Settling into a routine

We've been here nearly five weeks now, and we have settled into more or less a routine. Each week, on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I spend a couple of hours at the church doing things such as janitorial duties, putting together the coming Sabbath's programs and bulletin, reading articles from Leadership Journal and Adventist Review, and the various little administrative tasks of keeping a church functioning. I nearly always walk to the church (although once it gets icy and snowy, we'll see what happens), about 20 minutes, and possibly stop at one of the stores along the way or the bank to do some small errands. Elise stops by around 1 p.m. to pick me up, go to the Post Office to pick up the mail, and then return home for a late lunch.

Sundays or Mondays are my day off. I like to take Sundays off, but if I end up doing some task on Sunday, I'll try to take most of Monday off. I need that to recover from Sabbath duties.

Mondays and Fridays are my sermon preparation days. On Monday I take a broad pass over the material I plan to speak on during the coming Sabbath and jot down the main themes that I want to get across. That way as I go through the week I'm able to be alert for thoughts and ideas that will help develop the themes. On Fridays I go back over all the notes I've jotted down and arrange them into a sermon.

Our Sabbath School teacher has been unable to attend for a few weeks due to injuries. And it doesn't look like he will be able to come for a few more weeks, at least, so I've also been leading the Sabbath School lessons. So I use Fridays to prepare for that as well.

Wedneday evening is our prayer meeting. We just started reading and discussing a book by Jon Dybdahl, A Strange Place for Grace. (Perry, if you're reading this, I didn't choose it just to copy you.)

Thursday is grocery shopping day for Elise. To cut down on our grocery bill (quite important with groceries costing quite a bit more than in the lower 48 which has warehouse grocers like WinCo and Costco), she picks up the weekly local paper in the morning and then plans out the week based on the advertised specials.

As far as the kids, school starts at 9 a.m. each morning. They have a weekly list of assignments that they are required to complete. They choose when to do each one, but at the end of the week, they are expected to complete everything on the list. Whenever they are done with the items for the day, they're done. Sometimes this happens early in the day. At other times, they seem to drag it out for as long as they can.

This past Tuesday morning we had a little suprise. A lady from town stopped by wanting to get some grade school transcripts translated. Somewhere she had learned that there was a new Japanese person in town who might know both Japanese and English. She had spent a few years in Japan with her family. She has a couple of boys who went to school there, and the school here needed the transcripts. She is from a Vietnamese-Korean heritage and she is married to a Japanese man, but he apparently doesn't read Japanese. She was able to figure out most of the transcripts, but some of the teachers' written comments were beyond any of them. So I spent about half an hour translating the comments for her. She works at the Petersburg Fisheries, one of the canneries, where they are currently processing crabs and sea cucumbers. They also process various types of roe, most of which are shipped to Japan.

I never did find the other ministers yesterday. I need to call another one up and find out exactly when and where they meet.

The cooler weather it starting to come in. Yesterday morning after we had quite a bit of rain down at sea level, the clouds broke up a bit so that I could see some of the hills around us. There was snow at the tops of them, probably above 1,000 feet or so. I saw some today as well, but the clouds have been much more stubborn today. I had hoped they would go away for a little while so that I could catch a few photos, but they are not cooperating today.

According to the forecast, the low temps are supposed to continue lowering for the next week so that we should be seeing low 30's and possibly even some 20's by the middle of next week. We could possibly see a few snowflakes at sea level, although the forecast is for clearer skies.