The In Between Days Edition

Joy and sadness. My classes are over for the semester (except finals)- joy! But my classes are over for the semsester- sadness! See while I'm happy that I have a break from the massive amount of schoolwork, I'm very sad that I won't have these 3 great classes I had this year. The professors this semester were fabulous, the discussions/seminars/lectures were all great, and I met some amazing people, fellow travelers who always challenged me with their own ideas or critiques of mine. It's been a long semester with a lot of stress, but I think I did some of my best writing this year. I hope that shows up in my grades and if I can do well enough on my finals I think it will. As of Wednesday I finished my last final. All that work has left little time for much else, specifically keeping in touch with people in one form or another and for these purposes even more specifically this tgif. The problem for me at the moment is that I feel intellectually tapped out which doesn't make for the most interesting of posts. I've got lots of reading that I want to do this summer, but now that Shell is back to work and I'm back being stay at home Daddy again, there's not much time during the day to relax and read. Virginia Grace takes up nearly every second- though luckily she's been going down for her afternoon nap at a fairly regular time so at least I can find a few minutes (I hope) to update this thing and send along some pictures. April was a pretty hectic month, and Shell and I celebrated our 3rd anniversary. I can't believe it's been 3 years already. Her parents came over to look after the baby for a bit so Shell and I could steal away for a few hours. We had a lovely dinner and walked around a little on what was one of the first lovely evenings weather-wise we'd had this year. The rest of the month was spent prepping for finals. I've managed to get 2 of my marks back already. I got a B+ in my Modern Espionage and an A in my Great Trials class. I likely won't get my Reformations grade for another few weeks, so I won't know just how I did overall until then. But this was by far the best semester I've spent at University of Toronto. It doesn't match the grades I received at Utah mind you, but as I've stated before Toronto tends to be a tad fierce in their grading system. Nonetheless I feel good about this year as a whole and I look forward to next year when, if all goes well, I'll finally graduate. At the moment I'm putting together a list of classes and as you can imagine in your last year it's quite difficult finding anything you can or must take that actually fits into any sort of reasonable schedule. But I shall endeavor to find them. Gracie is nearing 8 months. She's just a little weed, growing faster than we can keep up with. She's starting to seek out her independence by slithering about the house- she still can't 'crawl'. She's also very vocal in her displeasure- so clearly she takes after her mommy. (just kidding, dear). Shell has really been working up a storm outside in the yard of late. She's started to build up a raised garden in the back corner, and fixing up the front gardens as well. Also we're about to finish the patio next weekend, so we've been removing some concrete that has to go to make way for the new patio stones. Once it is all complete it will look fantastic I have no doubts. Also we're looking forward to having our friend Lauren visit us next month from Australia. It's been 5 years since we've seen her so we just can't wait for her arrival. I'm a few weeks into softball and I love my new team. We're 2-0 and everyone just seems to enjoy playing together and there's no stress like the team I played for last year for half a season. My other team that I play on with my father-in-law had our first game also this past week. Sadly we lost our opening game but I've been slotted in as clean-up hitter so I feel like I've got a bit to prove this year. Hopefully in the next few weeks I'll get some pictures of both teams and maybe even some video to share with you. For now though, its time for baby pictures YAY! [as always, click on a picture to enlarge it] That's all for now...sorry about taking so long. Til next time, Cheers