What I learned this summer

[linking up with Emily P. Freeman for this seasonal series]

What I learned this summer (in no particular order)
1. I’m really bad at hospitals, when someone close to me is involved. I’m especially bad at being wife of said involvee. More about that here.
2. My husband is not the only one who can garden. While I may have a black thumb, I do seem to have developed a reputation as the school gardener. So perhaps, more accurately, I’m not good at the gardening but am pretty good at talking up the joy of compost and dirt when surrounded by troops of kiddos. More about that here.
3. I don’t like giving up if I have not yet proven to myself that I can do it. Part of my goal this summer was to make some progress in the long-term scope of my seminary progress. I was not sure what that meant, when Peter and I first talked about our goals for the summer, but soon I realized that this would be my chance to “redeem” my experience with Greek. When I took the course last year, I struggled through what was supposed to be a summer but ended up taking me an entire semester afterwards as well. It was a humbling experience to struggle so much with a foreign language, after spending much of my life feeling like language acquisition was “easy” for me. So this time around, I decided to do it right. I began by redoing each of the classes from Greek I, corresponding with my professor over the summer about this plan. I am now enrolled in Greek II, with the goal of a more solid go this time around. And so far, I’m getting pretty jazzed about the translation projects . . . no more on that. Yet ;-)
4. I like animals. More precisely, I like consuming all things produced by them . . . and yes, the animals themselves. No doubt I could thrive as a vegetarian, but my body is, ideally, most happy when metabolizing significant quantities of protein.
5. I like books. This may seem an odd thing for a librarian to say but, it comes after going through an embarrassing stint of many years not reading. I was flitting around the world and “too busy” adjusting to new jobs to make the time for it, so I started to fear that I was not a real reader after all. Two years ago I revisited one of my all-time favorite books and, since then, there has been no stopping me. I devour books—sometimes so rapidly that I have to remind myself to slow down and appreciate the process. It has given me a renewed passion for my job as I teach young ones how to experience the same joy I discovered over 3 decades ago. Just call me nerd. Sometimes I also talk to grownups about books. More about that here.