Real peace at Christmas

In celebration of being back in Oklahoma for Christmas, I would like to share with you (whoever it is that actually reads this) some of the best things about being home:

Football games. Lots of em.
Going to the grocery store and knowing what everything is and what it's for.
Having snow on the ground one day, and going out comfortably without a coat the next.
Friends who I love very very much.
And of course, my family- who genuinely get along.
Anyway I'm happy to be home, and I wish all of you my friends a nice time as well- wherever in the world you are.

I know that many of you are mourning the departure of Dr. Herndon from his Edmond practice, but there's good news. My very own sister Dr. Mindy Cail will be taking his place starting in January. So as she always says- an apple a day keeps the doctor away... but if the doctor's cute, forget the fruit!

Foreign schools are a trip

What do you do when school is out and you have money in the bank? Why, you go to Paris of course! I had a really nice time visiting my cousin and seeing the sights, and will post some pictures from that sometime soon.

It's recently been brought to my attention that I've written very little about my program at school. That's partly because talking about anyone but yourself in a public forum can get pretty sketchy, and also that it's a very slow process and not terribly exciting. However, as the semester has now drawn to a close, I'll give you a quick overview.
I participated in two course modules including our research methods foundation class, and qualitative research methods. In the first, we had a different professor almost every week (and let me tell you, there were some interesting characters!) who would give us a snippet of their expertise and advise about constructing our own project. The second was given by one prof and totally devoted to qualitative (that is, just about every that's not quantitative) research methods. Since our entire program is focused on the completion of a well run project, there are no tests. Yep, no tests.
Hmm, I'm not too proud to make a shameless plug here.... My project is over the culture shock and adjustment process in American expatriates- and more specifically, in missionaries. I require quite a large sample set for the results to have a valuable application, and hopefully with sufficient data collection this could be quite a useful study. So please, if you know of american missionaries still in the field or who I could contact to find such people, leave a comment or shoot me an email.