{"id":62,"date":"2008-12-30T18:42:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-30T18:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/caveatquaestor.wordpress.com\/2008\/12\/30\/looking-back-at-2008-and-forward-to-2009"},"modified":"2008-12-30T18:42:00","modified_gmt":"2008-12-30T18:42:00","slug":"looking-back-at-2008-and-forward-to-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/2008\/12\/looking-back-at-2008-and-forward-to-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking back at 2008 and forward to 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This year started out really awfully, to be honest, right down to a nasty stomach flu on New Year&#8217;s Eve. There was all kinds of badness. I think the extra hole punched in my ear was the high point of my January. Anyway, here&#8217;s a fairly complete rundown of the failures and successes of the year, with some added commentary at the end.<\/p>\n<p>Tried and failed (in roughly chronological order):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Getting a graduate assistantship at Pitt &#8211; their website lies; there is no such thing for Master&#8217;s students<\/li>\n<li>Keeping my wisdom teeth<\/li>\n<li>Studying for (and eventually taking) the CCNA &#8211; I got through maybe half of the book before quitting Booz Allen and thus the study group I&#8217;d set up.<\/li>\n<li>Taking an American Sign Language class &#8211; work got in the way, and I had to drop out<\/li>\n<li>Talking sense into a group of more than five people who were doing something damaging<\/li>\n<li><em>Not<\/em> hurting my knee severely enough that I couldn&#8217;t use it all summer<\/li>\n<li>Having a nice beach vacation<\/li>\n<li>Getting people to come play in my parlor larps<\/li>\n<li>Making a blanket in time to give it to people for late-Christmas<\/li>\n<li>Unpacking<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Tried and succeeded:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Getting into library school<\/li>\n<li>Getting a Pitt Partners placement doing what I [thought I] would want to do after graduating<\/li>\n<li>Playing with a penguin at the Aviary<\/li>\n<li>Buying a Mac and an iPod<\/li>\n<li>Getting a summer job as a library assistant before library school started<\/li>\n<li>Building a website on my very own domain, for the first time ever (I&#8217;ve Tripoded and my-school-paged it up in the past, which just isn&#8217;t the same)<\/li>\n<li>Rescuing four baby ducks from a drain<\/li>\n<li>Attending first ALA conference and making some library friends<\/li>\n<li>Getting good grades in my first semester of library school<\/li>\n<li>Finding an excellent field placement<\/li>\n<li>Getting a volunteer position at the Aviary<\/li>\n<li>Getting a scholarship to attend a conference<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>On the whole, I think it&#8217;s been a reasonably successful year, despite the poor start. <\/p>\n<p>Looking ahead, I know I am changing careers at a bad time, economically speaking, but I&#8217;ve got high hopes that I&#8217;ll get a reasonable job before this time next year. (I also have not-entirely-plausible hopes about what that job might be. :)) More immediately, spring semester is going to be rough, but I think I&#8217;m ready for it. <\/p>\n<p>I am still working on my resolutions and goals. So far, the only one I&#8217;ve really set is that I am going to stop eating factory farmed meat, except for 1) what&#8217;s already in my freezer right now and 2) when I&#8217;m at someone&#8217;s house and they&#8217;ve cooked. I&#8217;ll still eat grass-fed beef and free-range chicken, though obviously less often since they cost more. I&#8217;ll also eat fish, though I need to find the little card I have that lists &#8220;ethical&#8221; fish to eat. (Some are really environmentally unsound, right now, it turns out.) This is part of a larger goal of living more sustainably. Also, I think a goal of straight A&#8217;s through the rest of library school is obvious, even if it&#8217;s a tad unreasonable, given my schedule. <\/p>\n<p>Since the bulk of my year is taken up with school, and I can&#8217;t know whether I&#8217;ll be in Pittsburgh or elsewhere afterwards, goal-making is a little tricky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This year started out really awfully, to be honest, right down to a nasty stomach flu on New Year&#8217;s Eve. There was all kinds of badness. I think the extra hole punched in my ear was the high point of my January. Anyway, here&#8217;s a fairly complete rundown of the&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/2008\/12\/looking-back-at-2008-and-forward-to-2009\/\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Looking back at 2008 and forward to 2009<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-a-personal-note","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","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=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}