Accomplishments large and small

Some quick, unrelated updates:

My beautiful genius of a wife now has her Master's degree! Huzzah! Let me take a minute to say how proud I am of this woman. In six years, she finished Westminster's rigorous and course-heavy Master of Divinity (Counseling) degree program (which includes a strong dose of two ancient languages as well as a constellation of other subjects), and the whole time she was also working 35 to 45 hours a week at a demanding job, staying actively involved in her church, writing wicked haiku, and (in the last few years) meeting and enchanting and building a marriage with a high-maintenance guy from down South. Feel free to be jealous of this lucky guy :)
The WTS graduation ceremony was beautiful and bittersweet (lots of friends graduating, but tears for a student recently dead and for a beloved professor fighting terminal cancer). Both my parents and Mel's came to town for the weekend, our Philadelphia pastors were both present, and Peter, our pastor from Virginia, was able to come up as well. We got some nice snapshots, and i hope to post them in the next few days.

The Jeopardy! thing: the audition was a ton of fun, with me and a few other twentysomethings joined by lots of teachers and librarians (and at least one defense attorney, who claimed that he would use any game-show winnings for debauchery and vice. Hmmm). The folks from the show knew that we were all a bunch of geeks, and they jumped right into the geekiness with us--whipping us into a frenzy like a bunch of gladiators about to enter the Colosseum, etc. We took a 50-question written test, which i think i did really well on; then we played a brief practice game (maybe 5 minutes for each set of three people). It really is a lot harder when you're standing in front of an audience than it is when you're just yelling out the answers at the TV screen. Also the buzzer strategy is key. But i did pretty well; i correctly answered a question about Virginia Woolf, one about U2, and a couple others. Then we had to tell a little something about ourselves, and MAN! there were some good stories. One lady had recently donated a kidney to save her husband's life, another said she would give all her winnings to help refugees...and there was the usual assortment of weird talents.
Anyway, they won't tell us how we did. We just have to wait for a phone call that says, "We're taping your episode in L.A. in 3 weeks. Get out here." That call could come tomorrow, or at any time up to one year from the date we auditioned. So i've decided to put it out of my mind and not pin any hopes on it. If they call, they call.
Oh, and i got a cool "Jeopardy!" pen.
And no, Alex Trebeck was not there.