Big Books with Small Print

Mel is busy tonight working on his homework. I have not mentioned it - but my husband is now a PhD candidate. He started working toward his PhD in Intellectual Theology last week. :-) He says that's "a real fancy name" but it's not what it will be when he's finished.

Getting to this point has been interesting. We found out about this program through Whitefield Seminary while we were in Durango, Colorado. The husband and father of one of the families we stayed with last year is pursuing his degree this way (I think he's going for his Masters right now, though). Mel looked into it later and found that Whitefield offers what he was looking for in a PhD, at a price that we can actually afford. So, he applied, was accepted and then he ordered the books he'd need for the first course.

Uh oh. We forgot one critical step in all of that - permission from the mission for which we work to spend time working on an advanced degree. So, after we got back on the field, Mel sent the request up the chain of command to the final people who make that decision. Due to the nature of our work here right now the answer came back 'yes'. whew!

When all of the books finally arrived in Colorado, my parents and Kara boxed them up and shipped them to us via USPS to our post office box here. We asked them to wait for all of the books to arrive so only one box would be needed - the books are all 'used', you see, and were coming from different places. If they'd all been new and available directly from amazon.com, they would have been shipped directly to us here.

Well, they were sent on March 12 and in Colorado they were told it would take about 2 weeks for them to arrive. Two weeks came and went - no books. Three weeks came and went - no books. Four weeks came and went - and no books. Kara sent us the postal tracking info, I looked it up on the internet and they said someone had tried to deliver the box to us on March 26. It was now two weeks past that date and we know what the post office here thinks about a box sitting around in their storage area. They hate that with a passion and have yelled at us before if the box has been there a whole 3 days! Well, yell might be a bit strong - how about "given us a severe lecture over it with angry words"? Good grief. But it's true. WHY didn't you pick this up IMMEDIATELY???? HMMMMM???? It's been sitting here taking up valuable space, and etc. and so forth and so on. blah blah blah

With the knowledge that they had "attempted to deliver the box but no one was home" to our post office box (??? yeah, right) over two weeks earlier, we were quite concerned that the box was now at the market somewhere and the books being sold to 'English as a second language' students, or for doorstops. Or, maybe the whole box had been sent back to America. Mel went down and asked. The lady was quite nice to him (!!), went back and looked and said she couldn't help him - come back with the tracking number. So, he went back the next day with the tracking number - and they found the box somewhere in the dark recesses of the back of the main post office downtown within just a couple minutes. He was told there was "something wrong with the address". Since the address was correct, I have no idea what they were talking about, unless it's the American 7's instead of the European 7's in our address (European 7's have a horizontal bar through the middle of the 'leg' it stands on).

He was soon on his way home.

We opened the box, I pulled out 3 bags of popcorn (yea!!!!!) and some WORLD and COUNTRY magazines and some undies I had ordered several weeks before we left the State but hadn't arrived until a couple days after we left.

And Mel pulled out his books. Big books. Books with many pages. Books with no pictures, only words. Books with many pages and very small print. Books with many pages and small print and many chapters. Whew!

So now Mel is working on reading the books and writing chapter reviews for each chapter, all of it done to certain specs, and I don't know what else he'll need to do for each course - but oh, my! It looks like a lot of reading and a lot of writing and a lot of work to me. But he enjoys it. Every evening and sometimes during the day - he reads and writes and thinks and sometimes shares things with me.

And I am so glad he's doing this!!! So very, very glad. I am pleased.

Happy sigh.