Happy Leap Day!

Not sure what to say about this certainly important holiday. We get an extra day, and I've heard it proposed that since it's so very... extra... we should get it off of work and school and the like. We have another day so people should get to use it to relax, right?

Anyway, I'm going to use it to make sure I actually get my blogging done this month, since I'm supposed to try and post at least twice. There's not a whole lot to say: school's kept me busy, this week is particularly hectic. I have three tests, two projects, a quiz and a paper to write all this week. Well, the paper's not due until Monday, but I'm just like that. The good news is that by now most of that's sort of taken care of. I have one test and a quiz out of the way, I mostly just need to tidy up the paper, I lucked out that I don't have another test on Monday, and... oh right. The projects are done.

How can it still be Wednesday? As much as I feel like I did on Monday alone I'm ready for the week to be over. Alas, I still have the two tests tomorrow and Friday. At least I've sort of cleared out my schedule so I can study for those. One shouldn't be so hard. The other... well, it's a placement test for third or fourth semester Italian, so we'll just have to see how that goes. I just don't want to have to take yet another one of those.

Otherwise life has been pretty dull; I don't get to have much of a life because of all of these classes I'm taking, but Spring Break comes up March 12th, when I at least don't have to do a bunch of homework. Instead I'll get my wisdom teeth out! Yay.

School is just stressing me out and crowding out pretty much any other clever thought I have. I think the other day I thought about where the word "talent" probably got it's current meaning, but I'm not so sure it's all that interesting. Maybe you've heard of the Parable of the Talents, told in one of the gospels? The boss goes away and leaves three servants in charge of some money. To one he gives... five talents I think. In this case a talent refers to an amount of money, maybe a year's wages or something. I don't quite remember. Anywho, the next guy down the line gets just three. The third gets one lonely talent.

The master comes back after a while, and the first guy says "I invested your money and doubled it, so here's ten talents when you gave me five." The master says "well done, good and faithful servant. Come and enjoy the fruits of your labor." The second shows up and says: "I invested the three you gave me and I got three more." The master says the exact same thing to him.

The last dude, though, had run off and buried the one talent he'd gotten, so he comes up and says "look, here's your money, safe and sound!" And the master rebukes him, saying how he could have put it to work and maybe gotten him some more money. Moral of the story is good stewardship, I believe.

Anyway, if you can imagine how people tend to want to apply this: "it's not just money," they say. "It's about whatever God gives you. Your possessions, yes, but also you abilities." And they send them off with the admonishment to "take good care of every talent God has given you." And then talent becomes a specific ability God gave you, or that you were born with. Viola!

I have no proof. This was me thinking in the shower.

In Which I Start Getting Nervous

So... school. Things keep happening. Western Civ is going ok, I think, we're reading Italian Journey by Johann Wolfgang von Geothe, which is a beautiful book, but I'm not sure how well I'll discuss it. The past two have been pretty heavily philosophical books, but this one is just a guy on a trip and his musings. He gives great description though.

Also on the subject of Italian, after having backed off of Italian I now need to put the pedal to the metal again, at least until I take a placement test to see what class I should start with at KU in the Fall. It'll be soonish, but now I have a list of things I should study, so I'll get to writing myself discussions and things about those and bother anyone who will listen so I can remember everything.

What else... I'm giving a speech in public speaking (who'da thunk?) on Tuesday, but now that my outline's done I'm not so worried about it. Papers come up due in Composition II rather often... at some point some of these classes will cool down a bit, but the others will heat up (Western Civ will get harder around midterms, for sure), so I guess there's going to be this balance throughout the semester. Except for Italian, which will be really hard for a bit here and then just go poof! gone.

I find I'm already looking forward to June and Camp NaNoWriMo, since a friend and I started creating yet another language, and the people are just begging for a story so I can get ahold of their culture so I can work on their language some more. And that winds up taking more time than you might think, what with the two being intertwined.

But for right now, homework + Italian studying. Non stop. Should be fun. Maybe I'll blog something again someday.