked him to cut their wood and he said i could do it if i wanted some money (just a chain saw). so after we get home Kimberly and I ran over there. Come to find out they didnt have a chain saw (theirs had broken) so i couldnt cut it, it didnt matter to them though because they had just enough to last them till morning and another guy was comming in the morning to cut some. BUT this lady has wanted us to come over and hang out since we met her about a month and a half after we got here (she was out of town), she is a huge friend of Cynthia's. So we hung out there and talked to her and her man friend (she was married, he died and she met this guy, they havent gotten married but they have lived together for years). We FINALLY ditched out at about 9pm only to find out that the answering machine that was empty before we went over there was now full of 5 messages from 3 different people including Dale all trying to get ahold of kimberly and I because some grocerys had come in and they needed to get into the store to drop them off... just so happened that before we could check those message though the guy delivering them came by the house... he said he had left his van running for the last hr because he didnt want the grocerys to freeze and he couldnt get ahold of us... i ran down and helped him unload them, then came up only to hear the frusterated sounding messages on the machine from people that seem to think we are there just ignoring the calls.

Its hard for kimberly and i to process this... Ultimately we did NOTHING wrong, it was out day off and we were at one of Cynthias friends houses chatting... and its just depressing us to think about people frusterated with us... I called people right away when things happened today, i called dale right when we got home from towing the skidoo home to let him know, and i called the 2 people on the answering machine right after i unloaded the grocerys to let them know we were not ignoring them in the back room... yet after every conversation people dont sound up beat, relieved or anything. I know its me reading into it too much but Dale didnt seem happy with us at all (either call, understandably after the first one) and the other lady that called looking for us sounded like she didnt care where we were. Its hard to deal with, Kimberly and I are both home sick (we are both pretty sure its due to christmas with just eachother and no family) and it seems we cannot please anyone. I know its going to work out and we will be fine... I just cannot wait to be there, and not here.