Scratch 'em off the list.

To my great relief, I finished two important goals this week. One of them was long term and, by happy circumstance, I happened to stumble upon. Another was an short term goal that I'm extremely relieved to have resolved.

The first was to find a comprehensive history of the Bible. This has been frustrating me for a long time, because it doesn't sound like it should be this difficult, but it has been: there are several histories of Christianity (giant tomes that would take my entire life to read), and there are plenty of religiously-inspired texts about the Bible that cited the Bible itself. But an (at least moderately) secular account of how the Bible was put together has been surprisingly elusive. Thankfully, I found it this week at Barnes and Noble, on sale as I walked out the door.

It's really quite charming. It's a coffee table book with large and fascinating illustrations, concise chapters that outline clear stages of the Bible's history, and little pouches where you can pull out large images of important historical finds, like high-resolution scans of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most importantly, it points me in the direction of good sources for further study. For anyone interested in learning how the Bible got put together, this is a good start.

Finding a book like this has been on my plate for some time - I had almost given up the search. Among my other super long-term goals: a similar book about the creation of the U.S. constitution (also curiously difficult to find: lots of books about U.S. History, and about the Revolutionary War, and about the Declaration of Independence, but not so much about the process of creating the most important legal document in the world), and the perfect watch (found something pretty close with Longines, but it costs about 1000$). The search goes on.

Sigh.

The second thing to scratch off the list: I got a freaking job. This was a gigantic relief. I have spent the last three months inundating the Vancouver job market with my resume, and only got one disappointing nibble. In the end, thanks to sending my old boss an email a few months back, I now have a position at my old work place, Little Mountain Learning Academy. I loved my job then, a position I had before leaving for Dominica, and I'm pumped to get back to it now. Sitting around unemployed for four months, with no response to what I considered a pretty sexy resume, eats away at a man's confidence. It'll be good to get back to work, especially since it's in a classroom setting. It does, however, complicate honeymoon plans. We'll figure that one out soon enough.