Miscellany

I found out today that I passed the second preliminary exam, so I'm no officially 1/3 done with the requirements for the PhD. Not sure what else to say about it. I can already tell I'll be working twice as hard this year as last year. Maybe one day I'll really make it.

Sharayah and I each started a new Bible reading program on YouVersion. They've got dozens of different plans to read through the Bible in a year, such as in chronological order, arranged by topic, straight through in the normal order, or various other plans. You can just sign up for the site, pick a plan, and then each day go to their website and it has a checklist of passages to read for the day. We each picked a plan, and we're on day 10 or so. They actually have plans of varying lengths of time, but most of them are 1 year. I'll let you know next August if we made it through.

I've been reading a lot lately. This summer I made my way through the Ender's Game series, including the Shadow series and most of the short stories. I have a few more short stories left, but they're on the way to the library, and then I'll be caught up. I read the first book in college, thought it was awesome, and never gave it another thought. Then, for some reason, I started through the series this summer, and it's really all great. Many of the books have a very different feel from Ender's Game, but they're all compelling stories. I'd definitely recommend them. If you can manage it, try to read everything in the published order (rather than chronological). If you get confused, just ask me what to read next. I'm pretty excited because the next book in the series is coming out in November, and it's supposed to tie together a lot of the loose ends from all the different story arcs that didn't seem necessarily connected. Apparently I have good timing, because he had left the series alone for a while, and only came back to it this year.

Sharayah is almost done with her transcription training. Then she'll be (in her words) a "meat earner," though I think maybe she meant "bread winner." She's pretty much awesome. Apparently the rest of her plan is to start popping out babies, but she may have to wait a little longer for that.

Today, for the first time ever, I left my car's lights on all day and my battery died. It was sad. Also, difficult to solve, because my car was surrounded in its parking space so that no one would be able to get close enough to jump it. Luckily, just as I figured out how to unlock the gear shift without the car being on so that I could push the car out and back into another spot, allowing someone to get close enough to jump my car, the guy who owned the car next to mine showed up, so it was all unnecessary and I got my car going without any problems. Thus, all I lost was about 30 minutes and some pride (and who needs pride, anyway?).

the best I have