Atlanta and ASOR

Despite being a day early in Atlanta, ASOR was awesome, as should be expected. I met up with nearly everyone from Gezer and we all went out to dinner Friday night. I got shrimp and cheese grits. Oh yea. There was even some bacon in it, so I got my non-kosher fill. Our staff meeting got me REALLY excited to go back this summer! I can't wait! I got to see a lot of really interesting papers presented and some ideas of what to do with my focus in archaeology. It's a little difficult for me to try to do that while I'm at JTS, but I can at least clear out all my language requirements for PhD programs. :)

I saw Heidi, which was awesome, too. She's the one who recommended me to come to JTS! She gave me a bunch of professor's name to meet up with and try to get on good terms with. Sweet! She's such a sweet heart, I love her. Turns out she lived the exact same room I do now in her first year! Ha!

Marcella and I also groupied out when we saw a lot of famous archaeologists, like Israel Finkelstein, Dever, Amihai Mazar, Aren Maeir, Anson Rainey, and others. Oh yea, it was awesome. We would just stand in awe. haha.

It was really nice to get back into the archaeology sphere and hear what new things are going on and see who's moving up. I have a new list of places I want to dig at, ideas of neat things to study, and also some things to cross off my list. Like the Amarna letters! What the heck... I'm sad, I wanted to work with them. I guess there's probably still a lot more out there that I could study besides the 400+ ones that someone is working on compiling into a data base. We'll find out...