[Aunt Sally and Uncle Brian, you’ll be getting a beautiful printed copy of this]

Every year that I have been in Oxford has been different, and this one fell right into line. I spent more time outside of Oxford this year than in. I got back to America a record three times this year (four if you count last New Year’s), once during spring, once at the end of the summer, and then for Christmas. I also spent the summer in Austria as a Young Scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. There are vast swaths of my time in Oxford that I seem to have no memory of, possibility because it became a home, someplace that I left and then returned to. I think that most of us can‚Äôt remember what we do most of the time at home. It‚Äôs when we travel and are in new circumstances that we remember best, and so those are the tales I will recount this year for my Year in Review.

In America, the biggest event was probably my parents moving house. The first trip to Virginia this year was ostensibly to clean out and pack up my room in the old house. It turned into a race to get an application in (for a studentship I did not get) and then a sentimental few days of finding things in the room I had the longest memory of living in. Ten years, my parents lived in that house! For someone who is used to moving every two to three years, that’s like a few eternities. And yet it still passed all too quickly. It was a beautiful house overlooking the water, and I thoroughly enjoyed all of my trips back to it over the years.

That being said, I like their new house as well. Sure it isn’t as big or in as nice of a location, but it’s cosy and is still home. The end of the summer was the first time I saw the new place. Emily and I decided to surprise Mom and Dad, and so I flew home without their knowledge and appeared in their dining room one Friday afternoon! It was such a treat to see the look on Mom’s face and the lack of speech from both of them. That was a good week. The next weekend we decided to surprise Mom and Dad again by flying Melissa down from Minnesota with Molly Max. That’s the first time, I think since my graduation in 2002(?), that all five of us have been together.

It’s interesting to watch the changing relations in the family. Being in England, or otherwise out of the country, so much these days, when I get back around the family it’s a bit like getting reacquainted. It’s a chance for all of us to shift how we relate with one another. I think that much of my reacquainting this year put me in a different position with the family then I had before. I now feel like I can fully contribute to discussions and decisions on an equal level. A silly thing to say for a 26-year-old, perhaps, but there were a few incidents that pointed this out to me. One was when I returned for Christmas. I flew into DC and Emily picked me up and proceeded to take me to her company’s ball that evening. It was the first time I’d ever partied with one of my sisters! Emily and I had a number of chances to open up to each other and grow closer this year, for which I am very thankful. Another incident was also over Christmas, when Dad and I got a chance to discuss futures and what lay ahead for both of us. My parents will probably say that I have always had something useful to contribute, but this time I was contributing to problem-solving rather than what colour the carpet should be or ideas on how to fix the TR.

Usually when I return to America I bounce around, visiting friends and family in Texas and Minnesota as well as Virginia and DC. While I got back more than any other year since I started my time in Oxford, this year only saw me on the East Coast. I did manage to get up to the Northeast finally and see my old roommate Tom and Kate, his wife and good friend of mine, as well as finally seeing Vermont Law School, where Camille is getting her Juris Doctorate. I was also delighted at the chance to see Amy-Ruth, another great Ole friend, who happened to be in the ‘neighbourhood’ over Christmas. I am hoping to get back into the Midwest in 2006, and already have plans in the works for a week at a cabin in Minnesota will a bunch of my St. Olaf friends.

Speaking of Olaf friends, I got to spend about two weeks with Camille this year when she decided to take a summer job in London. The two of us have crossed the pond so many times since graduating, but we never seem to meet up for very long! This year the excuse was that, while Camille was in London, I spent the summer in Vienna, Austria. It was fantastic, as always, to be able to spend whatever time I could with her. She ended up renting my room and commuting to London each day, a journey made more exciting after the 7 July terrorist attacks a few stations from where she works. I got to meet her boyfriend, Aaron, as well, and spend some time with him. I didn’t run him through the ringer too hard. . . yet! It was a busy few weeks at the beginning of the summer, though, and before I knew it I was on the plane to Austria.

My summer at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in a little town on the outskirts of Vienna was filled with good friends and a swath of new experiences. Having been ‘in Europe’ for a few years, and visited the Continent a few times before, the major differences between European and American culture were no longer so symbolic to me. I didn’t feel the urge to have to go see everywhere and take every opportunity to experience something new. Don’t get me wrong, I got out quite a lot and had plenty of new experiences. There were the local trips, to Schloss Sch??nbrun and the Stats Oper. There were trips further a field, to Venice and Amsterdam.

There was even a weekend trip to Innsbruck and Lichtenstein, that beautiful doubly landlocked country you can walk across in a day. Lichtenstein was particularly fun, because we were there for the Lichtensteinian National Day. Everyone in the country descended on the capital, Vaduz, for festivities and a chance to meet the royal family. And meet the royalty I did! To give you an idea of the size of the country, the royal family invited everyone to their not-so-big-but-beautiful-nonetheless castle. . . for a free lunch. Beer and sandwiches all around! I have a picture of me with the Princess somewhere, but unfortunately I seem to have lost all of my film from this summer.

I need to say something about IIASA itself. It’s a former hunting lodge of the Hapsburgs, but I chuckle as I say so, because the ‘lodge’ has at least a hundred rooms, a ballroom, a theatre, it’s own (no longer functioning) railway station, a guest house with its own ballroom, and a full-size castle on a lake for the children to play in. My office was in the former bedroom of Empress Sisi, complete with a eight foot high ornate porcelain radiator, three-tiered crystal chandelier, and twenty foot high mirrors on the walls. My ride to work each morning was a delightful twenty minute cycle on a forested footpath along a river and through the poppy and barley fields. And the room that I stayed in overlooked the vineyards and the Wienerwald, the enchanted Vienna forest. Yeah.

My year was also highlighted by the strong friendship I’ve developed with Kathleen. Beginning with a first class flight from Minnesota, through an Easter break to Valencia (Easter in Spain is amazing!) and a brief trip to Amsterdam, and finishing with a whirlwind Michaelmas Term in Oxford, we have had opportunities to enjoy the good times and help each other through the bad. I’ve found a lot of truth in the saying that good friends double your joys and halve your miseries. I should add, though, that they also help you live much more of life by continually providing a mirror onto your world and helping you to live it better.

And that seems like a good place to round out the year. 2006 is already looking like’s it’s going to be exciting as well, with a new position as a Visiting Research Scholar position in the Security Studies Section of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and a number of trips planned back to Vienna for research.

I am so lucky I live the life I do, and I’m enjoying every minute of it. I’ve decided that the point of life is not to be happy, but to experience the happy and unhappy times (and experience them with someone if possible), and to realise that the one feeds off the other. Very yin-yangish, is it not?