Here We Are Again

Well, here we are again. The end of another year.

As I write this, I'm half-watching NBC's Minute to Win It while mom finishes cooking the second course of our "fancy"-ish New Year's Eve dinner, even though it's nearly two hours since we had the soup. I'll probably have to go eat well before this ever gets posted, but the beauty of blogging is that you'll never know where I left off!

(And yes, if you happened to remember from last year's end-of-year post, the second annual New Year's Eve Nachos are going to be one of the courses. Eventually.)

Twenty-ten has been an interesting year for me. I know you probably couldn't tell that from this blog, but it's true! Most of the stuff I've gone through in 2010 has been rather personal in nature, which is a large reason why I didn't write much of anything here. Still, it comprises a lot of what has shaped 2010 for me, so I'll do my best to summarize things a bit for the benefit of my readers.

If you've been paying particular attention, you may have noticed that I recently changed my mini-bios on many of my social networking sites (including, naturally, the "About Me" section on this one). That's because I have officially graduated from the University of Pittsburgh on 18 December 2010 with a Bachelor of Science in Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, an undergraduate certificate in Nuclear Engineering, and a minor in Music.

But wasn't I supposed to graduate in May? Didn't I actually participate in Commencement back on 1 May? The short answer to both of these is yes.

The slightly-longer-but-not-too-in-depth answer is that I had had some personal issues in the fall of 2009 which had affected my schoolwork and caused me to earn some incomplete grades. After a full 19-credit slate of senior-level courses in the spring of 2010, I then could refocus myself on finishing those last requirements for graduation. Unfortunately, other external pressures prolonged this effort past August and reset the goal to December. And I hate being so vague, but it really is better in this case. Sorry.

I moved back in with my parents at the end of July, which I'd written briefly about at the time, and which has thusfar remained neither largely good nor largely bad. It just is.

Although I worked toward my graduation steadily throughout the year, I spent the last part of November and the first half of December frantically picking up the pace and finishing everything that was left, at the expense of putting off other routine tasks (among which, obviously, was writing for this blog). And so, on 20 December, once all of the graduation stuff was finalized, I found myself with nothing more than a long list of things to do (literally, I made a list, even including individual episodes of television shows I'd intentionally missed). And I've been slowly whittling away at that list ever since, so that I can begin 2011 at least mostly unencumbered by 2010.

Anyway, here we are again. In the waning minutes of 2010. I'll forgive myself for having written last year that I was excited for a new decade to begin in 2010 when, as ABC Australia wisely noted, this is technically when the decade rolls over. I guess I was just dealing with the "modern" understanding of a decade. Writing the "1" seems to have meant more. But surely writing two of them will be even more significant?

So, I'll put up with the unfortunate double-keystroke in "2011" which I'd mentioned last year. And I'll actually post some of the photographs I took in 2010. For as much as I'd looked forward to 2010, I'm looking forward to 2011 more.

Random tangent: Carson Daly is saying "Twenty-Ten" and "Twenty-Eleven," whereas Ryan Seacrest is only further promulgating the ignorance in the old "Two Thousand and..." way. No disrespect to Dick Clark, but I think that after tonight, I'll be switching my New Year's Eve loyalty to NBC until further notice.