2006 in review

What a year it has been!

For me it started with an intense four months of work at Mobile Infirmary as the company prepared to annex another hospital. Up until 2006 the job had been a breeze, with overtime a rare thing indeed, but during every week of the big conversion we were on mandatory overtime. The intensity built until the weekend of my birthday, which ended up feeling like one long episode of ER. Whoever said the IT field is boring has not run at full speed through a hospital to a mainframe terminal in post-op to frantically unlock a pharmacy cabinet so that a life could be saved with the proper meds. Okay, that's probably dramatized a little, but it was enough to make me glad to leave the health care industry behind when R was reassigned for her job in mid April.

Yes, that's right--it was time to move. We said good-bye to southern cooking, the friends we Mardi Gras'd with, the church in which we were married, and warm winters to settle in an unexplored land known as Delaware. We bought a townhouse in Wilmington and have been enjoying a more urban lifestyle since.

R began her second assignment with DuPont as the mechanical engineer supporting the ethylene co-polymers High Pressure Unit (HPU) semi-works as part of the packaging and industrial polymers business. It sounds pretty technical, and it is. In fact, I had to ask R to write this paragraph for me. Her assignment is located only a few miles from our house at DuPont’s central research and development center, the Experimental Station. Most new polymer products developed by DuPont get their start in the HPU. R does great work and has been recognized by her manager as raising the expectations for her role in the unit.

I was unemployed for a few months after the move, which was like a dream come true for me. Disappointingly, however, a good chunk of the extra time I gained was spent developing my job seeking skills and seeking that next job. Still, it was a good break. Not having to go to work every day makes settling into a new house in a new city quite a bit easier to manage.

There was one particularly exciting thing that came out of my temporary hiatus: the opportunity to work on an independent film. I joined a crew and helped with the lighting for a family film called Jack of Clubs, which will be premiering in Wilmington in April of 2007. The shoot lasted 6 weeks and required many long days of satisfying work for no pay. What I got out of the deal was a lot of contacts in the business and some friends too. It was an experience I won't forget.

A series of events (well-documented in the archives of this blog) led to me find a Business Analyst job with a small, but quickly growing software company in Pennsylvania. I'm constantly surprised by the fast pace of the company culture and the amazing work ethic of my coworkers. It's been challenging and demanding, but the valuable skills I am learning and some perks from the company make it worth the stress.

R and I like to explore, and moving around the country offers us the chance to do just that. In addition to our week-long road trip from Alabama to Delaware with detours along the way, we also took getaways to Virginian wine country, the Jersey shore, New York (city and upstate), Winnipeg, Montreal, rural Vermont, and, of course, our beloved Minnesota.

So ends another eventful year. I can hardly wait to see what the next one brings. Happy holidays to all of you out there!