pilgrimage to Canterbury

Sweet! I just got an email saying my paper proposal for a conference commemorating the 900th anniversary of the death of Anselm, Saint Anselm of Canterbury and His Legacy, has been accepted. So I get to go to Canterbury next April.

the social calendar is filling up!

Thursday a friend of a friend of Joel's will be arriving in Amsterdam for a theatre conference and crashing at our place for a few days; tedeisenstein gets into Amsterdam from Paris on Monday, though he's staying at a hotel rather than with us, which is good 'cause leleth_faery and whynothing are dropping in en route from Italy back to the US and will be here Wednesday and Thursday, leaving early Friday morning. (And Friday afternoon I'm catching a train to Paris where I'll meet up with Joel for the weekend, yay; he's going on Tuesday for a conference.)

But most exciting, I just got an email from my sister, she and Matt and my niece and nephew have purchased their tickets and are coming in March! Even before we'd moved they'd been planning to come visit us sometime, but first Owen was young and then Leah was born, and that made travel hard. But Leah turns two at the end of March, and kids under the age of two fly for substantially less (not quite free, but close enough, comparatively), so they figured then is probably as good a time as any! It's also good timing from our perspective as I'll have hopefully handed in my dissertation two weeks earlier and so won't have that hanging over me taking up time and stressing me out. I'm so thrilled that they're coming; though we know we'll be in Amsterdam for another three years or so, who knows where we'll be after that, and it would've been such a waste and a disappointment if we'd lived in Europe for 6 years and they never had a chance to come visit us. Now I get to think of exciting things to do with a four-year-old and a two-year-old; I doubt we'll be going to many art museums, but the Oosterpark, the zoo, the Nemo (national science musuem which is DEFINITELY aimed at kids), and the Dutch Eastindiaman in the harbor are all good candidates. And I'm hoping that we'll also be able to take a trip to the Hague to see the scale model of the Netherlands that's there. Joel and I haven't been to see it yet though we really want to, because we figured this would be something that two architects like Andrea and Matt would really enjoy!