I'm going to Louisiana!!!!!!!

I'm SOOOO excited! I talked to Mrs Burrell today and she said that I could go down to Louisiana with them after Christmas to visit Abby and Alex! I haven't seen them since the wedding, and I've missed Abby so badly that I was starting to wish we could cancel Christmas. Well, maybe it wasn't quite that bad, but they can't come up for Christmas, and two Christmas's in a row without Abby just didn't seem like much fun. Oh, yeah you probably didn't know this, but Alex used all of his time off for visits, and the wedding, and all, so they aren't going to be able to come up for Christmas this year =(. When Abby first told me that, I cried, but then I started trying to come up with a way to get them up here anyway. I finally had to give up on that idea, so I decided to visit them. But I really didn't want to drive down by myself, and I can't afford to fly, so I thought I was stuck, until I found out that the Burrell's are driving down the day after Christmas. So for the last couple days I've been trying to get a hold of them, but it wasn't until this morning that I finally got through. Mom had already mentioned it to them, and so they had already decided that they would love to have me along (who wouldn't??=D). So as soon as I finished talking to Mrs B, I called Abby (today is her birthday) and told her that I had the most wonderful surprise in the world for her. She was very excited too, so the two of us spent some time "squealing" over the phone to each other. Squealing really isn't the word I was looking for, but it was the best I could come up with right now. I'm sure you get the point. Anyway, we're very very excited about finally seeing each other again. The longest we've ever had to go without seeing each other was while I was in PNG, and it will be way longer than that this time, so it's been really hard on both of us.

Classes are all going swell. Tomorrow is our last day of Pentateuch, so we'll be starting Old Testament History with Rich Bruce next. I'm really going to miss James Hatton. He's been a lot of fun, and I've learned a lot from him. One of the coolest things about him is that he uses personal examples to illustrate the principle in what we're studying. Some of the other teachers do that too, but theirs are usually about something in their past, whereas Hatton tells us about something he learned that morning or the day before. I know he doesn't see himself as being that great of a spiritual leader, but his openness with his current life, and his walk with God has been really amazing to me. I've learned a lot from him, and not just from the Pentateuch! He has some great stories too!

One of my favorite stories was from back when Hatton and his wife Lisa were in Papua New Guinea. They were asked by another missionary family to pet sit for them. The problem was the pets were two yellow snakes. Lisa doesn't mind snakes, but Hatton is actually quite scared of them. But they agreed anyway. Hatton said he didn't mind them being in his house, so long as he could look into the box and see them both in there. But one morning the inevitable happened. He looked into the box, and saw only one snake! So they started the hunt. After tearing apart most of the house, one of their kids looked into the box again, and realized that what they were seeing was one snake with half of the other snake sticking out of its mouth. Lisa sized up the situation, grabbed each snake by its tail, and gave a little tug. Nothing happened. She pulled a little harder. Still nothing. She pulled for all she was worth, but it didn't even budge. After giving up on that idea she decided that she would just have to cut the half eaten snake in half. So she got out her scissors, and started hacking away. As soon as she finished cutting it in half, the first snake immediately regurgitated the other half of the snake. Yuck! So now they had one whole snake and two halves of a snake, and were trying to figure out how they were going to break the news to the owners! I'm not sure how it all ended, but by the time they finished telling the story the owners were probably laughing too hard to care!

The Hermeneutics class doesn't end until November twenty, so we still have a couple weeks with Chris McMaster. The homework assignments he has for us have been, well, not hard exactly, just very time consuming. And somehow in his scheduling he managed to pack almost all of them into about a week and a half. But then he realized how long they were taking, and with so many of them he wasn't getting our best on them, so he changed them around so that we had them about every other day for a while. Then he looked at further, and decided that it was just way too much, so he canceled a couple of them, and made some of them easier. I've learned a lot from his class, but I must admit that I'm very relieved that he decided to cut back on the homework. It was just way too much!

Well, I think that's about all for now. I have to clean my room up before Andrew comes down to visit tomorrow. Until next time!