2013 was such a great year! I had some fun trips, marked a
major point in my thesis research and switched callings in my church. My
speaking business continues to grow. I finally stepped out of the stone age and
bought a smartphone in August--I love it!
The year started with a business trip to New Orleans in
February. I walked around the French Quarter and love the architecture. I found a wonderful pharmacy museum in the Quarter and
spent a lot of time there looking at the old medicines, treatments and medical
equipment.
In April I went to a 3 day genealogy conference in New
Hampshire. It happened to be the same week as the Boston Marathon bombing so I
was away from Boston during all that craziness. I am still sad for all the people
who were hurt and the emergency response people who saw such trauma. It was
interesting to follow the news from my laptop when I was in NH. This is the
year that the Red Sox went from worst to first. While I can't speak for the
people who were directly affected by the bombing, I do know that the World
Series win was a form of healing for all the people like me who were indirectly
affected because it pulled us together and gave us hope.
June was our family reunion in Idaho. My mom and dad and all
their kids and their families were there: 20 kids and 12 adults (1 bro in law couldn't make it). The theme was
"The Amazing Race" and we were divided into 3 teams. My team wore the
neon green bandanas and I think the kids all look like adorable little bandits.
We had so much fun. I then stayed an extra few days with each of my sisters who
live in Idaho. While at the reunion I met 3 nephews I hadn't met in person
before and got to see how fast all the kids are growing up.
I continue to work on my thesis research for my master's degree in history (I
know--it's been going on forever!). My major accomplishments this year are
finishing transcribing over 400 handwritten medical recipes into a Word
document. They were collected by a woman in the 1600s. I also have a mostly
finalized thesis proposal--I just need to add in some data analyses. My
research is comparing recipe characteristics (ingredients, complexity, disease
treated, whether elements of superstition are present, etc.) by the recipe
donor characteristics (male vs. female, family member vs. not, etc.). I am
slowly pulling all the elements from the recipe and entering them into excel.
Once that is done I can use my statistics background to analyze the data.
In August I took a trip to the Cloisters and the Botanical Gardens in New York to look at some of their
exhibits on medicinal plants. It was really interesting. The Cloisters is a
Medieval museum and has a huge medieval herbal garden.
In October I took a trip to Ticonderoga
with one of my friends. I love visiting historical places. They had an exhibit of military medicine that was interesting.
I also went to a
Harvest Dinner at Plimoth Plantation around Thanksgiving and took the
Orchard House (Louisa May Alcott) Christmas tour.
Ended the
year with a 10-day trip to spend Christmas with my parents.
I keep busy with my job as a biostatistician in medical
research, working on my thesis research, and building
up my genealogy speaking business (bridgingthepast.com). I am starting to
really focus on my niche, which is talks about using social history in
genealogical research and taking particular events (King Philip's War), eras
(daily life in Colonial America), or topics (medicine in colonial New England)
and talking about them so that the audience members can better place their
ancestors in context.
I switched from being in the Primary Presidency to
serving in the Relief Society Presidency this spring. After 7 years in Primary,
it has taken me a long time to be able to sit through all 3 hours of church.
1 comment:
What a great year! You are doing so many interesting things!
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