news.

yesterday, my "application status" for transferring to princeton theological seminary changed from "your application is being reviewed by the committee" to "you have been accepted!"

i thought the inclusion of the exclamation point was cute.

i've had mostly good experiences at palmer, but i was an outlier in their student body to begin with, and starting in the fall, they are changing their curriculum to make me even less of a fit. since i have two years left to go, i figured applying for a transfer to another school wasn't a bad idea.

so i will be spending the next two years at princeton and receive my master of divinity there.

this was a pretty tough decision, made partly more difficult by having been in this exact same place about 10 years ago. mcgill decided to get rid of their classics department because it didn't have enough students to make it financially viable. unfortunately for me, i was majoring in classics at the time. i remember doing the research about transferring to other schools with the tension building in my shoulders. it was literally painful to think about transferring. in the end i didn't, partly because i had 1 year left at mcgill and would have had 2 at any other school. in retrospect, that might not have been the best decision i made - my last year at mcgill was my worst academically, emotionally, physically...

on the other hand, i did learn something from it. i learned when to run away. so about a month ago, i applied to princeton. i have, naturally, been ridiculously stressed out since then, but now at least some of that stress is relieved. the other difference about this situation is that i would have 2 years left, whatever school i went to. and there were some people who thought i should have gone to princeton from the beginning.

so. princeton. huh.

now we just need to get the house sold, and life will be completely overhauled. eek.

alternative uses for hebrew textbooks.

killing yellowjackets that built a nest outside your window and get in the office.

kicking and screaming.

so this post (and several more) is way overdue. life has kind of sucked for a while.

anyway.

about 2 months ago, my phone started getting stupid. it was kind of a halfway smartphone, a nokia e71x running symbian 60. it had all of about 2 apps, which didn't bother me. it surfed the web fine with a real browser, which was something of a novelty when i got it. the only real main issue i had with it was google refused to make a gmail app for it, and i couldn't sync my calendars live over the air. instead i had to remember to do it manually from my mac via bluetooth.

then, suddenly, it lost the ability to cross-reference incoming text messages with the address book. all text messages were coming in labelled with just the sending phone number. which was fine when it was his and i had memorized it, but i was sending a lot of "my phone has gone stupid, who is this?" text messages back to people because i had no idea who they were or what they were talking about. grr, etc.

so i log into my account and discover, hey, i'm eligible for a new phone upgrade. w00t.

i was thinking maybe a blackberry. he said he thought it would be the best option for me. i am just not a fan of the iphone. not that i'm an anti-apple person, i like my macbookpro and ipod nano just fine. but i don't like the iphone. the touchscreen feels weird under my fingers and i like to keep my email accounts separated, which apple disapproves of.

so i'm wandering around the store, playing with some of the demos, and i see this motorola phone running android. it looks interesting. one of my co-workers loves his droid. and it's all googly, so i know i can get my email on it. and not only my regular email, but school went google too a while back, so i could use it to check both, which i thought might be helpful, since i'm a TA this semester and i am not giving out my phone number. and it's smaller than the blackberry torch.

also, much to my surprise, the sales guy seems to know what he's talking about when it comes to technology, and while he's an iphone fan, he says that people have been having problems with the blackberry torch and complaining about it.

so i buy the motorola atrix. somehow, when it rings up, it's $50 less than he quoted me, but i'm not arguing.

then i go home and set it up and start googling it.

turns out, it's a brand new phone and i got it - again, somehow - before the quoted launch date on the internet. wtf? i'm an early adopter??

i can say, having used it for a bit now, it's pretty cool. it uses different glass than the iphone and doesn't feel so weird under my fingertips. and i'm getting email and calendar updates on the fly, which is pretty cool. it flashes a little green LED at me when i have email or a text message. i like it. and you can remove the battery, unlike the iphone, which was really nice when the fingerprint scanner/unlock button decided working. i started freaking out, all "oh shit, my brand new phone has a hardware issue," but always the first thing to try is a hard reboot. which you can't do on an iphone. pulled the battery out of my atrix, popped it back in, turned the phone on, and hey, it's working again.

i'm not into apps, so i've only downloaded like, 3. got the sony reader app, so all of my purchased ebooks are on the phone, but the screen is tiny and bright, so reading them kind of sucks. the southwest airline app is pretty cool, though. we took a vacation to boston last month and i checked into our flight home while laying in bed in the hotel. got in the 'A' boarding group too (if you've ever flown southwest, you know what that means. if you haven't, just know it's a Good Thing).

also, the browser crashes occasionally, but as android is based on linux, i just have to go into the applications menu and force quit. yay.

so yeah. apparently, i'm an accidental early adopter. huh. i have joined the twenty first century. or something.