Brief, Belated, Year in Review

2010 has been a busy year and one I'm glad to see pass by - although considering that 2011 started with a political assassination and massacre in my new home town, 2011 could be rough as well.*

Here's the re-cap of our year:
-L wrote, and we survived, the writing of his dissertation.
-L graduated and got a job. He is now officially an engineer and a PhD.
-We spent most of the summer thinking we were moving to Nowhere, NM, then Nowhere (but at least there was skiing) So Cal Mtn town, then staying in SC, then finally settling on Tucson.
-Took full advantage of El Nino year for skiing.
-Watched two friends get pregnant and have babies.
-I delivered 3 papers at 2 conferences.
-I started writing my dissertation and got much less done than I hoped.
-I taught my own class.
-I ran two 10K races.
- I knit a lot.
-Two sets of friends got engaged.
-We finally gave away (to our cute, young neighbors) our ugly black couches that we've had since we first moved into our first apartment in 2002.
-We finally purchased a real, grown up, new couch.

Goals for next year:
-Take a lead climbing class and start rock climbing outside.
-Design my first knitted garment.
-Finish rough draft of dissertation (please?).
-Run Tucson 1/2 marathon in Dec 2011.
-Present at at least one, preferably 2 professional conferences.
-Cook more recipes out of the multitude of cooking mags my fathers keeps sending me. (and blog about them).
-Blog more regularly.
-Go on the job market in fall 2011.

*I've started and deleted several posts about the Tucson shooting. I personally feel that guns, particularly handguns and semi automatic anything, should be illegal, and I'm willing to extend that to most hunting weapons too. Another idea is heavily regulate who can own and be licensed to shoot (you know, like we do with driving), or hold guns for sport target practice and hunting in a central location and have owners check them out when they want to use them, or just finally institute background and psychological checks as well as several day waiting periods. Between health care and gun (lack of) control I realize that the US doesn't actually want to join the rest of the modern democratic/socialist nations but instead wants to bask in an era that more closely resembles the Gilded Age - rampant unregulated capitalism combined with the Wild West. Not to mention my feelings on the clear failure of our society to recognize mental illness for what it is and provide the help and support needed. See, this is why I haven't posted- it all jsut dissolves into ranting. So I'm saving my thoughts on this horrific event until I see the clusterfuck of ways in which we continue to respond to our failures as decent human beings in the next six months. In the meantime, I'm going to look for knitting patterns that can include/hide kevlar.