School

I was thinking of several things as I was on facebook for a few brief moments this morning and they were all too long and potentially boring to put on my wall or whatever (I'm losing interest in that site, it keeps changing, and I am lost each time I go back), anyway, I realized, oh yeah, I have a blog, maybe it should go there.

First a little update. I have two classes this term (but they are both four credits, and at BYU spring and summer terms are supposed to be half as many credits to be full-time because you are in class for just a handful of weeks, plus graduate credits are supposedly more time consuming than undergraduate -- as a matter of fact, if you do the math on the university's guideline of three hours outside of class for each credit hour, or hour in class, we should be devoting 64 hours to school each week (8 credit hours X 2 because it's summer school = 16 hours in class, 16 hours X 3 = 48 hours outside of class, plus the 16 hours in class = 64 hours), or over ten hours a day, six days a week, but I digress), Book of Mormon and New Testament. Besides the Book of Mormon and the New Testament themselves we have 500+ pages to read for the BofM class, and somewhere around 1800 pages for NT. I'm actually looking forward to a few of the books for NT though. Only one is by an LDS author. (I finished that one already, Dean Hughes' The Cost of Winning: Coming in First Across the Wrong Finish Line, it was decent.) I'm in the middle of Phillip Yancey's The Jesus I Never Knew. It's a good book. I'm also looking forward to John MacArthur's The Gospel According to Jesus. I don't particularly like school, and am only semi-interested in many of my classes. Why do I have to take two classes that I'm actually very interested in, and that I'm looking forward to during Summer Term when we speed through everything twice as fast? I would much rather be doing some of next semester's classes right now allowing me to spend more time on these two classes. (This is part of the reason, I'm not a big fan of school in the first place, I dislike being told what I have to study and especially when I have to study it, et cetera. That was a big complaint of mine in college the first time, having to take six classes on art and literature and history, and only having room in my schedule for two or three grammar and linguistics classes, which is what I really had more of an interest in anyway.) Oh well. Anyway, I should get back to my book now, if I remember I'll leave more specific recommendations at the end of the term on which of the books I particularly enjoyed.

Oh, and here's a random picture from our trip earlier this summer. (I don't know why my father-in-law can't the horizon to be level, it might have to do with the fact that he insists on taking the pictures with one hand. And he may have better software for manipulating the picture after the fact, but I lack the ability to rotate the picture in anything but 90 degree intervals, sorry. Next time I'll just have to take my tripod I guess.)