Normally I like to close the year with some retrospection about what's been going on over the last 12 months, but I'm in a bit of a bind this time around. The year has about five hours to go in my current time zone, and this will be the second post on this blog since the last time we were on this side of the Sun. The main reason for this is my other blag, which has been taking up a surprisingly-large chunk of my unclaimed time. I've posted quite a bit of content over there (by my standards), about three times as many posts as are currently on this blog, in the last year, so this is reasonable, but it makes it awkward for me to talk about what I've been up to in 2013. Out of context, many of the brief notes I could write would make no sense, so instead I'll talk briskly about some of the things I can be open about and I'll make a note to write more in this space next year. Hopefully.
In January I moved to Seattle full-time. I started my first real, indefinite-length job, and started learning about how engineering happens in practice, rather than the abstract way I learned in school. As the daylight and twilight yawned open for the summer, then contracted again in the fall, I gradually began to feel more and more like I actually work at Boeing, and I've been able to make some reasonable contributions to the work going on in the structures lab. At the very least, I haven't delayed a major program yet, which is cool.
For the first time since 2008 I stayed in the United States all year. I ventured as far north as San Juan Island, south to Houston, east to Bar Harbor, and west to Lake Crescent on the Olympic Peninsula. A stamp on my passport would be nice, but that seems like a rich enough set of travels for one orbit.
My life is at once more open-ended and more stable than it's been in a long time. Things are well at Boeing and in Seattle, and I don't foresee any obvious impediments that might prevent things from proceeding as they are into the future. There's more to life than stability, of course, and the questions about where to go from here with my education, my career, and my personal life remain open and largely unsolved. Given the fact that I'm not yet a quarter-century old, that's probably a good place to be. I expect that the next year will bring at least some resolution into focus. More on that later...
