Thursday, May 28, 2009

It's official! Dan's finished his Masters Degree!!!

We are so excited to announce that Dan is officially done with school for his masters. He received a written critique on his Thesis from two professors and they both thought it was wonderful. One even wrote that it was the best masters thesis he had read for several years. The other offered him an opportunity to work on a new religious atlas for the Czech Republic. They both highly recommended that all or part of it be published. Dan is amazing! Graduation isn't until the end of July, so we have from here to then to figure out what we're going to do afterwards.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Athens



Hopefully we didn't celebrate Dan's graduation too early (his thesis defense and final exam are on Wednesday), but we wanted to travel somewhere before plane tickets got more expensive for the summer . . . so we looked into flights to London and Barcelona - but ended up going to Athens. Some friends watched Vinson so Dan, Benjamin and I flew out for a three day trip. We had a blast! We got to see a lot of the old sights: the acropolis, the agora and the National Archeological Museum. We also were able to go to the beach. Unfortunately Benjamin thought I would disappear if I went in the water so I didn't get to swim much. Benji loves salty rocks :) Completely natural, right? We also got to eat Greek gyros which are amazing! We had one everyday!
When we got home, Dan and Vince got to wear matching Greek shirts and it was fun to be a complete family again. It's amazing how much we missed Vince after three days. Benji might have missed Vinson most of all.

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Český rozhlas

A couple of weeks back, we got a phone call from a friend, who is the media representative for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A Czech public radio station, Český rozhlas 6 (something like BBC in the UK), was looking for some Mormons they could interview for a weekly program that they do about different churches in Czech society. To make a long story short, a radio guy came and interviewed me (Dan). This interview was condensed into a half-hour long program and broadcast last Saturday.
Tonight (16.5), the same program will focus on Mormons again. The program's host also interviewed a Czech friend of ours, Jarda Haječek, and I expect tonight's program will focus on that interview. I was happy with the outcome of the interview. The program last week was quite positive and portrayed Mormons well, in my severely biased opinion ;-)
Anyways, I downloaded the interview from the internet (http://www.rozhlas.cz/cro6/audio) and made a link to it (on the right side of our blog: Files to download). So if you're interested, feel free to listen!

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Finished!!!

Dan is FINALLY finished with his thesis. He has been going pretty much non-stop since January and literally non-stop for the last few weeks. Here Dan is about an hour away from finishing (about midnight) and finding mistake after mistake and thinking it will never end. Though I am biased and think that Dan is absolutely amazing, I've read his thesis and think that it's really easy to read and interesting. If you're interested in learning about "Adventist and Mormon congregations in Chechia" you can download the whole bloomin' thing here. Yeah! I finally get my husband back! So if you want to know what this is - read Dan's Diploma work (that's what it's called in Czech) :)