I find it very helpful to take some time at the end of each month to take time to reflect on the wins and challenges of the past month. In this blog post, I’m going to share a few of my wins from the past month.
- Celebrate well! One of my goals for the year has been to “celebreate with gusto!” While that has certanly been more challenging with limiting our large gatherings, I was so thankful to have a wonderful Thanksgiving. We celebrated with my parents and our good friends. It was a day filled with so much joy and delicious food!
2. Continue on our fertility journey. My husband and I have been trying to have kids for 3 years. We’ve moved to using more aggressive forms of assistive reproductive technology via IVF. This month I had surgery to harvest my eggs. The surgery was successful. After many years of heartbreak, this was so encouraging! I did get Ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS) where I was in a lot of pain and was very close to having a second surgery to remove excess fluid from my abdomen.
3. Rest Well! I took my first “non-moving” week off of work the week of Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as relaxing as I had planned as I was in bed for a good chunk of it recovering. That said, I was able to do some sewing and spent a day doing Christmas crafts with my friend Jen!
4. Run #TheCommunityMaps with my surgery– including the prep and recovery– I didn’t do as much with #TheCommunityMaps as I would have liked to. The Community Maps was my initiative to have members of the Geospatial community map their communities. I had a lot of challenges with running this initiative. From pesky technology for our Altas to difficulty getting data for my own mapping. I’m really proud of myself for setting up the challenge and we may do it next year– but I will tweak the prompts.
5. Host a GIS Day Event! I teamed up with Eva Reid to host a GIS Day Event on November 17th. I am so thankful for our sponsors including SafeGraph, Directions Magazine, Critigen, and Project Geospatial. We had a great turn out and we were able to connect well with GIS Industry Members. I also got to speak at the Women in GIS Event.
Thank you for sharing and thank you for all you do! The GIS day sponsors were all so fun; it just happened all the chats gathered around their “rooms” and it ended up felt like a more intimate meeting and connection that you usually get even at an in-person conference
Fiona that feedback means the world to us, thank you! Also thank you so much for being a supporter of our community!