Year in Review

Well, I started this year alone at my house in Baghdad. My roommates had gone to Amman for the New Year. I think I stayed up until midnight. Heh.

A lot has happened this year. I started the year expecting that I would be in Baghdad for another year and a couple of months. That didn't quite happen. Evan showed up and was diagnosed as most likely benign. I've visited Cyprus, England, Scotland, and Jordan. Mara and my friends died. Iraq regained its sovreignty on my birthday. We had a change in leadership of our team which _greatly_ affected life there. We moved from one house to another. We left for some training and weren't allowed to return. I got to SCUBA dive in the Red Sea. Instead of sitting around in Amman until my term ended, I came home five months early, surprising my family and most of my friends. Since then, I've mostly been sitting around my parents' house, helping to re-organize stuff.

This next year is still pretty fuzzy for me yet. I expect that I'll finish my Master's degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland. I'll have some job to help finance it (and give me medical benefits - I'm currently among the uninsured). I'll be involved in some way at my church. I'll either rent the cheapest apartment I can find, or I'll buy the cheapest foreclosure I can find in the hopes of selling it for a tidy sum at the end of the year when I figure out where I'm actually gonna settle and what I'm actually gonna do.

It's....unsettling....for me to know so little about where I'm gonna be and what I'm gonna do.

I've never really been one for New Year's resolutions. I'll let you know if I make any, but I can't think of anything right now. I don't need to lose any weight or stop smoking anything. I could probably stand to exercise more regularly. My house is definitely gonna be less cluttered than in the past. I'll definitely have a less hectic daily schedule than I had prior to my overseas adventures. I definitely want to keep up with my Arabic. But I don't have any measurable "resolutions," per se.

This year actually ended for me almost three hours ago, if you're counting 366 24-hour periods, but it won't end here for another six hours. My little brother's out with friends, as I expect my older brother is. My mom's asleep on the couch, my dad's cooking something, and my sister is playing "vulture" for the computer. We'll watch movies until my dad makes us turn on the Sesame Street New Year's thing. After that, he'll fall asleep and we'll probably end up watching Conan since he's doing a Central time thing.

But, tomorrow is not just another day, it's also another year, and while I'm somewhat unsure of what it'll bring, I'm also looking forward to it. So come, on, New Year! Give it to me with both barrels. I can take it.