Some highlights of 2011 (roughly in the order they happened):
- In the beginning of the year, getting an offer to do graduate school work at UPenn
- Visiting Philadelpia twice before moving there, and on one of those occasions also spending some time in New York
- Being more healthy than ever before and having the organization skills to run and eat and sleep well. There was a big positive change in the first part of the year and throughout the summer. (All of those things suffered a bit towards the end of the year because of graduate school stress. Will work on that in 2012!)
- Visiting Manchester in May, meeting a number of wonderful people, seeing an interesting city, and getting stuck there for a few extra days because of a volcano making trouble back home in Iceland
- Finishing a huge project in work in August. The project took two years and our group finished it exactly on time even if there were times when the deadline didn't seem realistic. Things go well when you're working with a great group of people.
- Moving to Philadelphia in the fall
- Switching to an actual Linux computer for my work after having been in the business of installing Linux on Windows computers before. Free at last and will hopefully never do business with the Microsoft/Apple evil empires again!
- Getting married in Philadelphia shortly after moving there. It was just the two of us and the people working in the chapel and we had a wonderful day that was exciting in a very relaxed way. We had some really good Indian food and I got a bunch of cheese. For our honeymoon we went running up the Schuylkill River together.
- Enjoying cheese in a place where buying and selling cheese is a free market experience
- Getting breakfast shipped from Amazon by UPS
- Catching two mice
- Getting two mouse traps for Christmas to replace the ones I already used
- Getting to know wonderful people from all over the world, especially the other newly arrived linguists at UPenn. Also, Americans are always incredibly nice and I am very fortunate to get a chance to get to know how things are like over there. Americans are sometimes very critical of their own Americanness but the basis for those nationality worries is most often at the large scale level of a broken and self-destructive system of corporations and institutions. That stuff has nothing to do with the more personal level where Americanness is a super positive quality. I will stop now before this turns into blog post about Americanness, I'll do that later :-)
- Having a chance to meet family and friends in Iceland in December (though time went by far too fast so that I wasn't able to meet everyone, but that'll happen next time!)
The main regret is that I would have liked to meet more people more often in the non-work part of everything but the entire year was full of intense work, which in the latter half of the year was made even more time consuming by adding a transition to a new environment where a lot of adjustment took a lot of time. Will fix this in 2012.
