Year in review 2018

[liv]

2018 was the year of living stably in Cambridge and staying in a job where, and I keep coming back to this with amazement, there's a concrete set of expectations of me which I generally live up to. And spending lots of time with my husband and our OSOs and their children. And doing Jewish community stuff to a level that's fulfilling without having to carry a whole community single-handed. And I had a few really exciting trips, too.

Significant events:

• I published articles! For the first time since 2009, and for the first time at all in education journals rather than science ones.
• I went to Legoland.
• hatam_soferet spent time in the same country as me and I met her baby daughter.
• I returned to my community in Stockholm to help out with their siddur launch, and got to show ghoti_mhic_uait and the children a little bit of one of my places.
• I turned 40 – my birthday is right at the end of the year and often feels like part of the following year, or gets drowned out by Christmas, but this year it was really special.

Places:

• Cambridge
• Channel islands
• Frankfurt, for a ridiculous but awesome day trip
• Stoke, where I returned to celebrate Pesach and the High Holy Days
• I spent a fair amount of time in Chelmsford, Nottingham and Bradford, as my current job has connections in all of those places as well as my base in Cambridge.

Books: Still not really returning to my old reading habits. In 2018 I read 8 novels, plus half an anthology of short stories, a couple of novellas, and two pretty short children's "chapter books", younger than YA really. Picking five out of such a short list seems a bit silly, but I was excited about:

• An unkindness of ghosts by Rivers Solomon
• Two serpents rise by Max Gladstone
• How to be both by Ali Smith
• Sailing the Antarsa by Vandana Singh
• Aru Shah and the end of time by Roshani Chokshi, the best YA I've read in forever and I am dying of impatience for the sequel.

Music:

• I saw Hamilton in the West End, with rmc28 and cosmolinguist and it was amazing and wonderful and life-changing
• A concert of delightful Romantic orchestral stuff, Dvorak, Bruch and Rimsky-Korsakov with cjwatson
• Andreas introduced me to a new-to-me artist, Avicii
• Where you go by Girls in Trouble
• I have been almost constantly earwormed with Arvoles lloran por lluvias ['The trees weep for the rain'], a trad Sephardi song I know in the interpretation by Burning Bush. I feel embarrassed that I keep getting stuck on, Alas, what shall become of me, I shall die in a strange country, at a time when there are more actual refugees displaced all over the world than almost any other historical period, it's hopelessly melodramatic. But that's where I am emotionally.

Notable posts:

• Compliance doesn't prevent addiction by siderea
• Exercising patience by kaberett
• We dream of a better start by cosmolinguist

My posts:

• Queer films in context [film, gender]
• Belated International Mens Day thought [gender]
• Gene editing human babies [science]

Previous versions [2004] [2005] [2006] [2007] [2008] [2009] [2010] [2011] [2012] [2013] [2014] [2017]

Comments

[edrith.co.uk]

I'm glad you had what sounds like an enjoyable and fulfilling year. Hope 2019 is as good!

[kaberett]

<3