I'll start in...
when I kicked off the new year by driving home to Maryland overnight from Urbana in St. Louis. We had an excellent conference, and I am most grateful for good bonding time with fellow workers. After arriving home, I spent the rest of the month visiting friends and supporters - I had meals with 12 people/families (excluding my own) and spoke at 5 churches about the work in Japan. In the midst of it all, the second big snow of the winter left me stuck at home... I could hardly believe we get two more-than-one-foot snowfalls in one winter in Maryland! Somehowduring all of this I managed to squeeze in several trips to the jewelry store to find the perfect diamond ring... Then, in...
it snowed again. Even more. This was, of course, good preparation for my subsequent move to 'Winterpeg'. This time my family hunkered down in a hotel in Baltimore, because the snow came just as my younger brother was scheduled to receive my older brother's bone-marrow stem cells in a transplant at the University of Maryland Medical Center to cure his leukemia. Though confined to his hospital bed for quite a while after that, my brother is now doing quite well. While he was healing, my beautiful girlfriend Hillary came all the way from Winnipeg, Manitoba to visit me and meet my family! We had a wonderful time gallavanting around MD and DC after having been in different countries for more than two months. Still, that diamond ring didn't leave my pocket until...
when I returned the favor to my beautiful girlfriend and ventured up to Canada to meet her family. But before that, I spent a week in Reading, PA with our mission getting my spiritual tires retreaded... excellent time with friends and spiritual family once again. Right after that I hopped on the plane up to Winnipeg, where before Day 2 was complete I had asked Don Timmons for his beautiful daughter's hand in marriage... And before Day 3 was done, I had finally gotten rid of that diamond ring! With my new fiancee proudly wearing it on her left hand, we visited a whole host of people, whom she promptly introduced me to after first introducing them to the ring. This visit to Canada lasted into...
when for the last time I said goodbye to my beautiful fiancee. A short stop in the States to once again bid farewell to my family, and I was back on the trans-Pacific flight to my second home. For the rest of the month and all of...
May...
I was in Japan, living it up in my last days as a bechelor. My coworkers were all back in the States because their daughters were getting married, which left me busy but not overwhelmed. It was good for me to be able to say goodbye to my friends and to Japan, since it would be a while before I would return. I was already packing when...
June...
arrived, because I was soon heading back to America. I arrived at O'Hare on the 7th, where I was reunited with my beautiful fiancee, and then we flew together back to DC. We arrived after midnight, and then were up early the next morning to drive to Pennsylvania for New Personnel Orientation with Christar - though I am not 'new pesonnel', my fiancee was and so we decided it was best to go through the program together. As soon as it was over we shimmied back down to MD to get a week of intensive pre-marital counseling with our good friend Tom... no joke on the 'intensive' part, and we are both thankful for it now (and were then, too!). We said a quick goodbye and flew up to Winnipeg on June 30. After a LONG interview with immigration officials, we headed home to rest for one night, and woke up to...
July...
and realized that we only had 9 days to get ready for our wedding! It was a whirlwind, but thanks to many, many friends and family we were all ready by Friday night. Then Saturday, July 10, 2010 was a day I will remember forever - I wed my beautiful Hillary. Then for several hours after the wedding, our good friends Eric and Ashley ushered us around to a variety of locales to get some amazing pictures of me and my beautiful bride! The next day we drove to Whiteshell Provincial Park and stayed for a week at Barrier Bay - which we highly recommend for a romantic getaway... so much so that we are going back for 2 nights to celebrate six months of marriage in January. But I am getting ahead of myself, because we haven't even discussed...
and all the travelling we did! We spent several days in the Interlake at Hnasau with Hillary's family... good family bonding time. Then of course there was the day trip I took, alone, to Calgary. Yes, Calgary and back in one day... but I had to for immigration purposes. But 16 hours older and $400 poorer I returned home to Manitoba safely with no problems, and with my mission accomplished (that part of the mission, anyway). Can't forget our first trp to Saskatchewan, either. Though we were heading to Regina to visit Hillary's sister Melissa and brother-in-law Brad, we went to Moose Jaw and Caronport to visit some 'old' friends of Hillary's, too... and it was fun to see all the places that Hillary frequented as a kid! We made it home safe and sound that time too, but before the month ended our lovely car had left us stranded on the side of the road... in the middle of the night... in a rainstorm. Not a good way to end the month.
came in quietly and as the weather began to cool down, things started to heat up for us as Hillary started Bible college at Providence College. This pretty much kept her busy for the next few months... I, on the other hand, was in full-on paperwork mode working on my permanent residency application for Canada. It's an amazingly long process with a ridiculous amount of supplemental documents to gather up. There were some problems with my visa when I first entered Canada in June, so I had to cross the border into the US (less than an hour away) and come back into Canada to ask the immigration officials to redue my papers - which in the end still was incorrect. The perm-res saga continued into...
October...
but thankfully there were other highlights to enjoy. The biggest was our visit to Edmonton (Vergreville, to be exact) for the wedding of our friends Brandon and Nadine. Hillary was in the wedding and had fun with the girls, while I got to spend a few days with Nadine's father getting ready for the big day. It was tons of fun and very exciting to rejoice with our friends taking the big dive, so soon after us that we hadn't harldy dried off after our dive. I started teaching English classes at the Japanese church in town and we started to get to know people there a little better. They have been a big source of encouragement to us! The lowlight of the month was perhaps the several trips to the dentist I had to make... at least my mouth is (mostly) in good working order now though. Back to the permanent residency application - in...
I actually had to take an English test. Yes, an English test. But not just any English test, a $300 English test! Not very happy about that one, but when you have no choice you just bite the bullet and do it. And I did. You will all be very happy to know that I did in fact pass. It turns out I can speak English! But they didn't tell me that I passed until...
when the results came about one week later than I was expecting them. Didn't matter much, because I still couldn't submit my permanent residency application because the letter I needed from my bank still had not arrived. After much prayer the letter finally arrived, and my application was in the mail the same day. The relief I felt to have that done was great (of course it is not 'done', but at least it is finally, officially 'started'!)... We still had plenty of time to get ready for Christmas, and we enjoyed the entire season tremendously. We bought a lovely tree at Goodwill and decorated it all up 'Baden' style, and everything that we purchased in December (save perishable food items) were wrapped and put under the tree so that we'd have plenty of packages to open at Christmas. 'Tis the season! Hillary finished her first semester (with very good marks, I might add) and was able to start relaxing a bit again. To top the year off right, we travelled with Hillary's parents to Saskatchewan to spend Christmas with Brad and Melissa (Hillary's sister). Our first Christmas together was a real treat... and we are looking forward to the 'Timmons' tradition of Chinese take-out to ring in the New Year tomorrow night!
What a fast, crazy and amazing year it has been! God is good! I can say with certainty that there will never be another one like it again.
