Sometimes I wonder why anyone should care to read my blog. From my viewpoint I rarely ever do anything extraordinary or have anything fundamental to say. Life is just a succession of ordinary days and ordinary events. But then I remember M.'s blog which I love to read, and I remind myself that I never leave her blog thinking it was boring, even if she describes the most usual and mundane things in her life. So here's another ordinary post about my ordinary life.

Once again I've dragged my suitcase back to my apartment after three days in Tartu. It was a good trip as it marked the end of the Greek course in the Seminary. The students (well, those who did show up) took the exam and now I can sigh with relief - it all ended well. I was rather worried after the classes finished in December as there seemed to be so much confusion and frustration among them and I started thinking that maybe I had indeed pushed them too hard or demanded too much. But the exam went well, thank heavens. The statistics was what it ought to be - out of fourteen students there were three people who have to give the exam another shot, four people (would it be mean if I mentioned that all these four were women?) aced the exam, the rest were somewhere in the middle. A classical example of Gaussian distribution. If they had all failed, I would have been the one to blame. If they had all got straight A's, well, then things would have been fishy too. But the results calmed me down, I did alright after all. Or maybe a bit better than alright - in the bottom of the last exam paper I graded I found a message that was meant for me - the student had written "Thank you for the excellent course" there. It sounded a nice cadence in the end of the semester. Now I can catch my breath and then start getting ready for the next Greek course, which I will start teaching in the end of April in Riga for Newbold Licence students. Long live Greek!

Other than teaching business, it's been, well, life. There have been good moments and moments I'd rather erase with a magical rubber if I had one. On Friday afternoon I had a longish conversation with a friend and in the end of the conversation we were both in the danger or drowning as I was crying a river for... I don't even know for what or whom. It felt a like a small breakdown. Out of the blue. Oh schucks. But then again, there were wonderfully good moments as well. On Friday evening I was invited to some friends place who had just recently moved to a new apartment and who wanted me to share the Word with them and other friends on the occasion. I had never done anything like this before and I was still recovering from my 'cry me a river' afternoon but it all seemed to go well and my friends appreciated my little dedication sermonette.

(Which made me think about how much we actually know about our pastors and what is going on in their lives. How many pastors have cried their eyes out and have then had to pick themselves up and go help someone else or share the Word with their congregation? Would we even want to know how often it happens? I don't know. Maybe not.)

Or the other moment - my cousin's little boys got table tennis bats for Christmas. They don't have the table though so in the evenings we had to use all of the floors and walls in order to play. They're all crazy about table tennis now and I had a blast playing with them. Again I left their place this morning with their hugs to warm my heart and with a kind invitation to go to their summer house again. My cousin cooked up a plan of a weekend with a lot of skiing and icehole dipping in it. I checked my schedule - my first free weekend is in the end of February and if we actually manage to make this idea happen, it would be a historical weekend. I have not touched skies since the last skiing lesson in high school - I absolutely dreaded and hated these lessons. They were one of my worst childhood (or high school) traumas, these PE classes. But if my cousin manages to make me ski again (he suggested downhill, not cross country which might make a big difference as I've never tried downhill skiing), he deserves a gold medal.

And here's the most common ending - an overview of books and music. I'm finishing Nevil Shute's novel A Town Like Alice tonight and I'm absolutely loving it. It's a very unusual love story, brilliantly written, an easy read in the middle of more serious stuff. And music wise - classical music! They have excellent play lists in those buses which I use to commute between Tallinn and Tartu, and it has long since become a habit for me to read a book and listen to classical music which makes these 2,5 hours go by as if it was just a blink of an eye. Today I enjoyed these two pieces the best: Puccini's Nessun Dorma by Jose Carreras and Gregorio Allegri's Miserere by the Claire College Choir, Cambridge.