Almost School Time!

I have no idea what this says. But someday, I will.

I'm wrapping up my first summer of Daddy Day Care, and I must say it was more fun, and more draining that I thought it would be. Spending a large portion of the day talking to someone who can't say more than one word at a time, eventually made me thirsty for grown up discussion. Luckily for us, this was also an incredibly busy summer.

Norah has started talking more, and is officially at the stage in life where she repeats everything she hears. Which means when Norah drops something, or falls over, she says "Osh!" Which I'm pretty sure is her mimicking our attempts at self censorship. We don't say the whole thing, but we tend to catch ourselves at just the last syllable. Pretty much makes you feel like the world's worst parent. Oh well...

I also have made a full year now of being a vegetarian. I bring it up largely because I'm watching someone cut up the grossest looking fish I've ever seen on PBS. I don't know who this lady is, but even if I ate fish, I wouldn't eat that thing. It looks like a construction worker dropped it into an ash pit, dug it out with a shovel, and then drove over it. "Does this look like a sunset on the beach to you?" She just said. No miss. No it does not.

Anyway, Summer is winding down, and I'm trying to prepare for what looks like it will be the craziest Fall in my life. It's going to be as busy as a Nascar pitstop, but I'm excited for it to start.

I remember feeling this way when I was in elementary school, like I couldn't wait for school to start again. And I like feeling that way again. I'm excited to dive back into learning Hebrew, hopefully by the end of this year, I'll have a much better grasp on the language. I'm also going to take a class on Akkadian, which makes me both nervous and super excited. (The picture at the top of this post is a photo of a clay tablet written in Akkadian.) In addition to Hebrew and Akkadian, I'll be taking a class on the Biblical book of Amos, and sitting in a class on Ancient Mesopotamian Literature. That will be a pretty full schedule, but I'll also be applying for PhD positions at a handful of places, and filling out my petition for PhD work at the U of C. So, I should know where we're going to spend the next five [read eight] years by March of 2010. In between all of that, I'm trying to teach myself German so that I can pass a reading test this fall. If I don't pass, then I pretty much can't apply for a PhD anywhere. So I really have to make that a priority.

So, while it's been a pretty casual summer, I'm going to pay for it in just under 3 weeks. It's about to get pretty nuts around here for me. I feel like I'm in a canoe in a deep calm river of water, heading toward a sixty-foot raging waterfall.

Whoooooopieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!