power catch up

So really, I'm not sure where the past month and a half, or really this entire year for that matter, has gone. I am full swing into my final semester of grad school (when on earth did that happen?!). I'm taking 2 classes. One is on how to teach all the language skills (for you non-language teachers, that would be listening, speaking, reading, and writing). It's awesome, the textbooks are great, super practical, and I know I'll be hanging on to this material for a long time to come. And the other class would be my final project, aka my thesis. I'm doing a project on incorporating corpus research and internet databases into English language classrooms. Non-TESOLers look at me like I'm crazy when I explain it, but I'm sure that's common when most grad students explain their thesis work. It's really interesting stuff, but it's really confusing and overwhelming at times. I could use some prayers over the next month and a half (holy cow!). Raul continues to work and enjoy his job as I study and substitute teach for the third year, but really, we're just ready for God to show us the next step on our path. I won't get into all that, but if you could keep us in your prayers, we would both appreciate it.

Some pictures as of late.... there aren't many because I haven't taken a whole lot of pictures lately. But these are 2 fun moments that have happened in the past month that I wanted to share.

My mom and I are both big readers. My first summer back in the states, we got to meet one of our favorite Christian authors, Karen Kingsbury, and it was a great mother/daughter moment. So when I heard that another favorite author, Beverly Lewis, was going to be at the Gaither's store around my mom's birthday, I knew we needed to go. For her birthday, we had Amish food, heard Beverly speak, and got to meet her and get books signed. It was a really special evening :)

Twitter is my newest distraction/time-killer, but I discovered one benefit of it when KLove in Indy tweeted that Mandisa would be doing a meet and greet at a Christian bookstore in Indy. Well, I was not going to miss that and drove an hour to meet someone that I admire. I love her music and adore her as a person and woman of faith. 

Well-worth the hour drive, even when I was feeling sick at the time :)