Is it weird that I'm feeling a little homesick for Israel today? I've been back in the good ol' U.S.A. for just over ten weeks now, and have missed it more on some days than others. But today I was sitting in my geography class, talking about the Middle East. As it turns out, my professor is also a religion scholar and taught at the Jerusalem Center for the three semesters before my profs got there! And so, naturally, that experience leaked into his lecture. One by one came the Balfour Declaration, Theodore Herzl, the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan... On the projector screen he showed slide after slide after slide of the Old City, the gates, the Temple Mount, the Mount of Olives, the Sea of Galilee, the Golan Heights, Dan, Banias, Petra, Giza... I had my own pictures of every one of those places, and my own memories associated with them. So I sat there, sentimental sap that I am, .... while most people around me were either dozing or playing solitaire. What?--how can you possibly not just be entranced by all this? Sigh... they just don't understand :)
So I had to include a couple more pictures. Just for nostalgia's sake. 
Oh, and here's a picture of our surprise temporary pet hamster-- a couple of weeks ago I came home one night to find a cardboard
In other mildly interesting happenings since my return to Provo...
A few weeks back we cougars got lucky enough here to host Condoleezza Rice when she spoke in the Marriott Center for one of our Tuesday morning forums! I loved her address. I took a billion nerdy notes but it would kind of be overkill to recount the whole thing :) Here's a camera phone shot, though (which I took after her address, when the center was mostly cleared out--no recording allowed during the forum!)
I'm doing a really, really lame job of summing up the semester thus far. But until I'm less sleepy and remember something interesting, I think this picture, combined with lots of homework, gives a pretty good idea.
I think I handle Jerusalem weather a little bit better :)
