Tuesday, April 17, 2012

The I

I'm back in Idaho where everything feels normal again. The only different thing, really, is that I'm here with Jared, and have apparently joined some group of students that I didn't notice before. The student body seems to be primarily divided into the single-and-mostly-uncommited and the engaged-and-or-married groups. Without having consciously known it, I belonged to the former until now. I'm in my last semester of single-student housing, which is very nice. When we go to devotional and the speaker talks about eternal marriages, I get to sit back and smile when they plead for the single students to date, and I tune in when they discuss marriage and families. I'm even on a special list in the Bishop's office. Being engaged falls somewhere between a fantastic thing and everyday life up here.

Anyway, classes are awesome so far. My New Testament teacher spent years in the middle-east simply because he wanted to understand the Savior better. My firefighting class has a 2-1/2 inch wide textbook, is almost entirely male-dominated, and might be entirely useless, but it's supposed to be incredibly fun. Plus, I get to sit by Jared in both of those classes. My Spanish teacher seems to be fantastic, and I think I'll learn a lot from him. My DNA class textbook is Genetics for Dummies. I'm taking a global dynamics class online, and the jury is still out on that one.

For those who wonder, my hands haven't gotten any better, but they haven't gotten worse either. I'm learning how to take care of them and I've cut back a lot on the hand-stressful activities. Even Jared is finding ways he can help, besides just being my scribe when I need him. Granted, sometimes I feel downright disabled, and most days my pinkies and ring-fingers are mostly asleep, but I've gotten used to it.

Honestly, I think this is going to be a great semester. It just has that feel to it, you know? I guess we'll just see what happens!