We arrived

It's good to be home. We arrived Sunday evening, our bags got here this morning. Finally ... out of pajamas. Well, perhaps I'm not out yet.

Spending time with the sisters and parents, with their spouses. Hope and Rob tried to leave this morning but had to turn back because of the blizzard (still going on here). Watching the news to track what's happening near the Indian Ocean.

Help!

OK, we were supposed to be flying to Newfoundland yesterday but that didn't happen. Snow, you know. Anyhow, we're supposed to be flying tomorrow now. Please pray, anyone who sees this during our scheduled flight period (11:59AM on Christmas Day to 1:15PM the next day), that all would go as planned, that the snow would be kept up in the skies and that our flights would depart, transport and arrive in a timely fashion.

In short, ask God to do selfish things for us, provided that these things don't throw a massive monkey wrench in his eternal plan for the universe.

Oh, and Merry Christmas, y'all!

All complete! [a delayed reaction]

Yes, we finished up last Friday. Did as little as possible on Friday afternoon but I ended up running around at school until 4 PM anyway, finishing up odds and ends. Went with the dorm gang for ice cream at Braum's in the PM.

Saturday, went for a last-visit-before-Christmas trip to the SDA church where we were doing our ethnography observation. We were invited out for lunch afterwards and spent a lovely early afternoon with a couple from Kenya (Joshua) and Botswana (T.K.). Then, we came home and fell asleep until about 5:30. Starting to feel the adrenal drop, post studies.

Went to Cedar Pointe church on Sunday morning, had lunch with the Buchers and fellow GIAL folks unti mid-afternoon. Tried to do up a newsletter and Christmas cards in the evening but Rob's Mac and the printer went crazy. Gak! Some little piece inside the printer snapped and the black ink cartridge won't sit properly anymore. And Rob lost sight of his hard-drive and has been trying to get it back since Sunday evening now. All day yesterday, all day today (so far) ... he's over at the school now, trying to re-register all his software. He had to backup all his data, when he found it again, and wipe the hard-drive, reinstall OSX. [sigh] I hope he finishes up today.

We need to go buy some barber shears this evening. He's starting to look like Wolverine. Actually, he insists that he now looks more like Krusty the Klown. I am undecided at this time. Either way, the fuzz ends here, tonight. Hope (my sister) and Rob (my brother-in-law) are having Toni (my niece) baptized on Boxing Day and I want us both to look presentable.


Wolverine


Krusty the Klown

Eshinee working at the library

Eshinee working at the library, originally uploaded by eshinee.

Rob doing grammar homework

Rob doing grammar homework, originally uploaded by eshinee.

Rob and Eshinee; the Christmas photo

RobEshXms, originally uploaded by eshinee.

Rob with fellow students

Rob with fellow students, originally uploaded by eshinee.

Anthro exam complete!

Rob is still in there writing his anthro exam. I finshed in about 30 minutes. It was a decent exam. Rob and I are doing an experiment on this exam. On the midterm, I had prepared all kinds of notes and studied pretty thoroughly. Rob says he doesn't know how to study and, therefore, he didn't study at all. He only got 4% less than I did. So, for this one, we studied exactly the same amount as each other, except for the time I spent preparing our notes. That is, I collected notes for 2 hours and we studied together by running through the notes one time, 1.5 hours. It'll be interesting to see if studying actually does help me remember more.

We have a short 12 minute presentation to do tomorrow in anthro class, on our visits to the SDA church. Preparation shouldn't take too long. I think we'll just come up with a list of salient events or practices and take turns talking about them.

I made cookies yesterday; chocolate chips, raisins and oatmeal.

Chapel talk complete!

Woohoo! It went well. I went overtime [roughly 40 minutes instead of 20 ... eep!], but it went well. David chased by Saul, 25 years from anointing to kingship. Pictures of Philistines, satellite maps and rotund infant statuettes; I had it all.

I am now stopping for today. This has been a dense workweek, school-wise. We have a couple of things to go to tomorrow but I think we'll make it to a movie this weekend. Alexander, here we come!

Gotta arrange a taxi trip for Christmas morning. We're flying out of Dallas airport at 8:40AM and it's an international flight so we need to be there 2 hours early. I wasn't thinking about getting to the airport when I made the flight arrangements, obviously. Who would be available to give us a lift 6AM Christmas morning? Doh! Oh well, better than a month's worth of parking lot fees. We'll be coming back to Dallas in late January. Rob may be back sooner, actually. There's an ethnomusicology course that LBT may want him to pick up, a short one.

Stew for dinner. I'm boiling the beef now so it'll be falling apart and herbed. Tomatoes, carrots, garlic, onions ... yumm. And yay!

Ethnography complete!

Yes, the ethnography is done for ... uh ... with. Finished up yesterday afternoon with a redrawing of my area map for the SDA church. Title - Finding and Refining Our Strengths: marital role change and child esteem in an African community in Texas. Rob finished at about midnight last night. We took a little walk to the school to hole punch the final product so that Rob could feel truly finished. We had anticipated that there would be a lot of people still in the computer lab finishing up. We were right.

The remainder of this week will be consumed with preparing my chapel talk. I am going with David's many years of running from Saul pre-kingship. Am taking a break tonight to go to a Creation scientist talk on dinosaurs and the evidence that they coexisted with humans. Should be intriguing. It's sort of an unofficial class trip for Biblical Backgrounds, as in half the class (both of us) will be going.

Preparation

So, I looked at my homework log for this session and tried to plan how much time I would need to allot for homework and on which days I should be planning to set aside more time than others. Turns out that the rest of this semester is doable. I just need to keep on top on everything that needs to get done. My upcoming major due dates are as follows:

• 12.7, Tuesday - Ethnography; 15-25 page report on cultural themes observed at the SDA church, supported with observations taken from my data notebook, handed in with my printed out data notebook
• 12.10, Friday - 20 minute talk in chapel on some aspect of Biblical Backgrounds; I think I'm going to present something on the running away done by David (from Saul), how his experiences prepared him for kingship of Israel. I found a great website that has many maps of major Ancient Near East events.
• 12.14, Tuesday - Cultural Anthropology final exam
• 12.15, Wednesday - reports on our ethnographies; presenting our findings to the class as we would to someone new to the culture wishing to integrate appropriately
• 12.16, Thursday - Semantics & Pragmatics final exam
• 12.17, Friday - Pragmatics Analysis project (one of the 3 major projects in this course)

We still haven't made it out to see Alexander the Great. [sigh] I even know stuff about him; we covered him in Biblical Backgrounds a few weeks ago. Perhaps the weekend after my chapel talk we might be able to make a break for it, catch a flick.

I have a pain in my heel. I've had this pain before, back when I was working at the daycare. At the time, I thought it had something to do with my shoes so I bought new ones, stopped wearing the others. Sure enough, the pain went away. It doesn't seem that long ago but perhaps it was. The shoes I usually wear these days are the ones I bought to replace those old shoes. They're Doc Martens so I expected them to be functional for longer than this. My last Docs lastest from 1994 until this last summer, when I finally was able to dissociate myself from them long enough to throw them away. Today, I am wearing my red Earth shoes. Have been wearing them for 2 days. No noticeable improvement yet. Must stay off my feet.