{"id":930,"date":"2007-01-08T07:25:22","date_gmt":"2007-01-08T07:25:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/10.131.168.108\/wordpress\/?p=930"},"modified":"2014-01-04T03:18:26","modified_gmt":"2014-01-04T03:18:26","slug":"930","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elhogue.com\/shannah\/2007\/01\/08\/930\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font style=\"color: rgb(0, 191, 0);\" size=\"4\"><span style=\"font-family: Comic Sans MS;\">Back to Reality&#8230;<\/span><\/font><br style=\"color: rgb(0, 191, 0);\"><br style=\"color: rgb(0, 191, 0);\"><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 191, 0);\">I guess it had to happen eventually, but today is the day.&nbsp; I&#8217;m heading back to CU today for the first time in a month. Classes start tomorrow (and mine start on Wednesday), but I have some prep work I must get done&#8230;so today is the day.&nbsp; Truth be told, I&#8217;m not exactly looking forward to it.&nbsp; Last year, Spring Semester was one of the worst teaching experiences I&#8217;ve ever had.&nbsp; I was actuallly ready to just quit in the middle of the semester, just call in and tell them I was never coming back.&nbsp; Of course, I didn&#8217;t do that, and God was more than faithful to get me through.&nbsp; And it is highly unlikely that this term will be anywhere near as bad as last year since there were other factors at work last year on top of a difficult group of students, but still the memories are quite vivid.<\/span><br style=\"color: rgb(0, 191, 0);\"><br style=\"color: rgb(0, 191, 0);\"><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 191, 0);\">Enough whining, however, because there is no turning back now.&nbsp; And besides, I can&#8217;t hold this group of students responsible for last year&#8217;s problem-children.&nbsp; Truth is, I&#8217;m discovering that fear has become, over the years, one of my primary motivations for decisions and life.&nbsp; And it&#8217;s not a very good or effective motivation.&nbsp; God has been teaching me to recognize such moments and deal with them appropriately, since &#8220;perfect love casts out fear.&#8221;&nbsp; It&#8217;s not an easy lesson, but it&#8217;s been amazingly freeing.&nbsp; So I suspect that this term will be a lesson in watching God&#8217;s grace and love work themselves out in my life.&nbsp; And, of course, I could use your prayers, if you think of it&#8230;<\/span><br style=\"color: rgb(0, 191, 0);\"><br style=\"color: rgb(0, 191, 0);\"><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 191, 0);\">The weekend wasn&#8217;t too overwhelming.&nbsp; We watched a few episodes of MacGyver (which Eric got for Christmas) and Toy Story.&nbsp; I finished HP Book 5&#8230;it&#8217;s much better than I remembered it being, really.&nbsp; I didn&#8217;t like it the first time, but it made much more sense in the re-reading!&nbsp; Eric and I ran around on Saturday.&nbsp; Our goal was to buy something, but we were not specific about what.&nbsp; We went to all the stores to which we had gift cards from Christmas (Lowe&#8217;s, Target, Borders and B &amp; N) as well as Cord Camera and a whole string of furniture stores.&nbsp; After 5 hours&#8230;we had bought one book.&nbsp; Well, at least we met our goal!&nbsp; And it was fun to just hang out together and shop.&nbsp; <\/span><br style=\"color: rgb(0, 191, 0);\"><br style=\"color: rgb(0, 191, 0);\"><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 191, 0);\">Other than that, I did laundry, ironed, made meals, and generally tidied up the house.&nbsp; Nothing too exciting, but a relaxing weekend, which is always nice!<\/span><br style=\"color: rgb(0, 191, 0);\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back to Reality&#8230;I guess it had to happen eventually, but today is the day.&nbsp; I&#8217;m heading back to CU today for the first time in a month. Classes start tomorrow (and mine start on Wednesday), but I have some prep &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/elhogue.com\/shannah\/2007\/01\/08\/930\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elhogue.com\/shannah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elhogue.com\/shannah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elhogue.com\/shannah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elhogue.com\/shannah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elhogue.com\/shannah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=930"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/elhogue.com\/shannah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2897,"href":"https:\/\/elhogue.com\/shannah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930\/revisions\/2897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elhogue.com\/shannah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elhogue.com\/shannah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elhogue.com\/shannah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}