A Pretty Awesome April!

Another month of Scottish living is in the books, so it's time to bring you up to date. April was pretty eventful, full of many good things: deadlines reached, birthdays celebrated, and trips taken. (You'll have to forgive me if the tone that comes across in this blog is a little more sedate than those in the past. I got up at 3 am this morning to watch the Canucks, which has resulted in me feeling pretty tired -- and even more heartbroken. That was a rough one. Anyway, I shall soldier on!)

• As March transitioned into April, I was still feverishly working to complete all the required components of my GRO. By the end of the first week, I had a pretty decent draft of the chapter complete and only the outline to tidy up. Finally, on April 11, it was finished! All 70+ pages printed out, bound, and submitted. (Though it wasn't due until the 15th, the 11th was my goal deadline, so as to be finished before Liana's birthday.) That felt really good. Now I wait to hear whether it's been passed and I'm "officially" a PhD candidate.

• One of the benefits of completing the GRO is that I now have a provisional annotated outline for the whole thesis. It's great to have the project laid out before me: not only does it let me know what I've got left to do, it's reassuring to know that what I'm hoping to accomplish can actually be done in 80,000 words (or so I hope)! However, one of the drawbacks is that it had made me rather brutally aware of just how much work there is to do. When I think about how long it's taken me just to get the fraction of it complete which went towards my GRO... well, let's just say it's a long road ahead.
• Last bullet point about my work: I've had some positive responses (i.e. papers accepted) from a few conferences I've applied to, so I now have a few items to put on my summer calendar:
• July 7-11: The International Society of Biblical Literature Conference will be here, in St Andrews. I'll be presenting a paper in the "Sacred Texts in their Socio-Political Contexts" group.
• July 30-Aug 2: I will be presenting a paper at the European Association of Biblical Studies Conference in Leipzig, Germany, in the "Israel in the Ancient Near East" group.
• Aug 29-31: The British New Testament Society meeting will be here, in St Andrews, and I will be presenting a paper in the group "Second Temple Judaism and the NT". 
• This is all really exciting, and I'm looking forward (with a little fear and trepidation, I don't mind admitting) to presenting my work in front of colleagues and senior scholars. I'm sure they all will be very beneficial experiences.
• Also on the summer calendar? We're visiting home in August!!! Exact dates to be determined. Really really excited about this!
• On April 12 we celebrated Liana's 30th birthday! We are now both in our 30s, which feels a bit strange. We're like, grown up and stuff. Anyway, Liana and I had a wonderful day together, which included 30 beautiful tulips from Laura and Gerry, my famous scrambled eggs for breakfast, walking and shopping in St Andrews, and Skype-delivered birthday wishes from family at home. It was topped off by a fantastic birthday dinner at the nearby Peat Inn, a Michelin-starred restaurant about a 15-minute drive outside of town. And there was even a surprise gift waiting in the kitchen when we returned home that night! The next evening we had a bunch of friends over to celebrate. In true Liana fashion she made not one but two birthday desserts: a coconut cake with lime curd, and a peanut butter and chocolate pie. Yeah. Seriously. It was a great time with our new community here in St Andrews, celebrating the life of a wonderful woman, my favourite person in the whole world!

• Liana began her permanent position in the office at the Balgove early in April. So far it has been a lot of random jobs as the business is preparing to open the expanded store and cafe, and there is much to be prepared and organized. She's enjoyed the work to this point and is looking forward to becoming even more involved, especially with events and marketing. The staff at Balgove are a great team and wonderful to work with, and Liana feels very blessed to be a part of it!
• One other item of note in April is the fact that we ate pig's tails. Yep, you read that right. Our friend Chris is a fan of adventurous cooking, and convinced us that if you were to combine chicken wings and bacon, the result would be a pig's tail. So he convinced the butcher in town to start collecting them for him, and, having amassed enough, cooked them up. Read about it here. My opinion? Lots of cartilage and fat to work your way through, but the meat you managed to find was pretty good! I mean, it's pork... how could it not be delicious?

A heart of pork. What could be more romantic?

• Finally, April wrapped up with us taking a trip to Spain! This has been something we've been looking forward to for a long, long time: our first trip to continental Europe since our arrival in Scotland! (Hopefully the first of several, if we can make it work). We spent 4 days in Barcelona and 2 each in Madrid and Sevilla. It was wonderful, but there is far too much to tell in a single blog post. We saw a lot of incredible things, ate a lot of delicious food, and had some very memorable experiences. We even met up with Cheryl Enns, a friend from back home! We'll hopefully be posting some photos soon. It was a great week away, a much-needed break after what had been a very busy and tiring several months. Now to try and force myself back into a rhythm of productivity...

Liana in Park Guell, Barcelona

Us in Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

Us in the orange tree garden in Sevilla's cathedral, with La Giralda tower in the background.

• Golf season is pretty much here! I've managed to play one round. Unacceptable! My goal is a round a week until September.
• GO CANUCKS GO!!! I hope to have to set my alarm for 3 am many more times over the next several weeks!!!

I think that's pretty much it for April. May won't have the series of exciting events that April did, but I think a bit of quiet, a bit of return to normal, will be nice for a change. What I'm most looking forward to this month is the arrival of my parents on the 31st. I can't wait!!! Hurry up and get here already mom and dad!