Oops

So much for that "blogging several times a week thing," eh? Oh well. C'est la vie. And la vie has been quite busy for the past month. Where to begin? At some random point I guess. So I'll just categorize things as I go along:

Work: This is the main reason I've been out of the blogsphere for a while. No one warned me that while Lent is supposed to be a reflective, slower time for folks, it's insanity for those working in the church. There were several weeks when I saw R but a couple of times, and then it was to eat a late dinner and then call it a night. It was hectic, to say the least. But good-our "family" Lenten discipline was to stop going out to eat, aside from Sundays (which are feast days anyway so Lent doesn't really hold those days) when we eat lunch near church as otherwise we wouldn't eat until 3 PM, and I'm usually starving by the time we leave church. R looked as the finances and said we actually saved a bundle o' money through this discipline. Our plan is to keep it up, to a certain extent-we plan on going out for a date night once a month, but other than that chilling at home. This has been helped by the fact that we're now making our own pizza. We use the store-brand fresh or frozen wheat dough and go from there. It's actually way better than take out, and we've enjoyed the experience. I think we've also been more intentional about what we're cooking and planning our meals for the entire week. It's been great, all around. And now that it's about time for the grill to be in use almost every night, meal planning should be even easier!

Yesterday was Easter, the culmination of Holy Week which was busy on the one hand and not on the other. At 7:30 yesterday morning, after having slept in my office on Saturday night, the rector told me that I should perform the two baptisms, as I'd been working with the family and he didn't really know them. He then said I should just go ahead and celebrate too. This was at the 10:30 AM Easter service-the most highly attended service of the year, I'd venture to guess (more than at Christmas, but we have 3 services that night so folks are spread out). So I did my first baptisms yesterday! A 4 year old and his little sister, who was 11 days old (and ADORABLE). It was great : ) and definitely made my Easter!

Non-work wise things have been fine. I made my PhD decision and am super excited about it. I think it's the right place for me to be, and the visit I made was absolutely fantastic. I'll make a more official announcement once things are more official (the paperwork is getting started on their end this week) but hurray for that decision being made! I feel that I can move on and start getting excited about it. And start reviewing my Greek and French and making some headway in Latin this summer. Woot! I also want to get a paper I wrote last fall (2008) worked up for publication/conference paper presentation. Hopefully I'll be able to make that work.

As I said above, I haven't seen R too much in the past month. My Team in Training stuff is rolling along-I'm hoping donations will pick up a little soon (I'm sending out a reminder letter this week) as I have to reach my goal by May 4 or else I have to cough up the money on my own, which could pose a problem as I don't have that kind of money. Yikes. It freaks me out to think about, but my brother is going to have a concert in Iowa (at least, he's supposed to!) that will hopefully bring in some donations, and some folks at work are interested as well.

I've been doing some hiking on my own, as all of the team hikes in March were on days when I had work stuff I had to do. I hiked Mt. Wachusett two weeks ago, and today did a little on the Holyoke Range. My legs are going to feel today's hike tomorrow! I would normally have been able to go a little farther than I did today, but I was sick for a few days at the end of the week before last, and it took me a little while to recover fully from the allergy/cold/sinus thing. I'm just glad it's over, and hopefully that will be it for sinus crap this year!

Ummmm...yeah. That's all I've got on this end for the moment. The weather has been AWESOME lately-Easter was glorious! Mid-70s and sunny, which is a rarity for New England. Often it's gray and cold, but not this year! I think it might get into the 80s this week, which is bizarre but there you go. El Nino.

That's it for the moment. Hopefully I'll be more on top of this thing...