Ice on the Morning of the Coffee Tasting

The promise to blog

Well, here I am again; a new year, and a new job.  My new job has expressly forbidden me via new hire orientation from discussing my new job in online social media, so I will not be discussing my new job here.  (NB: My new job is not Fight Club.  It's similar to my previous job, but about an hour and fifteen minutes shorter on the commute.)

However, with the change in coworkers, I have made the promise to start blogging more often to keep in touch.   Somewhere along the way, someone decided that I'm an adventurous person.  Generally, I would say this is true statement.

Admittedly, my adventures are a little less adventuresome since marriage happened.  I haven't been outside the country since...well, the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein in 2003, because I know I read it first in an Italian newspaper.

So, here we are.  My latest adventures...

On Saturday, my dear husband surprised me by taking me to a local coffee tasting event, which was pretty neat.  I've never been able to taste the difference in coffee, or good coffee, bad coffee, stale coffee, expensive coffee...  I'm not a huge fan of plain coffee, so I usually load it up with sugar and creamer.  Or frappacino it into submission.  However, I can now say that I can taste and identify the "subtle flavors" and "differences in body" of at least 3 different varieties.

On Sunday, we went up to Broomfield to finish fixing up some stuff at the condo, and then hung out with both sets of in-laws for a while.

On Monday, we commenced the new routine regime: going to the gym.  I'm going every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with my husband.  I've tried to convince him that we should be able to shift the Friday workout to Saturday on Friday Movie nights, but he insists that he doesn't want to break the routine.  (So, I suppose we won't, and hopefully I can hit 20 minutes on the treadmill and still make it home in time to shower and make dinner for the movie night group.)

Note: Locker rooms are awkward.  Super, super awkward.

The End of The Year

One year ago, I was wrapping up my education at Emporia State University.  I had finished and delivered my capstone, and walked at graduation.  A lot has happened since that point.

The job I spoke of in my last post never gave me a start date--they still had intention to, but the background check took inordinately long for reasons beyond my control.  I was offered a different position in the meanwhile, and accepted it.  It's full time regular work for the State, which is a bit more stable than the contract position I had been waiting on.  The position title is "statistical analyst", but I got the impression that the work would be more oriented toward database and spreadsheet management, and the manipulation of data and information to extract and synthesize reports.  Needless to say, I am in disbelief that I found such an awesome position--digital information is kind of my thing.

(Note: when people ask you what you do with studies/degree in Computational Linguistics and/or Library Science, this is what you do with it.  You manage and analyze digital text, information, and databases.  This work is not highly specific to any one career field--just about every business or organization has information or databases and a need for someone to maintain and interpret them.)

I have to say, I was hoping to be "back by popular demand" in academia by this time, but it hasn't happened. I've been busy trying to get a stable job, and thereafter house shopping with my husband and thinking about coordinating the move.  We haven't found a house yet.

I published two books this year so far, and plan to publish one more before January.  That's something to be proud of.