Hello, 2020!

Jim and Sarah in 2010, getting ready to face down a pretty incredible decade together.

Last week I reported on the state of the this website and what got done here in 2019. This week I want to take a slightly divergent path and quickly reflect on the last ten years that came to close with the turn of this new year.

It is important to say that the period of 2010-2019 had more monumental moments to it than any other in my life to this point. It was around this time in 2010 when I first began talking to the cool girl who lived far away in the desert who would eventually become my wife. It also happened to be a time in my life where I was feeling frustrated professionally, and was contemplating a return to graduate school to potentially improve those professional prospects.

Over the course of this past decade I: got married, became a dad, completed two graduate programs (in the Environmental Humanities and Library and Information Sciences), certified as a professional archivist, found myself promoted twice at the Utah State Archives (to Archives Manager and then Assistant Director), and took on an assignment in my community on the Cottonwood Heights Historic Committee (which I now chair).

In addition to all that I had the good fortune to travel extensively and make a lifetime’s worth of memories with those I love. I don’t need to catalog them all, but with Sarah, Ceci, and a host of friends and family by my side I have wandered the deserts and mountains of the west, climbed the high peaks of Utah, explored the deep south, and made two pilgrimages to Alaska.

The lesson for me in all of this is that life comes at you amazingly fast, and that change is relentless. I can attest as my little family enters a new decade expecting the arrival of a new baby brother literally any day now. It is simultaneously exciting, terrifying, and all of the other things that change brings with it. Should I have the good fortune to find myself writing another one of these entries in 2030, I sincerely hope that I am able to reflect on more life that has been lived and enjoyed to the best of my ability to do it.