Welcome back

Wow, I can't believe it's been a month since I posted. That's dumb. I hope you had a wonderful Christmas. I was privileged to be at home over the holiday. My shipyard shuts down between Christmas and New Year's so I am forced to take vacation during that time. At the shipyard where I'm doing my training, Newport News, there was no training on the 23rd or 24th, so I went home early. A week and half without work is great. I went down to my sister's house in North Carolina with Mom for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Seeing my niece and nephew along with watching how my sister and brother-in-law love them is really encouraging. Here is Jenna, she is going through a ballerina phase. If you don't think this is cute, tell me and I'll come punch you in the face. I came back to Blacksburg the 26th, celebrated my niece Jenna's 3rd birthday and spent some good time with Dad and Marj. My good friend John Dooley invited me down to his house to smoke a cigar and have a little grappa. The next day we even got to shoot some skeet together. Nothing makes a country boy smile like shooting pieces of clay out of the air.

I will discuss my hiking trip and New Year's in my next post, but I will jump ahead to current events now. After returning to work, my coworkers and I started our next class, chemistry. I am not good at chemistry, but I have certainly learned a lot over the past 2 weeks which is great. I am still running Monday Homework Club in Norfolk. Today had some bright spots. A few of the older kids have made some great strides in reading comprehension and graph reading. One of the younger girls today had to write a sentence about a hero of her's. After a bit of prodding she chose her mom. I asked her why she looked up to her mom and she said, "Because she loves me." I said, "Why does she love you?" And she said, "Because I love her." I soon realized we were in an infinite logic loop. She wrote her sentence. I didn't know how to solve our problem.