Find a full-time job. A real one, with a salary, in an urban area, and most importantly, in my field.

Graduate with my Master’s in Heritage Preservation (on track for May).

Requisite fitness goal: will exercise on a more regular basis, and cross train rather than just get on a cardio machine and wait out forty minutes.

Continue to foster and build my quilting skills, and maintain my creative time with fabric.

Finish my 365 project, I AM 365, on July 31, 2012. I’m five months’ in now.

Pay off my other credit card, finally, once and for all, be finished with consumer debt. Hope, hope, hopefully.

Save money. At least, spend less. (Getting more cliche as I go, right?)

Move. This is apparently on my list every year. I’ve moved in 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011. And I will be again in 2012. This year though, I have no idea where. Wherever they hire me. Fortunately my field tends to revolve around urban areas.

Long-arm quilt, for myself, the Single Girl quilt that I began the day after my 24th birthday last year. I decided I’m going to finish it by my 25th birthday, fitting. It’s my first real quilt for myself, a gift to my twenty-five years.

Pray; support causes I believe in; and give when I can, what I can. [Biggies: My parents' mission with Greater Europe Missions, LiNK (Liberty in North Korea), public radio and WABE]

Not freak out when I think of all the factors that can change the plans I’ve outlined. I’m kind of at a crossroads here, finally finishing school for good, seeking a real and meaningful job, in a relationship that has last nearly four years, trying to find where I will fit into this world in 2012.

It has been a wonderful few years of transition, and I am so glad that as my parents have finally sent all of children out into the adult world, they have chosen to change up the purpose and design of their lives post-children. If last Christmas taught them anything, it was that waiting around for their children to dominate their home during those few days of the year that we might come home for a holiday is not worth keeping the whole house, doing the whole hosting thing. There is another chapter in their lives yet, and an important one; they are embracing it with a missions program they are now actively fundraising for–through Greater Europe Missions. They are continuing to downsize even more, and will leave for Rome, when they have enough initial money raised.

They know, as their children know as well, that this does not mean our family’s traditions are ending, just reshaping. We have never been a family overly attached to a place, or particular home or other thing to define our traditions, and our holidays. We have always made them meaningful instead with each other, by being together and enjoying wherever we happened to be that year. After moving to Georgia, some years we spent visiting back there, but many more we have spent as the six of us, and they have been equally magical. This year, with us each and all as adults, our lives have shifted more towards the new version of us: where we, the children, are now the hosts. As it should be. I’m happy to bake cookies, put up with the mess, decorate the tree, and continue our traditions now that my parents have shifted their own life goals. It’s the least I can do to take on the holiday hosting after the many, magical Christmases they have given me (and us). It’s actually exciting. It’s our turn. And as the years continue, we’ll be changing it up even more. We’ll add spouses, eventually (far in the future) children, and a lot of different locations to the mix, to our family. Next year could be Christmas in Italy, if Mom and Dad can get their fundraising goal met this year (which they hope to).

It’s exciting to imagine how Christmas traditions will follow us, and change, in these next, adult years. We’re off to a great start with this one. Friday and Saturday, December 23 and 24, were spent in Atlanta, lovely.

If you would like to donate to my parent’s mission, you can go to this site, and select their names (Edens, Mark and Valerie) in the donation recipients drop-down menu. My Dad’s blog on their journey and mission is here.

Around the Christmas tree, my apartment in Atlanta

Friday

Completed Christmas-themed exhibit case we composed at the Archives, using 1950s photographs of Christmas decorations (TVA-documented) and old newspaper clippings, photos, and WWI draft cards featuring the names of reindeer (Blitzen, Rudolph, etc.) and other holiday-themed names (Chris Kringle, Santy Claus, Partridge and Peartree).

Single Girl quilt: Home from work, I needed to see four of my sixteen squares sewn together.

Ormsby's for friends catch-up, drinks, and beet salad (yum).

Saturday

Root House visit, Saturday morning, to see Katie and smell the delicious smells of an 1850s Marietta kitchen. They were all in dress for the Marietta pilgrimage tour of homes.

Then, to the High Museum to see the Picasso to Warhol modern art exhibit (we got a deal on tickets). Ben ponders some other art. He approves.

Saturday, 2 p.m. Ben is angry at this, the piece of art he hates most: the white canvas painted white, on a white wall. Ben is very angry!

Pablo Picasso, Girl before a Mirror, 1932. All the paintings in the exhibition are owned by the Museum of Modern Art. Pretty impressive, as I would expect.

We "make" art, by adding fingers pointing to circles. Pablo Picasso.

Henri Matisse, Woman with a Veil. It was one of my very favorites of the day.

Henri Matisse, another favorite. The colors!

A Jackson Pollock classic! This is another that Ben is skeptical about, but I was just excited to be seeing a real Pollock. It was interesting to see some of his work before this famous "drip" phase of his work, of which they also had several.

I loved the work of Romare Bearden, who does a lot with mixed media and collage. I'm really drawn to pieces like this. Google his stuff!

