My course load for the coming academic year...

...through the following summer...

I spoke with our registrar today about my program ("Alternate Route") and what courses I will need to complete it. She referred to me and the two other "old" guys in my Greek class who are also in this program as "first-year students in your final year." This is meant to be a two-year program, but since I have previous coursework under a different program I entered in 2005, I only need 3 academic quarters. The full program is 92 credit hours + 3 credit hours of field work in a local congregation. The downside to just one year of classes is that the availability of courses narrows, so I'll be taking at least one class next summer before finishing up. In all, I think I've got 49 credit hours ahead of me (with the 3 hours of field work and 6 hours of "independent study" built in). But we initially planned to be hear a year (from September, actually, before we changed plans to move here in time for Summer Greek), so I guess we're on schedule.

My fall courses, beginning the Tuesday after Labor Day, will be: Pentateuch I, Field Education I, Liturgics I, Gospels I, Pastoral Theology I, Bibliography Technology, and New Testament Greek Readings. About 15 hours' worth, if I added correctly. It's a pretty heavy load, actually...

At the end of my last course next summer, I will be off to a vicarage (pastor internship) for a year. Where will be decided at the end of this new academic year in April or May; most seminary students begin a vicarage in June, but I will likely have to work with a congregation about starting in September.

As for the present, I made it past the second midterm exam (and still have an average in the 80s, though it doesn't really matter since it's pass/fail) and next Monday starts Week 8-- only 3 more to go!

Mouse update... An exterminator came and said he thought the mouse may have been the mother of babies they found nearby (outside). But since we're a middle unit and neither neighbor has had any mouse trouble, we may have inadvertently let it in (well, now I'm almost certain I probably did when I left the patio door cracked open one night for the cat). Since I rid us of that one mouse, we've had no other problems.

The professor who led the Communion service at chapel today was an incredible cantor (person who chants the liturgy)! What a beautiful voice-- it really enhanced the service. He gave a great sermon, too (making the point along the way that sometimes God lays trials before us, not as a test, per se, but as a means of attempting to turn the focus from ourselves back to Him, showing us the futility in trying to live a life apart from Him)! I very much enjoyed it all...

Tomorrow's chapel service is a sanctioned annual LCMS commemoration of Johann Sebastian Bach, Kantor. According to the LCMS website:

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) is acknowledged as one of the most famous and gifted of all composers past and present in the entire western world. Orphaned at the age of ten, Bach was mostly self-taught in music. His professional life as conductor, performer, composer, teacher, and organ consultant began at the age of 19 in the town of Arnstadt and ended in Leipzig, where for the last 27 years of his life he was responsible for all the music in the city's four Lutheran churches. In addition to his being a superb keyboard artist, the genius and bulk of Bach's vocal and instrumental compositions remain overwhelming. A devout and devoted Lutheran, he is especially honored in Christendom for his lifelong insistence that his music was written primarily for the liturgical life of the church to glorify God and edify his people.

That's it for now. Back to the books...

(Is it Friday yet?!)