This was written on the 28th of Dec.

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I think Anna is going to kill me if I don't update sometime soon. She's been bugging me for a long time and in fact her pleas have taken on kind of a fatalistic tone. "So...have you just given up on the whole blogger thing?" she asked me last night.

NO! It's not dead! It simply was flash frozen for the fall '07 semester...now that that semester is over, perhaps I'll be able to thaw it out.

So, here's an attempt at an update on what has been going on since Aug. of this year.

AUG: I start a new job and classes at a new school. NSU, for the most part, has been great. All classes meet only once a week...so if you take a three hour class, then you meet once a week...for three hours. That took a little while to get used to, but actually I like it a lot better now. I'm able to take 15 hours and go to school only three days a week. This past semester I took Advanced comp 1, grammar, world lit, pre-intern 1 and special ed. Advanced comp was a class that went from 7:20 to 10:00 pm...but it was actually one of my favorite classes, in spite of the late hours. Our instructor was very good and had enough energy to keep us awake when it got late. Grammar was horrible. I didn't have a very good foundation in basic grammar to start with, and the teacher didn't really teach...she simply talked about advanced topics in grammar with the ten students in the class who understood her. I would have failed the class were it not for Kelly and Michelle, two fellow students who met with me and another student once, sometimes twice a week to help us out. I managed to get a B in the class...which was very annoying, because now I've lost my 4.0 :( Next semester I'm taking another class from the same instructor (she's the only one who teaches it and I have to take it), but Michelle will be taking it as well...and she's agreed to tutoring for another semester. I owe her big time. World lit was fun, although we did read a fair amount of total junk and it was far too euro-centric. The instructor was pretty good and he liked me (which is always a plus). Pre-intern was one of the education classes required for all education majors. We met three hours every week, plus did an 8 visit internship at a school. It was interesting to visit an American high school, since I'd never been in one before. The teacher I worked with was a fellow Christian and martial artist, so I really enjoyed working with her. Special ed was a pathetic excuse for a class...the instructor was just plain lazy. One class she actually turned on the movie Happy Feet...I kid you not.

The students at the NSU Broken Arrow campus are very different from RSU. The average age is 28, most people work full time, many are married and have kids and almost all have gotten their two year degree already (because the BA campus only offers junior and senior level classes). Overall my classmates are about twenty billion times more mature and much easier to get along with. The only exceptions are those ever annoying elem. ed majors. It really is incredible how whiny and ditzy they can be.

The new job has been great. I'm working with two guys who are mentally disabled and live in a house of their own about twenty minutes from our house. Their house is "double-staffed", so there's always two people with them 24-7. I work a 32 hour shift, from 8 am on Friday to 4 pm on Saturday. The staff sleeps at the house, and other than getting up a few times to check on the guys, it's not hard to get a full 8 hours. The guys I work with, Donald and Corky, are great. They are both very easy to get along with and they always do something to make us laugh.

SEPT: Um....surely something happened in september. But I can't think of anything.

OCT: WanKan (the demo team from our karate dojo) did a demo for our church's fall festival. Although I am not offically part of the team (yet) I was asked to help out...so this was the first demo I was part of since the Phillippines. I think it was good for Mrs. Murry to see that I do know what I'm doing as far as performing goes...hopefully I'll be on the team for real sometime soon.

NOV: more karate news. This blog is not the only thing that was left unattended during that busy semester...I quit running in September and by extension, I quit stretching. It came back to bite me at the misssions tournaments on Nov. 11th. After taking first in the brown belt mem fighting and second in kata, I was allowed to fight in the light weight black belt men's division. I won my first fight (6 to 1) and then fought Luke, one of the black belts from our dojo. In the second to last clash of the fight I threw a high right kick...and heard a nasty "pop" in my left leg. I pulled my hamstring, and then lost the fight in the next clash. :( But I did take 3rd in the black belt division, which is pretty cool for a brown belt.

Ethan took second in his division in both fighting and kata...both times he lost to Josiah, a black belt from our dojo. Poor guy...he's never taken 1st in fighting yet, but he's got a whole bunch of seconds.

DEC: The semester ends! The Sunday before finals a huge ice storm hits and we lose power. They also lost power at school, so the first two days of finals are cancled. Once finals are over and I get out of work on Saturday (we're still out of power) I head down to Texas to visit the Brown family, who went with us on the Phillippines trip. I had a blast and learned some neat stuff...Scott is a really incredible martial artist. We got power back on Tuesday and I returned home on Thursday. Christmas was quiet but very fun.

Right now I'm at work, typing this blogger entry. How am doing that at work? *grins* I'm doing it on my brand new laptop! I bought it on Monday, but because of many difficulties (which have caused me to swear never to shop at Circut City again) I did not get it until today (Friday). It's an Acer 5520, with Windows Vista, a 160 g hard drive, 1 gig of ram and a 1.7 ghz processor. So far I'm pretty happy with it. With having three full time students in the house, and only one computer, we had a lot of tough juggling to do so we all got our assignments typed in on time. I decided it really would be worth it for me to get something I could just do my own work on, and I could take to a coffee shop and use wi-fi instead of messing with the slow dial up at home.

Next month I plan on testing for first degree brown belt, which means I'll probably be testing for black belt next fall. Ethan plans on testing with me. The new testing requirements also include a sword kata, two bo katas and a "three minute heavy bad demonstration" (whatever that is). So we have a fair amount to learn. But I'm excited about doing it.

Ok, happy new year to all of y'all. Love y'all and God bless.