About

will happen, Happening, happened…

The archive is a repository of prior year in reviews (YIRs) and other items that have an importance that is seemingly inversely proportional to time

The most notable part of this year has been the arrival of MARGARET GRACE! Margaret (or Maggie, we call her by either name) was born on July 30th at 11:50 pm, weighing in at 7 lbs. 4 oz. Wystan and Joe are thrilled with this joyful addition to the family and absolutely love being Maggie’s parents. As you may imagine, the latter half of 2023 has been filled with tons of diapers, frequent feedings, loads of laundry, and lots of love.

Prior to Maggie’s debut, Joe and Wystan cashed in all their points for a week-long “babymoon” trip to Savannah, Georgia in March. They were charmed by the city’s walkability and architecture (Joe not-so-jokingly started looking at real estate listings in preparation for a place to escape New England winters in the years to come). Little did they know, Savannah has the third largest St. Patrick’s Day celebration in the country -- and their hotel staged the beginning of the parade! It was an experience, to say the least.

Wystan still works for Haley & Aldrich, splitting her time between Providence and Boston with occasional work travel (e.g., a technical planning committee meeting for the International Foundations Conference and Equipment Expo in Colorado Springs). Joe joined her at an offshore wind conference in Baltimore this spring, playing with an all-industry cover band to a full house at the Hard Rock Cafe for a networking event (hundreds of people!). Wystan remained active up until the birth of Margaret, logging her last workout at the gym on Maggie’s due date before she began her “taper” to prepare for Maggie’s arrival. Wystan has started to go rogue in the kitchen, experimenting with her own recipes and figuring out ways to enjoy her baking hobby while also staying (more or less) aligned with Joe’s heart-healthy diet. A new “big camera” plus a super cute baby girl have been great reasons to continue exploring photography. She will return to work part-time in January, but in the meantime has been delighted to turn off her alarm clock and live on Maggie’s schedule.

Joe officially got tenure at the University of Rhode Island this year and has been on sabbatical since July. This teaching release has allowed him to consult for a Aclarity LLC, a water technology start-up. He also coaches a few classes at the gym. He spends his remaining free time walking with Maggie in a front pack, singing lullabies, and playing banjo “concerts” to an adorable audience of one. Speaking of music, Joe’s band from Philadelphia, Two Handed Engine, released their first LP this year to great reviews. He has a lot on his plate. If you ask him about a New Year’s resolution, it might be something about being more strategic with his time; based on what we understand however, 2024 looks like it will be rich and full for the whole family… tune in next year to find out more!

It’s been a year of hearts breaking and hearts healing.

Joe embarked on his cardiac rehab journey starting in late January: 12 weeks of monitored exercise combined with health education, mindfulness classes, behavioral psychologist, dietitian, nutritionist, and cardiologist appointments. He aced his final stress test (setting a new record at the clinic!) and celebrated by running a half marathon a few weeks later. The doctors gave him carte blanche for exercise, and he is back full throttle at the gym. Now that he is finally off his blood thinner medication, he can ride the OneWheel he got for his birthday last year to his…heart’s…content. Joe’s tenure application to the University of Rhode Island was filed this fall, leaving the interesting question of: What next?

Wystan had an exciting professional year, including an invitation to give a State of the Practice presentation at the American Society of Civil Engineers’ GeoCongress conference (“Using Advanced Finite Element Method (FEM) Modeling and Soil Property Measurements in Dense Urban Development” -- this was not the title she would have selected, but that’s what they specifically requested) and a promotion which included managing her firm’s offshore wind market pursuits. This summer was also the culmination of a leadership development class which Haley & Aldrich runs for two dozen hand-picked company leaders, requiring thousands of pages of reading and nearly three week’s worth of workshop sessions when all was said and done (Joe accompanied her to the final session on a dude ranch in Tucson, Arizona, and announced that the Spousal Leadership Program offered by Haley & Aldrich is top-notch). She has been enjoying the chance to exercise learnings in her new role and in her new office space at a coworking building in downtown Providence. 

We thought 2022 would include an update on an expansion to our family: we were expecting a baby boy to arrive in August. The stars seemed to be aligning when we were finally successful in buying a house just south of Providence -- but late in the game, we found out that our son (who we named Rudyard Aaron Goodwill, Rudy for short) had irreparable congenital heart defects (unrelated to Joe’s heart troubles, just a horrible coincidence). We lost him on the cusp of the third trimester. Wystan was hospitalized with complications. We closed on the house a week after our loss and the day after Wystan was discharged. 

The remainder of the year has been spent healing, settling into our new home, and putting one foot in front of the other. We are incredibly grateful for those who have supported us -- we wouldn’t recommend it, but back-to-back life-altering traumas are an effective way to connect with friends and loved ones.

