First Day of School

Today was my first day of school.

It followed a crazy weekend. Last Tuesday, Katelyn and I went to Lagoon (with different people, but we were both there). Steve left on Thursday to go on the backpacking trip with his brothers. I spent most of Thursday and Friday doing school stuff. Friday night, I went to a banquet for Idaho's Hometown Heroes. It was amazing. I got to get all dressed up, and the food was fantastic. The salad I had was so good, I think I will try to recreate it at some point. And I had the most delicious cake. Mmmm. Also, I met one of the Idaho senators, an Olympic fencer, and several business owners in town. Pretty fancy. It was great.

Today, however, was the real fun. I got up quite early (I was too nervous to sleep). After I got ready, I headed right over for my office and started working on my class for today. I met one of my new office mates, who is a very nice man starting the Ph.D program. Then I had two classes, including German which is going to be difficult as always, and a free hour before my 101 class. I grabbed a taco and went to class. It was full of Freshmen, most of whom looked a little scared. We made it through class, although it was more serious than I wanted it to be. They barely smiled when I did my "My email address is weird because I was a Russian spy when I first came to ISU." But I had them smiling at least a little by the end. Hopefully the semester will go well.

Then I came home and taught three piano lessons, made dinner, and went grocery shopping. Now I am sitting on the couch procrastinating my homework and watching TV with Katelyn.

That is all!

Today I have Elisabeth on my mind

This is a (fairly) well-known painting of Elisabeth greeting Mary.

What a meeting that must have been. Besides the whole I'm-pregnant-with-the-forerunner-of-Jesus-Christ- whom-you're-pregnant-with. Elisabeth went her whole life as a wonderful person, "walking in all the commandments and ordinances of God blameless." How many of us can say that? Anyone? Add to that the pain Elisabeth must have experienced her whole life in not being able to have children. She is now an old woman, possibly content and looking forward to returning soon to her Heavenly Father. Instead, her husband receives a vision of the angel Gabriel. But her husband is not able to immediately believe, and he is condemned to nine months of silence.

Can you imagine? Elisabeth is an old woman, past the years when she should be able to have a child at all. She gets pregnant, which is great, but I'm sure her pregnancy had all the same difficulties that pregnancy entails, including those unique to older women. And her husband can't talk or hear. He can't go get her pickles and ice cream in the middle of the night when she's craving it. He can't hear her rants when her feet are swollen and her back hurts and she feels ugly and fat.

In the absence of my husband, I would immediately turn to my family. But Elisabeth doesn't do this. Instead, she "hid herself five months." She hides herself away. Now, the reason for this is unclear. Perhaps she needs to hide from the faces of gossip-mongers. Perhaps she had no close friends to talk to. S. Michael Wilcox postulates that Elisabeth "retired into seclusion to prepare." She had a great task ahead of her, after all, and one that she faced primarily alone, as Zacharias could not help with the pregnancy, and died only a few years after John was born. Perhaps Elisabeth needed the time to commune with her Heavenly Father, to prepare to teach the great teacher.

Regardless of why it happened, can you imagine the relief Elisabeth felt when Mary arrived, already knowing about her cousin's pregnancy and coming to rejoice with her? Finally, someone to talk to who won't judge her! Who can understand the divine miracle that is taking place! Who is also pregnant and can share horror stories!

It's the greatest visiting teaching moment ever.

Day 2 of Resolution

In my attempt to blog more often, I now need to figure out something to say.

Random pictures from long ago. I still have the "I love you" balloon. It sits in a vase on my kitchen table, reminding me every single day that my husband is the best man in the world.

I have been out on my parents' farm this week to help with the fourth crop of hay. I enjoy haying, even if I usually end up with a lot of bruises and a terrible crick in my neck. My usual job is chopping hay. This means that after the hay is cut, I come along with a big tractor, pulling the chopper and dump box, and green-chop the hay, cutting it into little tiny pieces that we then store in a silage pit. My father feeds the hay to the cows all year. He is convinced, and he is probably right, that it is much more nutritious than baling, which is what most people do. I like almost everything about haying: driving the great big tractor, being alone with my thoughts for hours in a vehicle that is too loud for music, the camaraderie of hanging with my dad and brothers (whichever ones are available for that crop), tearing around the fields on the motorcycle, skipping lunch only to eat a huge dinner that someone other than me made, the huge breakfasts when we sit and talk and talk until it's time to go to work, wearing a trucker hat. Even the constant breakdowns are kind of fun, when they don't take too much time to fix.

I left for the farm on Monday, then returned last night to take Katelyn to a ward luau (which she ended up not going to), and to supervise a visit with her mom today (which ended up not happening). But I got the lawn mowed and watered and the kitchen completely clean, and now I'm headed to work on my school stuff. So it's been a good week.

Resolved:

I have decided I am going to update this blog more often, since I really enjoy reading everyone's blogs, and I get quite disappointed when two whole weeks go by and they haven't updated. Yet here I am, at more than a month.

We have had some interesting times. Taylor is gone. She moved out yesterday to her aunt and uncle's house. They are going to be adopting her. It is a good move for everyone, but I am feeling more than a little sad today. Even though we have had quite a bit of difficulty with Taylor and I've been praying for weeks that things would work out for her to move, now that she's gone, I miss her. We had decided we wouldn't take any  more foster children for a little while, since Katelyn is fairly low maintenance and I am about to start school again. But I don't know. We might have to anyway. It feels like there is a hole in the house. I probably should take a week or two to remember what life was like without her before making any decisions. We'll see.

In other news, I have been trying to get ready for the fall semester here. I'm working on my syllabus. I have been asked to head a presentation for future English majors, and I'm really excited about that. It's coming up in two weeks. And I'm trying to work on my thesis, but that is going rather badly so far, since I can't think of anything I want to study for nine months.

Fires keep burning in the area. We had a really bad one a few weeks ago that destroyed about 60 homes and a lot of the hillside in Pocatello. Steve and I drove up there yesterday, and it was sad to see house foundations with nothing on them anymore. I'm hoping for some rain so we will be less flammable.