#92 - invite someone over to dinner

I made this a goal because--let's face it--my grown-up social skills are nonexistent. I would much rather organize a game night than I would a dinner. It's not like I haven't had people over for dinner before or anything, but I wasn't sure how quickly I would make friends in Florida and thought I might need the motivation to be friendly and homemakery toward strange people.

Luckily, Ricky and I made friends before I had to subject myself to such terrible things, and we had the Kendalls over for vegetarian spaghetti! It was back in November, I think, and I took a picture of the place settings and all that jazz, but I must've deleted it between then and now. You'll just have to imagine them in all their glory. (Ondriceks, if you're reading this, we used your plates!)

After dinner, we had game night...naturally.

#92 is done!

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#16 - go to Claytor Lake

Yes, it is mid-January, and yes, I did decide this was a good time to visit a lake. Claytor Lake has free admission if you bring your Christmas tree for them to submerge as a reef for the fish, so off we went! It was a balmy 60 degrees with some pretty good wind, so not too terrible overall for a go-outside-in-the-dead-of-winter activity. We had fun throwing rocks in the water (B) and walking the trails (decidedly not B, who announced "I'm bored of walking!"). But hey, we did the thing. (Currently making plans to come back in the summer when we can actually go in the water!)

2021, in conclusion/memoriam

We're all just ignoring any and all goals we set during the pandemic, right? Right. After the nightmare that was 2020, 2021 wasn't so bad. I submitted my first first-author publication that uncovered a long-standing misconception about airborne transmission of disease, and it got me featured in WIRED magazine . I successfully defended and submitted my dissertation about volunteer health communication in US refugee resettlement. (Those two projects sound very unrelated, but medical rhetoric is the key there :) :)) After 2 years of doctoral coursework and 3 (soul-sucking) years of dissertating, I graduated with a PhD in Rhetoric and Writing from Virginia Tech. My mental health immediately improved. While I was finishing my dissertation, we sold our townhouse in Blacksburg and moved to a 1910s-era bungalow in coastal North Carolina. My daughter started 1st grade (!) in a Spanish immersion program. We all got vaccinated. I was on set as an extra in a Simu Liu/Phillipa So...

#29 - write in a journal weekly for six months (1/27)

Ok, blogosphere. It's time to get serious. One of the items on my list is keeping a weekly journal for six months, and since I'm getting dangerously close to not having six months left in those 999 days, I better start now. I'd much prefer to keep a paper journal, but it takes so long to hand-write things. (First world problems, right?) So here we are. I'll be pulling prompts from this website whenever I get stuck...so, basically all the time. I really struggle with blogging because I'm too worried about how I come across to the people reading it, and that distracts me from writing about real things like how I really want to play a Dungeons and Dragons game (I'm serious, you guys) and how I may or may not have left a load of laundry in the washing machine for two days and am writing this to avoid dealing with it. First up is something eerily similar to those Livejournal/Facebook "fill this out about yourself" lists, so consider this m...

Katie's 99 in 999 (currently 55 in 555!)

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