We forever hold our little angel Rudy in our hearts and are grateful for the far-too-short time that we got to be his parents.

As some of you may have heard, Joe survived a heart attack in October -- an event which will forever mark “before” and “after” periods in our lives. For more details on Joe’s health scare check out the “Joe’s Heart” tab.

BEFORE

2021 kicked off with Wystan’s oldest brother moving from Chicago to New Hampshire, proposing to his girlfriend, and getting married -- all in January! Wystan had recently embarked on a photography challenge for the year and was delighted to be the surprise photographer for the engagement (though had she known in advance she might have done a few things differently…). 

Joe and Wystan joined a local crossfit-style gym late in 2020 and enjoyed working out together and meeting new people. Wystan worked from home most of the time (going up to her office in Boston no more than once per week), so the gym represented her primary “out-of-house experience.” Spring term was a hybrid model of in-person and online teaching for Joe. Thank goodness for an apartment with plenty of room for two home office setups!

The summer brought with it vaccination (woohoo!) and a reintroduction to civilization, travel, and society -- which Joe and Wystan mostly celebrated by going to remote locations (e.g., more hiking in the Adirondacks and visiting our dear friends Marie and Arthur on Nantucket). We competed in the absolutely crazy housing market but came up empty-handed (better luck next year?). Wystan was not terribly disappointed that she could continue trying out new recipes from her Food & Wine magazine subscription in their wonderfully spacious kitchen.

Joe kicked off the new school year with in-person classes, an NSF CAREER award, another large federal grant, a prestigious Emerging Investigator Award from a Royal Society of Chemistry Journal, a stable full of students in his research lab, an impeccable diet, a robust exercise schedule, and… 

AFTER

We are beyond grateful to our new gym family -- beyond saving Joe’s life, they visited the hospital, raised money for us, brought us meals, checked in regularly, and have supported us as we grow accustomed to our new normal. Other than taking it easy for a few weeks and kicking his nitro cold brew addiction (well, switching to decaf anyway), life goes on (almost) as usual and every expectation is that Joe will be back in the gym soon.

What a weird year. We traveled less in 2020, that’s for sure…

We embarked on our COVID adventure with a spring in our step and a song in our hearts (literally: Joe wrote a song!), but our little “Marlborough Mansion” studio in Boston’s Back Bay got a lot smaller once quarantine measures began in March. Both Joe and Wystan found themselves working from home in the same room -- leading Joe to realize just how much of Wystan’s work day is spent on collaborative engineering design projects (read: talking on the phone for about 75% of the day). We were able to relieve the stress of the small space by Joe’s once-a-week visits to campus to keep lab experiments running, Wystan’s ability to go back to her nearly-empty office a day or two per week, taking outdoor exercise time seriously, and “podding up” with our across-the-alley neighbors (Marie and Arthur).

In spite of the oppressively lonely conditions of quarantine, Joe and Wystan found some joy in the pattern that emerged: on Fridays, Wystan and Marie would discuss their weekly reading of Don Quixote over cocktails, richly inflected by recorded online lectures by the illustrious Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature at Yale, Roberto González Echevarría; Joe would arrive later and embark on conversations with Arthur about how American history influences modern day politics (or similar) while receiving an expert lesson in oyster shucking; we would cook dinner together (usually a recipe we had never made before), drink wine, and bask in the glow of good friends and good food -- while planning the menu for the following week. Saturday morning Joe and Wystan would meet up with a few other diehard fans of a group fitness instructor from a local gym, who taught ad hoc outdoor bootcamp-style classes on a public-access turf field.

We took a hiatus or two from Boston to stay with Wystan’s parents in the Philadelphia suburbs, enjoying the extra space -- like separate rooms for us to work from! -- and time with family. We also hiked several peaks in the Adirondacks, including New York’s highest: Mount Marcy! In August, after nearly four years in Boston, Wystan and Joe left and moved to Providence, Rhode Island to a much larger apartment. And, in spite of all the bumps, Goodwill Labs (real name: Water for the World) had an excellent year: five papers published and a big federal grant awarded!

While we are excited to immerse ourselves in the “stream of Providence,” we plan on staying out of the canal-like rivers that flow through our new city.

No ifs, ands, or buts about it: 2019 was not an easy ride for Joe and Wystan. Team Autobueno continues to stay the course; however, surviving nearly a dozen work conferences plus all kinds of [national] travel to welcome each other home.

Wystan debuted as a (part-time, one-off, adjunct) professor teaching a course in Advanced Foundation Design at the University of New Hampshire this spring while maintaining her full-time position at Haley & Aldrich. While she really enjoyed interacting with students and mentoring the next generation of engineers, she thinks that perhaps in the future just one job is enough. In her “free time” she likes to try new recipes, read, and practice calligraphy.

