Tag Archives: 30×30

30x30

30 by 30—2015 Year End Update

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434 days.
62 weeks.
37,497,600 seconds.

That’s how long I have before I hit 30 (and thus the amount of time I have to complete my 30 by 30 list!)

Even more scary is the fact that I have only 112 days to complete my dissertation if I want to graduate on time, which by the way IS part of the professional category of my 30 by 30. So where do I stand? Here’s where I was the last time I remembered to swing by my website:

Travel
√ Chicago
√ Quebec
Charleston/Edisto Island (this will be my next blog post, coming soon hopefully!)
France and Belgium
San Francisco

I can now check off Charleston/Edisto Island from the travel category, though I never blogged about it. Vacation 2015 was lovely, and quite possibly one of my all-time favorites. It’s a lot of fun to vacation with the niece and nephew (and their parents and Mimom and Grandaddy are pretty nice, too!) With that vacation, plus some serious family time this Christmas (both my side and Karen’s side, as I write this at Karen’s grandparents’ house!), I think I can safely check off another big (and certainly ongoing) item from the personal category: spend time with family. I’ve also been able to check off some items from the Musical, Spiritual, and Just for Fun categories this year. It’s been a great start to the list, and looking back in total, a year of great accomplishments.

Here’s where the list stands (again, not giving it away in full!) heading into 2016, with some comments:

Personal
√ Spend time with family

Professional
Earn my PhD
Seven publications (no really—I’ve already got five if you count the two book reviews, with three more dissertation chapters and a third book review under development!)
Land a job
Month-long photo challenge
Purchase a professional suit (perhaps a bit vain of me, but I’ve been waiting to lose some weight first…and hey, forthcoming job interviews are maybe not all wishful thinking and pipe dreams, right??)

Spiritual
√ Talk theology with a minister—Thanks, Rev. Matt Hampton!
√ Volunteer for a good cause (more on this if I ever get around to it, but suffice to say that volunteering at Church Street’s Soup Kitchen has been one of the most meaningful, amazing additions to my life this year!)

Travel
√ Chicago
√ Quebec
France and Belgium (forthcoming, summer 2016!)
√ Charleston/Edisto Island
San Francisco (forthcoming, March/April 2016!)

Musical
√ See another Broadway show — Godspell (I don’t care if it was staged in the Church Street Parish Hall, it was an amazing production!)
√ Sing in another opera—Knoxville Opera’s production of Boito’s Mefistofele (sure, I was just in the auxiliary heavenly chorus, but it was fun!)

Just for Fun
52 in 52 book challenge—this may never happen at my current reading rate!
Hike Mt. LeConte—seriously HAVE to do this in 2016
Watch a dozen classic films—now taking suggestions!
Watch a meteor shower?—or something else if the opportunity does not astronomically present itself…
√ Baseball at Turner Field—finally checked this stadium off of my MLB travel list, now up to a grand total of Busch Stadium II & III (STL), Kauffman Stadium (Kansas City), Nationals Park (D.C.), and Turner Field (ATL). So many more stadiums to visit…I’m looking at you next, Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati!

TTFN! There’s life to be lived (and dissertation chapters to be written…!) Much love and best wishes to my readership (all, like, four of you) in 2016.

30x30, Photography, Travel

30 by 30—Quebec

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Yeah, so it’s a little late, but I “checked off” the second item on my 30 by 30 list earlier this summer with a trip to Quebec. For those keeping score at home, here’s the updated list of what I’ve revealed so far:

Travel
√ Chicago
√ Quebec
Charleston/Edisto Island (this will be my next blog post, coming soon hopefully!)
France and Belgium
San Francisco

As is true for all of these travel goals, going to Quebec was planned in advance, before the idea to do a 30 by 30 even crossed my mind, so it’s kind of cheating. Oh well. The choir tour to Quebec was, nonetheless, a blast.

This quick trip to Quebec (slightly under five days total in the province + almost four solid days of driving!) was my first adventure in Canada, and I’ve gotta say it was a almost entirely positive experience. (Hint: Watch out for flower boxes that hang over the sidewalk in Quebec City… as my new eyebrow scar can attest.) I now have some new and interesting insights into Canada to include in Geography 101 lectures (which is great, because I start teaching the course again on July 6), and my international travel itch has been scratched for at least another few months. I definitely want to visit SO much more of Canada now. Vancouver, Toronto, Albert, Prince Edward Island, Nunavut… Okay, maybe not Nunavut (it’s seriously cold there) but maybe Baffin Island… I mean, who wouldn’t want to visit a place that looks like this? (Not my photo, btw.)

