And the dreams take flesh! O__O

Just thought I'd share a couple of the wild academic dreams I [Melanie] decided I would try following through on this summer.
First, I followed through on Dr. Yeh's post on Bubbs a while ago about the free Greek course Gordon-Conwell was offering.  So I'm starting to learn (koine - New Testament) Greek.  I'm not being super-consistent and disciplined about it, but every so often I crack the ol' book.  It is exciting and fun.  It brings me joy.  I am enough of a grammar nerd that learning to decline nouns brings me warm fuzzies - "Oo, I've never had to do that before!"

Secondly, well, I'd already decided, long before that, that when I finished listening to The Chronicles of Narnia on audiobook from my library, I'd get the Pimsleur Japanese audiobooks and start learning Japanese.  So now I'm learning Japanese too.  Spoken only.  Sometime I want to also seriously study the writing system, etc., but right now that sort of language study is reserved for Greek.  Haha.  Learning two languages at once is fun!  ^__^  Not as suicidal as it sounds because Pimsleur is such a very different method from textbook study, so my brain kind of devotes different resources to them.

Third, well, I've been working on writing my novel.  Some of you know I got 50,000 words written during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, in November), but that was not enough for me to finish even the first draft.  I'm at 70,000 some now, about half done, I think. (Yes, I've been working at a much slower pace, but really not nothing, especially since I also worked a little on my other novel, which now stands at about 60,000 words, or about 5% of the way done, haha, that one's going to be much longer.  I know, I didn't want to split my attention either, but sometimes the muse is stubborn and won't let you work on just anything.)  Today I read a book called Writing the Breakout Novel, given to me by my sister Marcy for my birthday.  It contains seriously good novel-writing advice from a professional writers' agent.  So now I have a lot to think about and edit.  Whee!  But it was actually pretty encouraging - it seems I've been doing some of the major stuff really right, and he gives good advice for how to improve other specific things.  Advice is helpful, advice is good.  Now I get to change my perspective.  And improve the beginning.  And edit out some relatively tame scenes.  And... yeah.

Finally, for my Torrey reading pleasure, I decided that I would begin, at my own leisurely pace, reading through the Morgan House curriculum.  So far I've read about five books of The Iliad.  It astonishes me how much more there is in it than I knew as a freshman!  Seriously!  ...If any of you want to join me in this leisurely venture and get some of that discussion itch scratched, it would make my week.

So that's some of what I've been up to in my spare time.  Who knows how many of these adventures I will actually drive myself to follow through on when time becomes a little more scarce... but I'm enjoying them for now.

What have all of you been up to?  What dreams do you want to pursue?  I know Megan's starting to learn the flute... teh awesum... But yeah, now that we're released and can do practically anything we want (haha, yeah right, but in all seriousness, there is some more freedom available to us now... and jobs and the like... but also some more freedom...), what wacky things from your "bucket list" will you start / have you started doing?  Alternately, what crazy adventures do you want to have this week / have you had this past week?

...Hey, anyone in SoCal want to randomly go to the Getty with me?  No, I haven't made any plans yet, but it hit me when I asked that question that I could!  ^__^

-Melanie Joy