Hello Friends, It’s Been A While

Circular image of a yellow flower in full bloom slightly out of focus due to movement in the breeze. Decorative.

It’s been a little over four years since my last update. While I know some people who kept posting, or forced themselves to, for me it was important that I prioritize other things. Much of my time has focused around my, and my family’s, physical and mental health, moving, work, cleaning, more work, fixing things, and trying to support others to the best of my abilities. I had hoped to put out an update this summer but due to ridiculous rate hikes by my previous website host, I ended up having to move my entire website. This took quite a bit of research and back and forth with tech support as I didn’t have the funds to pay someone to do the move for me. The biggest part of the move was going through every post and page and fixing all the errors that crept in due to changes in how websites are coded. To add to the labor of moving the site, the move also destroyed most of my image descriptions, but not in a consistent manner so I’ve had to go back through and manually refresh, or in some cases retype, every image description on every page. If I missed an image description please let me know. All this moving and updating took all the time I’d hoped to spend in updating this website.

What has Kiyomi been up to?

This is an excellent question. It feels like yesterday and forever ago that the pandemic started in 2020. Since then many projects and activities have been delayed, canceled, or revised. I don’t know how I accomplished anything, but eventually, by sequencing things so that at any given moment I only had to think about what was in front of me I made progress. Last year my husband had surgery and I took quite a bit of time off to deal with that. I also took the time to work through the formal ADA accommodation process. I’ve always been fortunate to be accommodated by my supervisors as needed without a formal plan. To ensure that doesn’t change in the future I decided to work through the process while I knew I had a supportive supervisor. I’ll expand upon this more in an upcoming book chapter, but please know that being in pain should not be a daily thing, seriously go to your healthcare professional. Physical and occupational therapy can help alleviate many different types of pain even if, like me, the root cause is not completely understood.

Obligatory list of accomplishments since late 2019

Here are some of the things I’ve been up in the last 4years.

Crowd Sourcing Design

Earlier this week I asked about iconic images in Chemistry on Twitter. Below if the storify of the results:

While many of these images come to mind for me I wanted to ask others what they thought. I’m working with a graphic designer to create some promotional materials for graduate students and wanted to gather more than just my personal opinion on what stood out as iconic. So often we skip the ask others stage in design, which is fine if we’re making something for ourselves. Even if you don’t have time to do a huge study you can usually find some people on one or more social media sites who are happy to weigh in and help you crowd source ideas.