News from Illinois

Tom is still busy with research and will soon be publishing his first paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Everyone look out for that one because I know you read that journal all the time!! Get your subscriptions now. Or, I can just send everyone a pdf in a month or so and you can open it and look at the pretty pictures. That's about all I understand of it, too, so don't worry. OK, that's not true, but pretty much all my work for the last 8 months has gone into experiments to allow us to make one picture for this paper. Crazy.

Becca is participating in a 3 year program for High School Chemistry teachers here at the University. It is focused on using technology in the chemistry classroom in rural high schools. Right now she is in a 2 week intensive program, and is enjoying learning new programs to use in her lesson plans. She also enjoys meeting all the other teachers (60 of them!) and getting ideas and networking. She gets graduate credit and a $2,000 stipend, so Europe, here we come!!!

We are going to Vienna and Prague over New Years, and we are so excited!!! Becca brought all her German books back so we can learn situational German. And Czech. But we won't be learning Czech from the German books, just in case you were wondering (she also has some Czech books, not to be confused with checkbooks).

We also have new callings in addition to being ward missionaries. Tom is now one of 2 gospel doctrine teachers, which is good because he has been wanting to study the epistles for quite some time. Becca is jealous, but it's OK because she will teach when Tom can't.

Becca is now the 2nd counselor in the YW presidency which means she works with the Beehives which is quite exciting, even if there are only 3 of them. But she is excited to work with the youth because teenagers are funny! And not as scary as primary children, who just cry all the time. But she did her time in primary, don't you worry!

That's all our news!!! Life is busy but really great! We'd love to hear from anyone reading this blog. So write us a stinkin' email!!