Exhaustion is Setting in

I am so tired. After nearly three weeks of school and my new job, my brain is fried. And tomorrow is my first Latin test. Nice. I'm sure I'll be able to recover over the weekend and will get used to the stringent schedule, but so far I have yet to adapt after my less than structured summer break. It must be all the extra walking (which gets tiring when you're lugging books around!), the reading, the studying, the learning... and it probably doesn't help that our tomato harvest just hit big this week (we canned like crazy last night), we had our first Bible study meeting of the fall last night, and Amber's been sick and weary from being pregnant.

All of this, of course, easily explains how we managed to overdraft money from our checking account, not once but a couple times this week. It's not that we're living from pay check to pay check. Its just that we didn't think about the fact that I wouldn't get paid for several weeks until after I started working, never got around to taking a deposit slip with two checks in it (which had been sitting on our kitchen table for a few days) to the bank, and didn't have it on our radar to get online and check the status of our account. Craziness... At leaast the damage isn't that bad.

In my current state, I guess it's no wonder that it didn't hit me that it was September 11th until later on in the day. While I was learning Latin this morning, the survivors and victims of the fatal crashes that changed the course of our country's history (well, at least its foreign policy) gathered in Pennsylvania, New York, and D.C. to remember. When I was a kid, I always thought it was weird how my parents would talk distinctly as to where they were when they found out JFK had been shot and could recall vivid details. But now that I look back on the day the Twin Towers fell, I don't find it odd at all. It was my junior year in college, and I was with all the other Resident Assistants on our way to some camp way out in the woods where we were going to do a bunch of team-building exercises. We had arrived at the camp and only minutes later did we hear the news about the first tower on the van radio. We were stunned, but since we had no TV or extensive idea of the damage, we hardly thought much of it. We stopped for a moment and prayed and then went on with our exercises. Throughout the day, one of the deans kept calling his wife to get updates on the situation to tell the rest of us. As more news came in, we went from being stunned to being utterly speechless. We prayed some more. Later, we were told a side of the Pentagon had been hit as well, and for some reason a spark of immaturity had to swell up in me at that particular time and I tried to lighten the mood by joking that the Pentagon would now have to be called the Square. (I think that was one of the stupidest moments of my life). We all just sat around during lunch without much to say. A couple hours later, we rushed back to campus and clamored into our Resident Director's apartments (only they had TVs!) and glued ourselves to the news reports for hours upon hours. Unbelieveable.

But unbelievable largely because I don't live in a country like Israel where things like that happen on a regular basis. Unbelievable that three thousand innocent Americans could die because I don't live in a country like Iraq where almost a million of died since 2003.