#24 - go scuba diving/renew certification

Catching up some old events! Last October (that's right--2011), Ricky and I took advantage of a Groupon for a dive class. I really want to get Ricky his open water certification (I'm already certified), but he wasn't sure if he would like it, so this was a chance for him to get his feet wet, literally speaking.

He loved it! I had a great time doing a refresher course, and it was fun going with Ricky. (The title here is misleading. SCUBA certification never expires, but you do have to do a refresher if you haven't been diving for a while.) I forgot how amazing diving is. I told Ricky that as soon as he's done with school, we're going to get him certified so that he can be my dive buddy.

I wound up leaving my dive gear (oops!) and we had to go back to Orlando the next month to retrieve it. But it was a good excuse to visit the dive shop again!

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#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...

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...

#13 - take Ricky to NYC (day 4)

DAY 4 - THURSDAY, MAY 17TH I have to brag for a minute. When Ricky and I decided that the New York thing was really going to happen, I wondered if we may be able to squeeze in a Boston day. I went to Boston over spring break in 2008, and it's been my favorite "big city" ever since--Ricky wasn't over the moon about going (because that was one less day we'd be in NYC), but he could see how excited I was about it. Also, I planned the whole trip, so he didn't really have a choice anyway. :) So, I did some searching. We were still about two months out at this point, but I discovered that Peter Pan Bus Lines (they use Greyhound buses? I don't know how it works) offers a $1 fare from NYC to Boston (and back) if you book online a month in advance...so I set an alarm on my phone for the right day and scored two round-trip tickets for $4.50 (with tax)! Since we took overnight buses, that $4.50 was also our NYC lodging cost for two nights. Plea...

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

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