Another Romare Bearden, using a very old and battered patchwork quilt against a woman who's made to reflect the ancient artistic body form that we know as Egyptian.

Jasper Johns, a Georgia-born modern artist, works in familiar images and print-making to make you think about things that are everyday in more conscious ways. Loved the numbers.

The Real Andy Warhol Version Of This Super Famous and Much Reused Image. So cool to see the image the started this iconic pattern. Then again, Warhol would ponder how much of him as the artist is really in these, "the originals," anyway. ;)

The Soup Cans. All along a whole wall dozens of times, so emblematic of all that is Warhol's pondering of the reprint.

And again

And again. Am I Warhol yet?

Pretty tree in midtown

Coffee break at Octane

Snowy winter cupcakes (with advent-gift decorations), episodes of Parks & Rec, and one-person sewing bee to round out Saturday night.

Sunday

The binding goes on Ben's Christmas present, so near to the end now.

New undies and popcorn for advent! There is nothing better than new underwear for Christmas, really.

Some of Ben's awesome advent gifts from my mom, including a half-zip sweater and requisite fun Star Wars items.

Paul's advent, Upper Peninsula Michigan playing cards, with photos of Yooper things. The Iron Mountain ski lift where we used to live, there.

Avery helps Ben cook Cheater's Chili, our all-day-stewing best-chili-ever recipe.

We document the damage of earlier burns to my hands, from the hot oil when browning the meat for chili. See the bulbous blisters?!

Homework and another advent, a yummy candle. Organizing the many documents that compose our Atlanta History exhibit for the Atlanta airport, making sure we have everything we need to print this hundreds-of-pages document on Monday. And Ben helped too.

Then, finally, Dexter on Showtime at 9, one of the best reasons to start a new week. Season 6 is so, so good. I forgot to take a picture because the episode was so good.

Happy week, everyone!

Hot coffee is better in a beloved mug

November 28:

Windows open, with rain pouring outside on a finally crisp day

Christmas tree is glowing

“Winter” candle is burning, my absolute favorite scent of all time (Bath & Body Works, worth every cent of $20)

Pot roast is slow-cooking in the crock pot, my first attempt at making one (and it looks darn good)

Coffee is freshly brewed

Orange-banana breakfast smoothie is in-hand, frothy and fruity

My legs are jelly from an awesome hills-intense 12 miles on the bike at my complex’s gym this morning

One presentation to prepare for later on today, and another one ready for presenting tomorrow

A book on the way from Amazon, for 600-odd pages of great reading to round out the end of the semester

Beautiful quiet in this little homestead, the cat and myself right now.

Our tree all lit up with cheer, advent gifts surrounding

We’ll call this the requisite commentary-on-the-anniversary blog. Probably every American is reflecting on that Tuesday, September 11 ten years ago, in their own way, to many different degrees of emotion and disconnection, both and neither at once. It has been a decade, and what made it perhaps most poignant was a story posted on Public Radio International’s website, on the difficulty of teaching 9/11 in high schools now that so many kids who are in high school recall the event only in vague and foggy ways–if at all.

The story tells of the teachers interviewed for the piece and their experience year by year: how in the years just afterwards, classroom discussions “were much more visceral.” The 4- to 7- year olds mentioned in the story, who are in high school today, remember reactions of their parents and other very responses very near to them, but not the same way many who are older (adults, now, like me) remember the images on TV clearly–even if, as in my case, I didn’t see them until I got home from school. (At the middle school where I was attending eighth grade at the time, someone higher up made the decision not to tell any of the students what was going on. By lunchtime, teachers around us were in tears and we all detected something was not right. I went home on the bus that day knowing only that “someone had bombed the Pentagon.” For real)

Looks like it’s history, now, really and truly. I remember in the wake of the tragedy, people saying this would be the moment for my generation that would long be recounted as a universal American experience. The endless and epic tale we each, we all, have. Where You Were When It Happened, much like President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. But really, here it is, a whole decade later, and it has become a part of history, and event that marks a clear delineation in this nation’s history: a Before and an After. Strange to be at a stage, in adulthood, where things I experienced are “history.” Guess this is what growing up feels like, right?

There was another truly interesting–and also disturbing and crazy and wholly logical given the world we live in today–report on the ten-year-later mark in this world: on the technology of facial recognition, and its birth in the government funding that allowed its remarkable development in the post-9/11 scared, reactionary, and technology and internet-savvy environment. NPR’s Marketplace had a segment on the stunning course it has taken, as two enormous events dovetailed in history:

Fred Cate is a law professor and privacy guru at Indiana University. He says after 9/11, two independent trends dovetailed and reinforced each other. The federal government was investing hundreds of millions in surveillance technology and research to try and keep us safer. And companies like Google and Facebook were remaking the digital landscape. There was a data-collecting revolution.

FRED CATE: 9/11 and the sort of huge growth in social networking and in profiling and collecting Internet traffic — those events are really parallel with each other.

And Cate says:

FRED CATE: We have gotten more used to more surveillance. And it’s not clear that that’s just attributable to the events of 9/11. But particularly when you think of the types of security we all go through now — would have been pretty close to unthinkable a decade ago.

