January 13, 2011--Tendonitis

So lately, we've been looking at a transition in our lives, in Erick's work. He's been working construction for the past year and a half, and his elbows have been bothering him for several months now. For the last few months we've also really felt that we need to find a way to be more involved in the community in which we are pastoring. One of the options we'd been thinking seriously about was having Erick quit his construction job and get a job at one of the small businesses in town. Well, it seems like God has been nudging us along in that direction. Recently, he was laid off temporarily from his job because they ran out of work. So he put in an application to be a substitute teacher at the schools up in that area. The kids were rather shocked that he'd want to teach at a public school. Today he received his substitute teacher's license, so the way is clear for that. He's still looking at other jobs, though, such as working at the IGA or Dollar General. He really needs to be more careful with his elbow. The doctor is talking about surgery if it doesn't get any better. He has another appointment in a month and they will decide then if he should get surgery or not. In the meantime, he's laid off anyway so maybe this will be a good time for him to heal, if he can restrain from doing things like shoveling snow and chopping firewood for awhile.

In other news, I started back to school again this week. I have one class this semester I have to take on campus--Fundamentals of Algebra. I didn't do so well on the COMPASS entrance exam on the algebra part. I had forgotten everything I'd learned in high school about algebra, so just selected random questions. It didn't help that it was the last part of the COMPASS exam and that I'd been there for four hours already, not to mention I had a headache and was hungry because I hadn't eaten lunch. I did really well on the English portions and even pretty good on general math, just not algebra. So I have to take this class before I can take college level math courses.

Anyway, besides co-op classes and a few other similar type things, this was really my first time in a brick-and-mortal school classroom. As you all know, I've been homeschooled all my life. So I was interested to see what it would be like. All I can say is I hope that things get more interesting as the class goes along, because I felt like I had wasted two and a half hours of my life. It took the teacher an hour and a half to explain the syllabus! I could have read it myself in five minutes. In fact, I could have learned everything that we did that night by myself in about ten minutes. It's going to be a bit different not being able to do this at my own pace.

So that's what's been going on lately with me. I haven't had very many hours at work because it's always slow after the holidays. They have too many cashiers and not enough hours to go around. Oh, and I also found out that my great-grandpa passed away today. He was ninety-five years old this last Christmas.