bestest news ever!!!

Joel just got a phone call from his advisor, and he's just been offered a GLoRiClass fellowship! This solves an incredibly large amount of things that had been looming ahead of us in the future, and does so in a most fabulous way.

We're off to the windmill now to have a celebratory beer.

<edit> Heh, sorry for the cryptic message, folks - I didn't have the close " in the HTML link.

bouncy, bouncy

This just makes me so happy. I've always had more faith in Joel's abilities and what he does than he (outwardly at least) appears to, and so this is really nice because it a) vindicates my believes (which I swear are only moderately biased by me being his wife) and b) hopefully strengthens his. I'm very, very proud of him. We went out to the brewery by the windmill to celebrate, but we hadn't realized that it was already after 9pm, and they close early. So we headed over to the Groene Elephant, a few blocks away, and each had a beer, and some oude kaas with mustard. (The mustard is good, but it's better with celery seed than mustard). We just came back now because even though it doesn't get wholly dark until around 11pm here, around 10:30 it starts getting pretty chilly out! It was so nice to have something to celebrate, though.

We had a lot of fun earlier today, too. Our landlady's son in law, Nir, is an art student (the entire family is artistic; we have a number of pieces done by our landlady, our landlady's first husband, and one by a family friend throughout the apartment, and her daughter, Chaja, who is married to Nir, just finished art school last year) and he is graduating this weekend, and as part of graduation at their art academy, there's a couple-day long exhibit of all the students final projects. We were invited to come to the opening, so we left the office early today and took the metro to the Academy (and though we did make a minor detour walking from the station to the academy, it wasn't enough to make us late, which was nice). Nir's final project as amazing. He did it jointly with Chaja, and the end result was Norbert, his twin brother. They took a full body cast of Nir, and make a complete replica. When you enter the room, you see it standing there with it's hand resting on a pile of books, and the other hand raised (like swearing in at a court), and from the back, it is so life like that I thought the exhibit was one of those living ones, i.e., that it was a real person just standing there. It's only when you get to the front and see the closed eyes and the lips that you realize it isn't real. The detail of the skin, the color and the wrinkles and the pores and the blood vessels, is *amazing*. I wish I'd had my camera to get a close up. (Marijke, our landlady, did take our picture with Norbert, and will send us copies when she downloads them.) After that we went to another building to watch a short film he'd made about an experience of his brother's in Jerusalem. Prior to that were a number of other short art films by other students, most of which were all very interesting.

After that, we wandered around the rest of that building, seeing all ranges of art. It's exactly the type of art that we both enjoy wandering through too - stuff which is provocative, but which doesn't beat you over the head trying to give you a message. We spent nearly three hours there before coming home because we were hungry. The show goes on for another few days, and we're thinking of digging out the bikes on Saturday and biking over to see everything in the other building and all the outdoor displays. Entrance is free, since it's basically just one long graduation ceremony, and it'd be a lot of fun to just browse and wander.

We'd never have heard about this if it wasn't for our landlady telling us about this, and I'm really glad that she did. The neat thing is, this happens every year, so we can go again next year, too.