Speaking of photos, here are just a handful of photos from Montreal and Quebec City. I haven’t had enough time to do much else with the 100+ good photos from the week, so this will have to suffice for now.

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30x30, Grad School, Photography, Travel

30 by 30—Chicago (First item done!)

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Okay, so this may technically be cheating, but one of the easiest items to check off of the 30 by 30 list was going to Chicago for the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers back in April. I say it’s cheating because the trip was planned long before I started coming up with ideas for the 30 by 30 list.

If you will recall, one of the six categories for the list was travel, a somewhat ideal category for geographers. The difficult part, however, was how to plan/envision/strategize getting in several trips  (1) in a limited time frame, and (2) on an extreme budget.

So I “cheated” and went primarily with trips that were going to happen no matter what, including a vacation, a couple choir tours, and two AAG meetings.

Update: That said, I guess I can give more spoilers to the 30 by 30 list. Still not giving them all away yet! Here are the travel “goals”: Chicago, San Francisco (AAG 2016 will be there), Quebec (CSUMC Youth Choir Tour going there in just a couple weeks!), Edisto Island/Charleston South Carolina (going here on family vacation in June), and France/Belgium (planned Knoxville Choral Society choir tour for June 2016).

Here are some highlights from the 2015 AAG Meeting;

  • Despite not seeing much of the city (in part because Karen wasn’t there to pull me away from conferencing and partly because of increased responsibilities for this meeting), I did get out and see a lot of Chicago’s beautiful architecture around the Magnificent Mile. More on this below.
  • The conferencing itself probably rates for me as the best annual meeting yet. I went to a number of highly relevant sessions, made a few introductions and caught up with several friends from previous meetings/former UTK students who are elsewhere now, presented a pretty good paper (in my humble opinion) for a somewhat small audience (the curse of the Friday 8 am session…), and organized both a landscape photo exhibit and a breakfast as part of my responsibilities on the Cultural Geography Specialty Group board. Whew.
  • I was elected, with my dear UT friends/colleagues Melanie and Janna, to be student board members of the American South Specialty Group.
  • I did make it almost out of the city (at least somewhere near the northern suburbs) with my other UT friend/colleague (and other officemate with Melanie and Janna, come to think of it…) Tyler Sonnichsen to see him perform stand-up comedy. It was fun!

Now then, to the photos… I posted some online earlier, but I haven’t gotten around to processing any of the other photos from my camera. Here’s what I took with my phone.

Trump Tower, Downtown Chicago
Trump Tower
The Bean!
The Bean!
The Chicago Tribune Tower
The Chicago Tribune Tower
Savannah and I went on a photo tour of downtown Chicago, mostly in the South Loop. As you can see, it was slow going!
Savannah and I went on a photo tour of downtown Chicago, mostly in the South Loop. As you can see, it was slow going!
The Chicago Public Library. Didn't have time to go inside.
The Chicago Public Library. Didn’t have time to go inside.
30x30

30 by 30—a starting place

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A couple of months ago, I was walking with a friend at a local greenway and he told me his partner/girlfriend was coming up with ideas for a “30 by 30” list.

“A what?”
“30 things to do before you turn 30.”
“Oh…”

(I had pictured a matrix or spreadsheet that was 30 cells wide by 30 cells high, in case you were wondering.)

I don’t remember much in the way of details about her list, but I started to have this nagging idea in my head at night when I can’t fall asleep or when I’m bored in the shower that maybe I should come up with my own list.

Then I started googling it, and I realized that this phenomenon was much more popular than I imagined.

A lot of folks (mostly women, it seems, based on my extensive demographic Google research) post their entire list online, then eventually start blogging about the various things as they check them off.

Well, I’m not going to post the entire list (I know, what a tease!), in part because I don’t want the whole list out there if I stop updating or if I fail to complete some items on the list. Simple enough, right? Suffice it to say that as I accomplish some of the important things from the list, this will be the space where I writ about it. That’s all I got for now.

…

Oh alright. Still not satisfied? I’ll give you a peek at the categories I’ve decided upon. Six categories, five items apiece.

  • Personal
  • Professional
  • Spiritual
  • Travel
  • Musical
  • Just for Fun

That’s all you get for now!