First school post

Hey everybody! Sorry I haven't written in a while, it gets difficult when you don't think you have anything important to write about and then important things slip by and it gets easier to forget. Due to the content of material I have to cover I hopefully will be doing some summarizing.

School is back, unfortunately, and this year I am a junior. There are a few differences that have happened so far that I wish to reiterate. The first one is that a leak was discovered in the Downey pool, so while it's getting fixed the Downey Water Polo team has to swim in the Davis pool. To make a long story short our practices have been from 6:30-8:30 p.m. which is usually the time I spend doing Tae Kwon Do. Not anymore, and so far that has made Water Polo more unenjoyable. On the bright side though, we've done pretty well in all of our scrimages. We lost to Sonora last Thursday, 13-9 (I scored a goal, yea!!!) We played three games in a scrimage tournament at Johansen the day Ryan and Becca had their little party at our place, (you know, the party with, tacos, the ice cream dessert, that one.) and we beat Beyer and whomped on the new high school that played against us. Well, that is, if an official score had been kept. So far I've scored a grand total of 7 goals in all of our scrimages right now. One more thing: Our practices have been getting harder, this has reaffirmed my belief that Vesey is a Grade A nutcase.

Other new differences this year is that we have a new chior director: Mary Ann Vlach. (pronounced like "flash" only with a v instead of an f.) Ms. Vlach is a lot like Mrs. Costa (our last director) in her methods of teaching, they both went to the same college and were taught by the same guy. The only real difference is that Mrs. Vlach is way more soft spoken and way less strict than Mrs. Costa. Another thing about choir is that, as a veteran, I'm idealistically supposed to "step up" and be a leader to all of the choir noobs, (new people) and to be honest I don't think of myself as a leader or having a leader like personality, so why bother? For those who are interested our first concert is Thursday October 4th.

The last two points are these: a) The upcoming seminary year b) some "food for thought" in case you're in the mood for a discussion. As far as the upcoming seminary year, I am studying the Old Testament, and my teacher is a fairly knowledgeable guy by the name of Brother Brown. This week was my first week of seminary and I gotta tell you getting up at 5:30 a.m. is no cake walk, but I seem to be getting through okay.
The "food for thought" comes from something that I can/could do for extra credit in my new History Class. The extra credit is this: Listen to some guy's lecture down in Central Valley and then write an essay for which there is a grand prize of about $5,000. The topic of the essay is: To what extent should religion influence politics? As for me, I like the idea of the separation of Church and State, but I also know that religion influences the work ethics and behaviors that drive our people and essentially our politicians. Plus more and more of the issues of our day are all purely ethical ones.
Anyway, please ponder it if you have a moment. I love you all, and hope to see you all again soon!
Love,
Grant