{"id":575,"date":"2013-11-27T20:39:14","date_gmt":"2013-11-28T05:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/?p=575"},"modified":"2013-11-27T20:39:14","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T05:39:14","slug":"being-thankful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/2013\/11\/being-thankful\/","title":{"rendered":"Being thankful"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With all the health issues (and the <em>cost<\/em> of all the health issues) and everything, it would be really tempting to write off 2013 as a &#8220;rebuilding year,&#8221; and I won&#8217;t lie: those words have escaped my lips. Maybe as recently as yesterday, when I found out that the Prednisone was more of a diagnostic tool than a cure. Now that I&#8217;m off it, the <a title=\"Invisible disabilities and healing\" href=\"https:\/\/sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/2013\/11\/invisible-disabilities-and-healing\/\">pain<\/a> is coming back, to the total lack of surprise of my doctor; and now that my shock has worn off, I&#8217;m pretty angry that she didn&#8217;t warn me. Anyway, we&#8217;re looking into ways to head it off before it gets really bad again. I&#8217;ll skip details, here, but short story: there&#8217;s a chance it might still all be OK. Fingers crossed.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/stayworkplay.org\/blog\/giving-thanks\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/give-thanks-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"give-thanks-300x199\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-576\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/give-thanks-300x199.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/give-thanks-300x199-226x150.jpg 226w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>Anyway, my point is, it&#8217;s easy to say &#8220;This year wasn&#8217;t so good.&#8221; But it&#8217;s not really true, on balance. Some really bad things happened. But <strong>LOTS of GREAT things happened<\/strong>, too! And I think it&#8217;s worth calling them out and reminding myself about them and really taking the time to be thankful. So, here are some things I&#8217;m thankful for, from late 2012 and 2013 so far:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Early this year I approached a then-acquaintance, now-friend, with the idea that we might create a local technology training group for women, a la <a href=\"http:\/\/www.girldevelopit.com\/\">Girl Develop It<\/a>, and she thought it was a great idea. So <a href=\"http:\/\/www.anchorageprogramming.org\/\">Anchorage Programming Workshop<\/a> happened, and we&#8217;ve held successful classes on GitHub, WordPress, Web Fundamentals, HTML, and CSS. We participated in the mini-Maker Faire this summer. And now we&#8217;re looking into joining up with other interested people to create a broader &#8220;diversity in tech&#8221; organization, locally. I couldn&#8217;t have predicted this project&#8217;s success, at the beginning of the year, and I&#8217;m really, really thankful that it&#8217;s working out. I&#8217;m also thankful for the new friend and partner in crime, who challenges me and who kicks me when I go all <a href=\"http:\/\/geekfeminism.wikia.com\/wiki\/Impostor_syndrome\">impostor syndrome<\/a> on her.<\/li>\n<li>2556 people thought I would do a good job representing them on ALA Council. I&#8217;m incredibly grateful for all of those votes and for the chance to serve.<\/li>\n<li>I got back word that my <a title=\"Reflecting upon reflection \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The faculty file\" href=\"https:\/\/sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/2012\/08\/reflecting-upon-reflection-the-faculty-file\/\">fourth year file<\/a> was A-OK, and I pretty much don&#8217;t have to stress about the tenure thing. I mean, I still need to do my job well and work hard to put together a good file, but at least I know I&#8217;m on track.<\/li>\n<li>I made huge progress on some really important stuff at work. Most important: we have adopted a web plan that makes students\u00e2\u20ac\u201dspecifically, students who haven&#8217;t yet been trained on library resources\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe focus of our design\/development efforts, above students who&#8217;ve been through one shots, above faculty, and <em>above librarians<\/em>. As a result, everyone agreed to standardize our LibGuides, to make them more usable.<\/li>\n<li>Based largely on that effort, I pitched a talk for the LITA National Forum, and it was accepted. And then I got to attend a great conference! And then the talk went well! (I think? People wanted to see my web plan, anyway. :))<\/li>\n<li>I got to serve on a panel at ALA Midwinter. I felt kind of like the token newbie, but honestly, that was a super fun role to fill. I felt great about the discussion we had!<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m also signed up to participate in a panel at this upcoming Midwinter, and I&#8217;m <em>super psyched<\/em> about it, since it&#8217;s about an issue I think is really important.<\/li>\n<li>I got to go to Hawaii for the first time ever, and it was great!<\/li>\n<li>I participated in my first two hackathons.<\/li>\n<li>I was invited to write a <a href=\"http:\/\/letterstoayounglibrarian.blogspot.com\/2013\/06\/what-is-web-librarian-anyway-by-coral.html\">guest post<\/a> for <a href=\"http:\/\/letterstoayounglibrarian.blogspot.com\/\">Letters to a Young Librarian<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0I&#8217;ve also been invited to write two other posts, on a different blog, but I haven&#8217;t actually done that work yet. ;)<\/li>\n<li>Dale (that&#8217;s my Mr.) and I rescued a parakeet this summer. Like, from under a truck, at a stop light. And he&#8217;s kind of the <a title=\"video - parakeet making a swing\" href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=F3fpoPG2g6o\">funniest<\/a> <a title=\"video - parakeet eating other birds' food\" href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=HjhW0tmQ4jM\">guy<\/a> in our flock, now. He&#8217;s also made the other parakeet approximately a million times happier! (For those keeping count, we now have <a title=\"video - cockatiels love blankets\" href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0NLSWtnkNzU\">two cockatiels<\/a> and two parakeets.)<\/li>\n<li>Some awesome people got married, and we got to celebrate with them.<\/li>\n<li>And, just generally, I have a smart, funny, loving husband; we have jobs we like; we have enough money to pay our bills; our house keeps us warm and dry; we have friends and family (and those people who cross that border) whom we love and who love us; our pets are happy and healthy; and <em>things are going fairly well<\/em>, all told. I have a lot that&#8217;s wonderful in my life.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, yeah, I know there&#8217;s a very real chance that I&#8217;ll look back on 2013 as the year I started battling a life-long health issue. And I&#8217;m not thrilled about that. But it might <em>also<\/em> be the year I emerged from being a state-level public speaker to the national level, the year I started to come into my own as a programmer, the year the Anchorage tech community started to become more inclusive, or the year the Consortium Library <em>really<\/em> started focusing on the student user experience. It might be <em>all<\/em> of those things. That would be amazing. <em>Any<\/em> of those things would be amazing. <\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;m thankful, and I&#8217;m hopeful, and, on this Thanksgiving eve, I am content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With all the health issues (and the cost of all the health issues) and everything, it would be really tempting to write off 2013 as a &#8220;rebuilding year,&#8221; and I won&#8217;t lie: those words have escaped my lips. Maybe as recently as yesterday, when I found out that the Prednisone&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/2013\/11\/being-thankful\/\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Being thankful<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":576,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-on-a-personal-note","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}