Michigan Welcomes the Spring

I thought I ought to post something since I haven't for a little while. I was going to display a nice picture of the lovely spring weather we've been having here, but for some reason (whether it's my computer or my internet connection or some insidious combination of the two) my pictures aren't uploading, so you'll just have to imagine it for yourself.

And by "lovely spring weather" I actually mean six inches of snow, undoing the past week's snow melt in a matter of hours. This happened Friday, which you may know was the second official day of spring.

Still, despite the snow, I braved the weather on Friday to go see the opera on campus. One of our ward members was in the opera, and so we had a pretty good group of HIll Streeters in attendance. I'm willing to guess that my own opera experience was a bit different from Kelsey's back in October. The opera was Postcard from Morocco, an opera that was written in 1972 (and when one of the people I went with read that afterwards, they said something along the lines of, "Oh, that explains a lot!"). There is no discernible plot - a group of people are gathered in a train station and sing about what they are carrying in their luggage. When I left the opera I honestly did not know what to think, and I was not the only one. I think I liked it. But I'm not quite sure. I think that if I had been able to understand the words (they were in English, but still hard to hear, especially on the balcony) I might have liked it better, but it was very interesting, and I mean that in a mostly good way. I think. It seems like the kind of performance that gives you a lot to think about, but may be a bit hard to fully enjoy in the moment.

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The biggest news of the week is that I passed my prelim examinations. I turned in the written part almost two weeks ago, and then on Tuesday I had the oral part. This was where the three professors who had read my exams met with me in a little room and grilled me about my responses, and this is the part that made me most nervous because I had no idea what they would ask me. I had tried to anticipate possible directions the questioning might take, so I was pretty well-prepared for most of what they threw at me, but I still got a couple questions I didn't know exactly how to answer. I fumbled my way through the whole thing, and apparently I did all right because they conferred for just a few minutes afterwards before my advisor invited me back in and told me I had passed.

One piece of advice a friend of mine gave right beforehand: "To us it's a really big deal, but to them it's just something they have to do and really they're probably just anxious to get it over with and get back to their work." I actually think that helped me.

And these did feel like a big deal to me, particularly because there have been many, many moments that I thought I wouldn't even get this far. So in spite of the fact that I usually don't like to call much attention to myself, I found myself talking up my prelims to friends and family, and then I felt a little embarrassed about all the attention that I probably called down upon myself. Still, I feel really good about having made it to this point, and it was a nice excuse to call my family midweek, and a nice excuse to go out to dinner with friends a little later in the week, and I even came home on Wednesday to a fruit basket and flowers from my parents, so that was a nice surprise.

Anyway, this doesn't really mean I can slow down. It just means on to the next step, but this is really my first major milestone in the PhD program, and it feels good to get here.

Ah hah, now my computer's being cooperative! Here we go, spring in Michigan: