Moving on Up!

Such a beautiful day!  Ah, Autumn, I love you so much!  It's a really strange time around here.  The first flush of yellow leaves are gone, so there are tons of naked trees around.  However, there are still loads of trees with leaves that haven't changed at all.  So it's a very odd mixture of winter and summer when you look at the trees.  :-)

We learned how to use a Coptic dictionary today.  Much like Hebrew or Arabic, you have to look up most verbs by the consonants, leaving out the vowels.  Coptic is more complicated, of course, because you sometimes leave certain vowels in, and don't even get me started on prepositions (which each have more than one form, and are only listed under one) so the whole thing can be difficult if you don't know what's up.  So, we read a bit of the Gospel of Lucas, and the prof made us look up a word.  Both times I turned to the exact page!  I'm a Coptic dictionary genius!  :-)

The rest of the day consisted of Egyptian, and ISN-R stuff, and walking around in the cool confused autumn air and warm confused autumn sunshine.  Then Wushu.

Jan, our teacher, moved me up to the Intermediate group tonight!  :-D  I'm an Intermediate now!  Whoo!  This meant that everything happened much much faster tonight, and that I had to just DO the new stuff without having Jan walk me through it.  Rock!

I can't really feel my legs now though, because Jan decided we needed to do some extra training after the lesson.  Ouch will come tomorrow, I imagine.  Tonight I just struggled to convince my legs that they could walk down stairs, and bike back from the sportscenter.

The other teachers are all in China this month for Wushu championships (!) which means I'll be getting my sword within the month!  :-D

I had a meeting after Wushu, and didn't think I was going to make it.  I hadn't eaten since noon or so!  But I had a rockin Pindakaas (peanut butter: lit. peanut cheese) sandwich and some soy milk.  Life, she is good.

In other news: check out the two blogs I've added to my long list of awesome blogs:  Faith in the Zone is a blog written by soldiers in Iraq who took a course on religions.  The blog is a chronicle of their reactions to various holy texts, and how they deal with religion in a war zone.  Spirit21 is a blog by a Muslim woman who discusses life in this modern world.  "I am not us," she writes, "nor am I Other.  I am me."  Good stuff, both of them.  :-)