I'm getting ready for yet another Labor Day weekend trip. This year Seattle is the destination and the trip will serve more as one of reunion than cram-as-much-as-we-can-into-the-time-we're-there. My friends John and Sarah have been living up there for a year now and Becky recently moved up there for a three-month stay as part of her traveling physical therapy work. I'm really excited about getting to see everyone again; it seems like so long ago that I was visiting San Antonio, even though it was just a couple of months ago. This trip will serve as the bookend to my summer travels -- and I hope the ushering in of fall weather. Maybe I can bring some of the Seattle weather back to Alabama with me.

I have my first class this afternoon. It's called The Structure of English. My other two classes for the semester are Teaching ESL Composition and Methodologies of Teaching English as a Second Language. For my assistantship, I'm working as a research assistant for one of my professors and coordinating/supporting the four sections of Freshman Composition for Nonnative Speakers. Should make for a fun and interesting semester -- and hopefully a nice change of pace from the previous three months.

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I was excited to get to be back at church last night, too. I was a bit late, so I only caught the last half of Pastor Bill's lesson about the four soils. As he asked us to evaluate our hearts and determine which soil we felt we were, I thought about the cycles that soil and land sometimes goes through. I wondered about that parable representing seasons of life, that we go from rocky ground to plowed/fertile soil to thorny to dry and then through them again.

I missed out on the rain in Texas while I visited and, of course, while I was gone. I know the flooding oversaturated much of the soil, but I think I could've used some of that rain, literally and figuratively. I'm not going to get too caught up in gaging where I am and lose sight of what's going on around me, but I look forward to taking inventory over the next week or two and find out what's been going on that busyness may have kept me from seeing during the past months. And by the grace of Christ, something beautiful will grow.

I'm back in Alabama after a crazy summer tour. I flew back from Orlando yesterday morning and have been crashing out at home since then. I'm hoping to catch up on my sleep by the end of the week, but moving back to Tuscaloosa tomorrow may put a kink in that plan. I've got to get back into the school mode this week. Fortunately, I'll only be in class three days a week; I'm also doing my assistantship hours with the same professor, who may let me work from home. Not that anything is going to be easy, but I'm definitely excited for the change of pace coming my way.

And I still have one more trip before I call an end to the summer: I'm going to Seattle for Labor Day weekend, continuing a tradition that began in 2005 with friends from San Antonio. I'm looking forward to a reunion with them and getting to enjoy their company, as well as weather under 100 degrees. Of course, this means more jumpshots, too.

I didn't take many pictures at Disney World; responsibilities didn't really allow it too much. Here are a few I did manage to get:

I'm not a fan of Christian t-shirts, but I saw one a couple of days ago that left me with some excitement by what it communicated:

Jesus is here. Anything is possible.

So true and so exciting. I probably won't go out and get a shirt with that on it, but that's definitely an idea/phrase that's going to stick with me for a while.