Joe had the nerdy pleasure of visiting the Argonne National Laboratory outside of Chicago, where he got to collaborate with scientists and engineers to look at what happens when you shoot lasers at ferrate: sometimes it disintegrates if there’s too much laser, but if you do it right then you can see ferrate change oxidant states (this description brought to you by his wife’s limited understanding). When not at “Rhody,” Joe has been playing his new banjo and harmonica (often in the boulevard of Commonwealth Avenue, much to the delight of local passers-by and their dogs: “Dogs are my biggest fans; or at least, they’re really big fans of sniffing my banjo case.”).

Too much work and not enough vacation is never a good combination. As a duo, Wystan and Joe took their FIRST EVER, NON-ANNIVERSARY vacation together up in Putney, Vermont, enjoying time in quiet greenery while drinking delightful local beers and ciders. They also ran the Boston Athletic Association Half Marathon together this fall to break the streak of five “no race” years (the last thing was the Philadelphia Marathon in 2014). 

We hope that at this time next year we can look back on 2019 as a period of great growth -- I mean, based on our understanding, hindsight is 2020. 

2018 started off with a bang in Lahore, Pakistan (literally -- there were fireworks and celebratory firing of guns in the air, giving us quite a start!). Why were we in Pakistan, you ask? Our good friend Hassaan got married! Hassaan and Joe were roommates for several years in graduate school, and Hassaan is also a prestigious member of the “Minute-Leopard” club (Lafayette College Leopards + UMass Amherst Minutemen alum). Our experience traveling in Pakistan was overwhelmingly positive, and we will deeply treasure the memories of our visit.

The travel didn’t stop there: Joe and Wystan also went on a Carswell family trip to France in July (which, when you include Joe’s conference in Brazil in November 2017, puts us on four different continents in the last 12 months...). We were moved by our time in Normandy touring World War II sites and museums, charmed by lovely Paris, and appropriately overwhelmed by the ostentation of Versailles (Joe: “I think I get the French Revolution”).

Wystan recently tacked on another (very brief!) trip back to Norway for an offshore wind turbine foundation workshop (she spent some time there in 2013, during her Ph.D.). She continues to work for Haley & Aldrich in Boston, has enjoyed exploring the world of business development, and was very relieved when she passed the Professional Engineering (PE) Exam this April. Joe deserves a special shout-out for the multitude of “Joe Mac’n’PEs” dinners he prepared to fuel studying leading up to the exam.

Joe was very excited to do something twice -- this is the first time since graduating with his Ph.D. that he has gone back to the same campus a second year in a row! He has been supporting a Ph.D. and a master’s student in his lab and successfully published an insightful paper on the de-escalation of risk perception post-Flint, MI drinking water crisis (you can read more here). URI is building a new engineering laboratory which Joe looks forward to moving into next year (we hear they will have lots of fun toys, like mass spectrometers, gas chromatographs, and spectrophotometers -- all the things to make a water-nerd’s heart go pitter-pat!).

As Wystan’s dad might say, this past year our lives have been “rich and full” -- and while we sometimes feel it has been too rich and full for our tastes, we cannot help but feel grateful for the abundance of blessings and goodwill (hehe!) in our lives.

What a year! Joe spent the 2016-2017 school year as an assistant professor of environmental engineering at Saint Francis University in Loretto, Pennsylvania while Wystan remained in Boston working for Haley & Aldrich, Inc. as a geotechnical engineering consultant. We missed each other terribly, but the time apart had some positives - Joe enjoyed spending more time with his parents in Pittsburgh (and eating a lot of hot dogs at PNC Park while watching the Pirates) and Wystan had fun exploring the city of Boston by bike, spending a lot of time with her sister Brynna, and learning how to make the notoriously high-maintenance french macarons.

With hard work and tenacity, Joe made it through the arduous application and interview process to be the #1 pick for assistant professor of environmental engineering at the University of Rhode Island! As of September 2017, Joe and Wystan were once again cohabiting -- albeit in a small studio apartment in Boston’s Back Bay (which we affectionately refer to as our “Marlborough Mansion”). Joe takes Amtrak to Kingston, RI most days (except for when he works at his “office” -- the Boston Public Library) and Wystan continues to ride her bike to work in Charlestown. We aren’t exactly sure what the future holds for us professionally or geographically, but we are grateful to be back in the same house and that both of us have fulfilling (if demanding) jobs.

Being apart led to a lot of travel: this year’s adventures included several visits to Chicago and West Point to see family, a trip to Tulum, Mexico for Wystan’s brother Ian’s 40th birthday,  spending our 2nd anniversary in the Adirondacks (our Christmas Card this year!), and a quick gallivant to a conference in Brazil!