Lauren Lives!

Hello everyone. I just wanted to give y'all a short update of the past year. It's been a wacky year with peaks of ultimate awesomeness and troughs of total drek. I'm not posting this to get sympathy, I just wanted to let everyone know what's been going on. I've been fairly incommunicado for the past year and I keep getting these "hello, are you still there" e-mails.

Let's see. Last summer started great! I spent two months in Oman, hence this blog. A week before I returned, one of my friends in grad school committed suicide. Of course, since I barely had Internet access, I had no idea of what had happened to him. I started studying for comps, but then kind of collapsed from exhaustion and stress. I went straight from Master's to Ph.D. and I think I was burnt out too. I managed to make my November research trip to the JFK Library in Boston - I love scallops and chowda! But shortly after my return I got even sicker. Then over Thanksgiving my great-aunt died. That may not sound like much but she and my grandfather (her brother) were very close, so she was almost like a 3rd grandmother in some respects. I saw family over the holidays and in the New Year I started feeling a little bit better. Then I got the wonderful birthday present of my father going into the hospital. We drove down immediately and the first day I saw him was literally on my birthday. But Frank got the wonderful birthday present of a job! My dad was in ICU for 6 weeks and then he died in June of necrotic pancreatitis. We still don't know how he got it - he wasn't a drinker. I've been staying with my mom off and on. And then in July we traded in my poor 11-year-old truck, via Cash For Clunkers, for a Scion xB.

So that's been my tumultuous year. Here's hoping this school year is much better!