What we have created, as the story reports, is technology that fairly easily recognizes your face and identifies you based on photos it draws from the internet, and several other features both amazing and scary at once. The creepiest part: new technology can actually take a stab at what your social security number is, if it can determine from internet sources where you were born. Rest easy, though, because this stuff isn’t on the market, and there are no intentions by its creators to put it there. As it stands, as I understood anyway, is that this is for governmental purposes. (You can decide if that makes you feel better about this.)

How interesting to think our post-9/11 perspective has provided the incubator for things like this, and our Facebook pages have fueled the flames, made it all the more possible. We are willing participants, at some degree, of the worlds we create. Ten years later, look at us now. To be honest, I have little memory of what adult life was like, even in a purely observational point of view as mine was, prior to 2001. And now it’s a part of our past. Huh.

Stieg Larsson's third book

Books I read this summer (and recommend)

For the preservationist you:
The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a CIty Transformed by Michael Meyer

For the adventurous youthful side:
Undress Me In the Temple Of Heaven: A Memoir by Susan Jane Gilman

For an all-out laugh (and very breezy, quick read):
Laughing Without an Accent: Adventures of an Iranian American at Home and Abroad by Firoozeh Dumas

Your source of comedic relief on everything from unsolicited ”help” on being a mom, to the old men’s Christmas event at the YMCA (oh yeah, and a disastrous honeymoon on a cruise ship…):
Bossypants by Tina Fey

For when you need to be reminded, we all start somewhere:
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

OK, everyone’s read it. Darn it, it’s SO good. Read it again:
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

For the kid (and really, the adult) in you:
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling (yes, again)

For the crime thriller fix:
The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson 

For adventure in the Brazilian Amazon, complex moral dilemmas, and mystery:
State of Wonder by Anne Patchett

Books that I was enjoying, alas, did not finish (but still recommend!)

For a thoughtful analysis, crafted beautifully, on your missing father figure:
Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama

For your do-gooder, “I want to change the world now” mood:
It Happened On the Way to War: A Marine’s Path to Peace by Rye Barcott

Books I read that were, eh…

Mostly trite gender analysis, of all our “little princesses”:
Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein

For when you want to hear a talented writer talk about his crippling childhood fear of Jesus, and his hatred of Fidel Castro:
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy by Carlos Eire

Carl has never not loved sweets :)

The youngest in our family, Carl turns 18 today, finally graduating us to four adult children. He has just started school at the University of Georgia, where he finished his freshman summer term last week. Very proud of this “little” brother too.

Neil on his third birthday

My brother Neil, the third of four and the middle boy in our family, turns 20 today. He is stationed at Guantanamo Bay, where he works as a dental assistant. So proud of this grown-up guy.

This was back in his “light bulb head” days.

I have also started in on priming my whole apartment, which I painted in its near entirety last summer, when I anticipated staying here for two years at least. Rent increases have made that impossible, and I am fully feeling the pain right now, in the time it takes to return these walls to white. I’ve decided that my energy and determination to paint a new space is directly related to whether or not I have recently had to paint a room, since last summer I didn’t have to repaint anything when I moved out of my previous townhouse. This summer, I am taking a much simpler approach to my new apartment: beige walls, no work required. I’ll take my mom’s advice: just cover it with so much art, it feels like home anyway. Perfection.

Maybe the most indicative hint that it is summer (and the most fun) is the vast increase in alcohol intake compared to my regular, super busy semester life. Spending two weeks in Cuba, where the mojitos are the same price as a bottle of water (and you got to have something with lunch, right?) certainly helped kick that off right away. Since I’ve been back though, I have had time to visit lots of friends, and have taken a new approach to dinner: why not have a beer with that? In fact, why not just have beer for dinner instead?

Only working, and not having class, has been truly joyful. Relaxing. Only ONE thing to focus on in my life. Is this how real people live? It’s so much fun!

I’ve also been absolutely obsessed, all of a sudden, with M.I.A. and Dengue Fever, two artists I’ve long known, but they are seriously hitting the spot right now. Exactly my mood. A bit rebellious, no?

Did I say, also, that since I’m moving, I am really excited about shaking up the way all my stuff is arranged, and in further simplifying my space. Might get rid of a bunch of stuff. Might put the bookshelves in the dining room. Maybe put my art/fabric/inspiration board right out in the living room. Why not?

I pretty much just want to pay homage to summer:

to having a tan and wearing a skirt to show it off,

to last year’s dirty, broken-in flip flops,

to pleasure reading (YES!),

to no make-up,

to keeping the frig stocked with good beer,

to the pool,

and cook-outs,

to margaritas with great friends,

to MOVING (even though it’s a lot of work),

to less stress in the classroom (and if you’re really lucky, no class at all–jealous),

to the windows down!,

and the heat suffocating you (I do kind of love Georgia heat the way it does that),

to sweating so much at my job, I don’t feel guilty about not going to the gym,

and to spending too much time watching TV shows.

Among other things.