I’m snug in a bug in a rug now. It’s cold. So cold, in fact, that I’ve plugged in my electric blanket and I’m tucking myself in my big fluffy down comforter. And better than that, I found out today that I came in second place in the Annual Report design contest I wrote about earlier.

I was so elated that I sent an email with the good news to my school’s “faculty folderol” course conference (basically, a place where faculty can post about anything from an apartment they are subletting to finding good restaurant recommendations)!

You can view the winners and read the judges analyses, the other entrants, and the initial competition description.

The two best things about this competition is that (1) I got a chance to reflect on the year, on the information we save and the information we discard and the information that we discarded that we wished we had saved, and on how my life has differed from January to December. (2) I learned to use a program like photoshop (but without 99% of the bells and whistles). It’s an opensource program called Seashore; you have to do your work on “layers.” A lot more work, but very easy to play around and edit in. The learning curve is steep. I made one slide a night; the first night’s work took about 3 hours, but the next three nights’ work took about 1 hour each.

So congrats to me. I’m proud.