I'm Back!

Hey there! Me and my new laptop are now online. Hooray, hooray, hooray! The internet is quick, the screen is bright and cheery, and the audio system is significantly better than my last laptop. Apparently things change quite a bit over four years.

I had a great Christmas. Home is just wonderful. Coming back was a little stressful, but life seems to have settled in here and it's manageable. Not perfect, but manageable. I'm taking some heavy classes and I've got to make some quick decisions about where I want to be and what I want to be doing in the next couple of years, but I'm trying to look on it all as an adventure and not just a big lump of stress.

As a side note, when I was at home I talked to an older gentleman contemplating heart surgery who wisely observed that stress is just another word for fear. Since we're told that we're to live in a spirit not of fear, but of power, love, and a sound mind, I'm making an effort to recognize stress for what it is in my life - that is, fear - and deal with it on that level instead of pretending that it's just a biological reaction over which I have no control. We'll see how it goes.

Speaking of stress/fear, I got my marks back this week and was not so much disappointed as confused. I got a very poor mark in a class on which I worked really hard, and an astonishingly good mark in the class in which I was still 500 pages behind by the time I wrote the final exam. Wierd. Happily, I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't really matter as my marks don't limit God's ability to make good use of my life. Hallelujah!

So that's me now.