Not To Be Trusted With Knives

2008 – My Year in Review

December 31, 2008 by Beth

Wow, it’s the last day of 2008. How did that happen?  Seems like only yesterday that it was New Year’s 2008 and now New Year’s 2009 is upon us!

So, in a blog posting that fits perfectly into my “rampant narcissism” category, I give you my personal 2008 summary:

The Good

• I moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress
• I got to hear Gloria Steinem speak
• Got laser eye surgery
• I saw Madonna in concert
• I saw Chris Rock live
• I taught two courses at UBC (Nutritional Assessment & Topics in Food, Nutrition & Health)
• I got hired to teach another UBC course (Research Methods) and my first SFU course (Human Anatomy) for the upcoming term
• Tod got the greatest cat EVER¹.

The Bad

• My Granny passed away

The Ugly

• Stephen Harper got rid of the National Science Advisor and it made me angry
• I feel like I was sick a lot – I had bronchitis, several nasty colds, and a UTI (TMI?)
• Injuries (fortunately all minor ones): groin injury (hockey),  seriously scraped knee (twice), strained wrist (hockey)
• The Governor General prorogued Parliament because Stephen Harper had a temper tantrum and didn’t want to face the House in a (despite what the Conservatives* say) completely legitimate non-confidence vote

Travels

• Yellowknife, Northwest Territories in March
• Los Vegas, Nevada for a hockey tournament in April
• Kelowna, BC for hockey provincials in May
• Edmonton, AB with Tod in May
• Toronto, ON to visit the fam in June
• Sun Peaks, BC with Tod in July
• San Francisco for BlogHer and to visit Katie in July
• Toronto, ON for my niece’s 4th birthday in November
• Los Cabos, Mexico with Tod for Christmas

Accomplishments

• My hockey team won our divisional championship
• I celebrated my one year workiversary
• I climbed a mountain
• I ran two 10 km races (Pacific Spirit and Nike 10K)
• I wrote a grant application letter of intent² that was accepted (yay!), which allowed me to submit a grant application that, if successful, will allow me to still have a job
• I receiving funding to plan a science outreach event in the new year (you’ll hear more about that later)
• I published my thesis in book form

Books Read³

• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
• The Pleasure’s All Mine by Joan Kelly
• What to Eat by Marion Nestle
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
• The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman
• Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (just started)
• Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti
• Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind The Pay Gap-And What Women Can Do About It by Warren Farrell

Textbooks

• Principles of Nutrition Assessment by Rosalind Gibson
• Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches by John W. Cresswell
• Best Practices for Teaching Statistics and Research Methods in the Behavioral Sciences, edited by Dana S. Dunn, Randolph A. Smith, Bernard C. Beins
• Philosophy And The Sciences of Exercise, Health And Sport: Critical Perspectives On Research Methods, edited by Mike McNamee
• Brain-based Teaching For All Subjects: Patterns To Promote Learning by Madlon T. Laster. (only a bit, because it turned out to be about elementary school teaching, whereas I was expecting it to be about university teaching)
• Conducting & Reading Research in Health & Human Performance by Baumgartner & Hensley (only partway through)

Misc

• I voted three times (one federal by-election, the federal election and a municipal election)
• I attended three blogging conferences (Northern Voice, BlogHer and BarCamp)
• I attended two learning/teaching conferences (one at UBC, one at SFU)

And what year in review blog posting would be complete without some nerd stats:

Nerd Stats 2008:

• Blog postings: 423
• Tweets: 2,227⁴
• Visits to my blog in 2008: 32,410⁴
• Average number of blog visits per day: 93⁴
• Most popular blog posting: Hockey Hotties (1062 views)
• Busiest day on my blog: Friday, September 26, 2008 (460 views, thanks to the Hockey Hotties posting)
• My first guest posting on a blog as a correspondent for Miss604 at BlogHer

¹OK, I realize that *I* didn’t get the cat and this is supposed to be *my* personal summary. But he’s the best freaking cat ever and he’s sitting on my lap as I write this, so it counts.
²A “letter of intent” (LOI) is an application to be allowed to submit an application. Anyone can submit an LOI, but only the people whose LOIs get accepted are allowed to submit the full application.
³I’m sure I’ve read more than this and am just forgetting some of them. This list is based on ones (a) I can actually remember without prompting, (b) appeared on my blog and so I saw them when I went through my blog to write this year in review, and (c) I still have out of the library, so I saw them when I checked what books I have out of the library.
⁴At the time of writing this blog posting.

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