The Lists

Well, it's been awhile, per the usual around here. I have a mental queue of blog posts about 15 posts long, but I'm (slowly) figuring out that I should stop aiming for the moon and instead settle for getting over the backyard fence. Which may or may not be reachable for the unmowed grass and litter of abandoned summer toys.

Anyway, since there is nothing more entertaining than a blogger explaining why she isn't blogging (sarcasm!), I think I will just encapsulate the whole thing by explaining that our life has become absolutely dominated by To Do Lists, hereafter referred to as TDLs for the sake of brevity and annoyance. I have a daily TDL, Tim and I have a joint weekly TDL, and we also have a Master TDL that encompasses the next few months. Why, you ask? Because in typical Ewald fashion, we have bitten off more than we can chew and are now gagging on the excess. That sounds sort of graphic and disturbing, doesn't it? Sorry, I'm leaving it because IT'S SO TRUE.

So, it turns out that putting your house on the market and moving away to parts as-yet-unknown is kind of a long and arduous process. Adding a child further complicates things, and oh, just for fun, why not throw in a houseful of visiting relatives and a few birthdays and a few major holidays and also a few highly contagious viruses for variety.

These are all good things (except for the viruses) and taken as single events have kept us busy but really happy. However, it is undeniably a little overwhelming in the cumulative, and so "Just do the next thing" has become my daily mantra. As in, just do the next thing on whatever TDL is dominating my life at the moment, and try to enjoy it if at all possible.

In the midst of our various work projects around the house, we also lost the hybrid and gained a minivan. The Lament for Phil Ford (our Escape) is too long and convoluted to interest anyone, but it was about six weeks of attempting to cram two to three children in an Audi sedan without losing my sanity or getting stuck on my growing belly. And then the Audi pretty much stopped working too, just to make things really interesting. God is smart, if you had any doubts, because normally I would have been pretty sad about entering the ranks of van owners, but now I am truly only delighted to have a minivan. It feels like a luxury to have room and wheels that work, and I have only broken one sideview mirror backing out of the garage so far, so I think our vehicular luck is changing!

And in other catching up news, we did submit our rank list to the Air Force. They gave us 24 options to choose from, and most of the locations were appealing. For those of you that have submitted rank lists before, for residency or fellowship, this is a little bit different than that process. We were told to rank 20 and that if we left any spaces blank, it was assumed that we were happy to "serve the needs of the Air Force". In essence, we were truly eliminating four places and then the rest of 1 through 20 were put in our order of preference. That said, the Air Force doesn't necessarily rank Tim as a candidate and place him according to that. It's more like they try to make all of their incoming surgeons as happy as possible, so it's as likely that we'll be in place #10 as place #1...if they need someone in place #10 and we were the "happiest" to go there. I realize that's a little confusing, and frankly, I'm not sure I understand how they do it once you start throwing in things like rank and seniority. Probably they just draw names out of a hat.

To the best of my recollection, our list went something like this:

1) Landstuhl, Germany
2) Destin, Florida
3) Colorado Springs, Colorado
4) Northern California
5) Washington DC
6) Langley, Virginia
7) Gulf Coast Mississippi
8) Tucson, Arizona
9) Phoenix, Arizona
10)  Anchorage, Alaska
11) San Antonio, Texas
12, Lakenheath, England

And after that, I don't really remember. It was funny, because we went into the process thinking we'd rank a lot of foreign postings very highly. Then as Tim found out more about each place, it became pretty clear that he did not want to work in some places right out of residency. For instance, there were three postings in Japan and Italy. Normally we would be all for that, but he would be the only surgeon. That means he's always on call and that anything he doesn't recall how to do, he's looking up in a textbook instead of working with a colleague. Not ideal for anyone.

We should hear something sometime in February, and it sort of simultaneously thrills and horrifies me, because y'all...if we get posted to Alaska I'm going to need some prayer. And some wine. Maybe some strong drugs. I'm sure it's beautiful, but I wouldn't mind thawing out for a few years. Each posting is typically three years, so it's highly likely that we'll live in two places before our time with the Air Force is done.

Last but certainly not least, all three of our children are doing well. And I promise my next post will include pictures of them and their various numerous escapades.