Happy things

Ok, here are the happy, upbeat things I promised in my last post:

1. The department is really really good. I have complete confidence in the professors and everyone I have met has been really nice. The PH.D. students are all brilliant and amazingly friendly at the same time. I was afraid that the department would be more competitive, but there is really good community here. I've actually been hanging out mostly with PH.D. students and am even part of the Old English reading group that they have going. I attended the first meeting and was a bit worried to find out that most of the people there were just translating the text off the top of their heads. It was way above my level, but they were happy to have me there and were extremely gracious when I made stupid mistakes. I'm going to continue attending, but will have everything more carefully translated beforehand.

2. At church yesterday, one of the sub-deacons (Sbdn. Edmund! My patron is interceding for me!) pulled me aside and offered me a room in a house owned by the church. The rent would be the same as I am currently paying, but I would be living with people my own age from the church in a much nicer house (I should note that the rent I am currently paying is very low for Toronto). The other people currently living there are at the church learning how to run Orthodox missions. I think there would be four of us total living in the house. They are envisioning the house as being very community oriented, and I am not entirely sure what that means. I'll be meeting with the subdeacon sometime this week to clarify and iron things out, but I'm pretty positive that this will work out nicely. I'll be expected to help out a bit at the church's mission, but I was planning on doing that anyways, so its sort of a win-win. I'll have more info later this week, hopefully. However, I still will be living at the nasty house for the next month no matter what.

3. Toronto is very pretty and it is not hot. We've been having temps in the low 70s, which is still warmer than I like, but 60s weather will be coming in the next month or so. Also, the public transit makes it very easy to get around town.

4. The horrible "17 Again" advertisements that were everywhere on the subways are gone. They had three pictures of Zac Efron with the text "Which one is the cutest?" and in the middle picture he was making the most horribly smug, soul sucking face you can imagine. His eyes followed you no matter where you were in the subway car. Every day I would enter the subway, look up, and find Zac Efron stairing into my innermost being. Guhhhhh. I searched online, but wasn't able to find any images of the posters. It is probably a good thing that they do not exist on the internet.