yo peeps

Hi friends
Sorry I haven't been updating so regularly lately...I don't have anything profound to say today (or maybe ever? he he), this is just a life update for those who are curious.

Life is very good here. Dallas is growing on me little by little, especially now that the weather is finally cooling off a bit. It's nice to live so near a big city (I'm in a suburb just north of Dallas). 2 big cities actually, since Fort Worth is a little ways off in the other direction. Tomorrow we're going to see an incredible exhibit in one of the Ft. Worth museums, and I'm super pumped about that. It's good to be near a ton of opportunities for fun and culture and music.

School is...well...school. It is so different from last year in some ways, and so similar in others. We have around 3000 students, so size-wise, I'm in a whole new world. I'm enjoying teaching physics, although chem is not so much fun. I remember hating 10th grade, mostly due to chemistry and geometry, and teaching chemistry is bring it all back...ha ha. Not really, but I just really don't like chemistry to begin with, nor do I understand it all that well, and that class has some punks in it that need popknots frequently. The only problem with that is that I'm still not very good at doling out the popknots, classroom management not being one of my strengths. My juniors however, are great. Fortunately the science dept. is HUGE and I work with 3 other chem teachers, 2 of which have been teaching several years (aka, know what they're doing), and I work with one other physics teacher who has also been teaching for several years. The greatness in that is that I don't have to write my own curriculum like last year! Instead, we get together for planning meetings, the others plan, and I just write it all down and follow their lead. That is truly saving me this semester, because I still generally feel like I don't know at all what I'm doing...very much in the survival stage of teaching. I still can't say that I love it either...sometimes I come home feeling like maybe I might like to try something else...like maybe being the science ed person at a museum or zoo or something. Who knows what's in the future though.

Marc and I are still having an incredible time together...I am continually amazed by how much better being married is than I thought it would be. Not to say that I had low hopes - but God has, as usual, completely outdone my best imagination. Not only is living with your best friend wonderful, but Marc and I don't even really fight (like we were warned that we would by quite a few people), nor has living with him taken a whole lot of getting used to, and God is continually using Marc to show me new facets of his love that are just overwhelming. It is incredible to me that after asking in desperation if God could just let it be easy for a moment in the last couple years, that he actually has made it easy. Not to say that life is entirely easy - I miss Albuquerque and friends a lot, sometimes I'm a little lonely out here, and I can never, ever seem to get caught up with school work, but the heart struggles have stopped. The feelings of struggling not to drown and fighting against the wind are gone. God seems to have said "Ok, you can have a rest" and wow, what a rush of gratitude I continually feel about that. To take a deep breath and not feel the heaviness...oh, hallelujah! We've been praying lately that when things get hard, that we will remember that God is entirely in charge of difficulty and ease, that's he's in control...and that we would have some overflow from this easy period to sustain us through the hard. For now though, praise the Lord, my heart can fly!