Farewell to 2013

I started this blog in January, and then I didn't post on it all year. Nice. So here's my year in review--some things that happened, in no particular order.

1. I traveled quite a bit. We visited my sister in Florida, we camped in Shenandoah National Park, and I went to Michigan once and Utah twice. More excitingly, Peter and I traveled to Hong Kong to visit his friend William. We breathed terrible air, did some hiking and sightseeing (Lamma Island, Kowloon Walled City Park, Hong Kong history and art museums, several temples and street markets), ate loads of dim sum and other delicious food (we're mostly vegetarian at home, but we realized pretty quickly that avoiding meat in Hong Kong wasn't really feasible; my stomach was grateful for the pork buns), and just generally enjoyed hanging out in a completely new place.

Dirty air! Skyscrapers! Boats!

Ruins in Macau!

Buddhist nunnery and temple complex! With skyscrapers!

I also spent a month in London doing dissertation research. I love both London and archival research, so this was fabulous. Peter also joined me there for the latter half of the month to participate in a seminar for librarians. I spent my days reading depressing but fascinating World War II documents, and in the evenings, we rode the Tube, revisited favorite places, explored new parts of the city, saw plays, and took basically no pictures (that weren't related to my research).

Oh, wait! I found some failed selfies:

In Greenwich

On a bridge

2. Peter and I celebrated our first anniversary (and now we're at a year and a half, though it feels like longer). I know that's nothing compared to many of our friends, but it was nice to reach that milestone and feel very settled and comfortable in our marriage.

3. I spent time on hobbies that sometimes fell by the wayside during grad school. I started binding books again. With a local choir (and the North Carolina Symphony, in some cases), I performed Holst's The Planets, Bach's St. John Passion, Handel's Messiah, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and probably some other things I'm forgetting. I continued working on projects with LDS WAVE. I read more books for pleasure than I have in years.

4. I started a new job as a journals production coordinator at a university press. It's a temporary position, but it's fun to be doing some publishing work again and it's a good transitional job to help me move from a tenure-track-focused graduate program into the alt-ac realm.

5. I successfully defended my dissertation! I still have a few minor revisions to make before I turn in the final version in January, but I feel relieved to have reached this point. I'm also proud of achieving a goal that seemed far away and unattainable during much of my program--it was difficult to find the way forward in a situation with little structure and guidance and lots of isolation. But I did it! Freedom, after 5+ years!

6. My strong, generous, wonderful grandma passed away. I drove directly to the airport from my defense to fly home for her funeral. It was nice to be with family I hadn't seen in years and to hear new stories about Nana's life, but her death was fairly sudden and I'm sad that I didn't have more time to spend with her.

7. My immediate families had two weddings and two new babies. (I haven't met S's yet, but R's baby is very sweet and adorable, and that's coming from someone who's really not into babies.) Two siblings also started college, and one of those is now on a mission in Chile.

These kinds of lists tend to make people's lives sound momentous and awesome. So in the interest of avoiding misrepresentation, I will also say that 2013 featured many mundane and/or frustrating moments: a fight with mold in a poorly maintained apartment, a move to a new apartment, lots of dread and procrastination and frustration related to my dissertation, anxiety about jobs and health, and expensive car repairs. But overall it was a year of good experiences and positive transitions. Here's to an adventurous 2014, in which we graduate, search for jobs, and move who knows where!