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 Soo movi
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!)