One year ago, I started at my current position at Valo Health. In another month, I’ll have officially been out of academia for one year, too.
Wild.
I don’t have any navel-gazing (per se) to go through here, suffice to say: I am incredibly grateful not just to have a job in my preferred field during what can only be described as a brutal hiring market, but I am beyond grateful that it is a job I find rewarding and energizing and something that literally gets me out of bed in the mornings.
So I thought I’d just take the opportunity to run down a few things, some work-related and some not, that have happened since I took the Valo job one year ago.
July 2025
Started working on Valo on July 16, 2025!
Spent some time in Colorado for a family member’s wedding.
Kiddo continues to wow us with their original artwork.
August
Had my first on-site Valo meeting in Boston, MA. Went for multiple runs (including one with my supervisor), met a ton of my coworkers, and had some of the most work-related fun I can remember.
Celebrated the end of an era: my official last day at UGA, a 10.5-year run. Bought myself a small gift to help celebrate.
Attended my first-ever minis painting at a local board game shop.
Read a fantastic Sanderson book (I mean, they’re all fantastic, but this was really fantastic).
The whole family went to the Cleveland Air Show. Saw some incredible aircraft. Lots of loud noises.
September
Busy month–September always seems busy–so I didn’t take many pictures. But there was at least one rainbow.
October
Our car hit 100,000 miles.
My 2025 Halloween getup!
Our family took a few days’ getaway in the Appalachians. My goodness, the views.
The first porch pumpkin carved entirely by our kiddo!
We saw a DOUBLE rainbow on a run!
Attended a birthday party for one of kiddo’s friends at a wall climbing gym. Gave us quite a few ideas!
November
This is usually when the leaves really start turning for us. Absolutely love it.
During Cathryn’s birthday month, we had a longtime mutual friend come stay with us.
December
I joined the “Latke Daddies” for the second year in row in prepping industrial-sized numbers of latkes. So much freaking fun.
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment was released, though I didn’t really get a chance to dig into it until the new year. Still, I was incredibly thrilled for it and have absolutely loved playing it.
Celebrating all the holidays in our interfaith household.
Kiddo continued expanding their artistic talents on our trip to AZ to see extended family over Christmas.
For the second time in a row, we brought COVID back home with us following our AZ trip (I might be permanently done visiting AZ).
January 2026
Cathryn and I attended a wedding in Ohio (child-free!) for one of Cathryn’s longtime friends. It was FRIGID but also such a blast to clean up a bit.
We’ve been together for 20 years, y’all :)
We got snow this year, and a decent amount of it! Decent enough to make snow angels. Of course it also canceled school for a handful of days, so there was that too.
February
Made some more homelab hardware upgrades. Y’know, just after the prices started surging.
Nope, still not a fan of The Depths. Still love the game though.
March
Took my second work trip to Boston! This time, it was for an all-day workshop that I organized from start to finish. By all accounts it was a huge hit.
Also, my birthday month! Got myself a lovely new running watch.
Cathryn and also picked out a new living couch to replace our 40+ year old one.
I read another mind-blowing science fiction book by one of my all-time favorite authors.
April
Installed new shelving in my home office (picture not available, but it was life-changing).
Went to a UGA softball game with friends!
Dealing with a broken bathtub faucet. Homeownership, am I right.
Got inspired one day after watching the Faceytalk episode of Bluey, and just… coded my own version. Kiddo LOVED IT. I promise I’ll open source it one of these days!
May
We got one of the funniest AI-generated stickers in the mail from a friend across the pond (it’s a joke about how bad AI generated images can be).
We finished our living room makeover! This was the first time we seriously moved things around since we moved in almost 11 years ago.
I broke a window at our local YMCA during sled pushes. Oops. Don’t worry, I immediately notified the folks who worked there and paid for its replacement myself.
Our family went to an event at our public library that featured a petting zoo. Lots of cute fuzzy animals!
June
We’ve started seeing the new baby deer out on our runs through neighborhoods.
Another of our lontime friends, this time here in town, got married!
1.0 release day, woohoo!
Don’t mind me, just over here setting new personal bests on deadlift. Seriously, I don’t think I could deadlift 360lbs even at my height of high school football, and certainly not over 5 sets of 2-3 reps each set.
And flipping tires for the heckuvit. That I used to do in high school, so it feels like seeing an old friend for the first time in decades. Then you get tired of them real quick.
We kicked off our two-week trip to Seattle! Fun fact: this trip had been in the making for six years. We’d even purchased tickets for the trip… for May 2020. Suffice to say, that iteration did not happen. But we finally made it happen.
July
We wrapped up our two-week trip in Seattle.
Just in time for me to celebrate a full year at Valo. Incredible.
Here’s to many more!
Citation
@online{quinn2026,
author = {Quinn, Shannon},
title = {The {Long} {Year}},
date = {2026-07-18},
url = {https://magsol.github.io/2026-07-18-the-long-year},
langid = {en}
}