The Pressure of a Name

Eight Things

2007-05-15T16:20:00.000-06:00

Jackie tagged me for this meme. Quite awhile ago. Apparently, I'm supposed to tell you eight interesting things about myself. As long as we're all willing to play fast and loose with the definition of interesting, I'm game. :) Here we go:

(1) I despise the summer. If I could choose my own weather, it would never get above 70 degrees in the summer and would be blustery and cold and snow a lot during the winter. But the snow would never cause driving problems, because that only annoys me.

(2) The only exception to the above rule is the week that I'm at the beach each year. That week, it should be incessantly sunny and very hot. Hot enough that I have to spend a large portion of the day actually in the ocean just to ward off a heatstroke.

(3) I worked very hard for nearly a decade to obtain my PhD. And most of the time, I really love my field of research. But sometimes I wonder if I could go back to the beginning, knowing what I know now, whether I'd give up my career to instead have a family with 2.5 kids, a house, a Volvo, a dog, and a white picket fence. (You know, a family in the 50's, more or less). Sometimes I think I would. I feel like I inadvertently, or perhaps unconsciously, made a choice somewhere along the way not to have both a career and a family. And that makes me sad.

(4) I find that my tolerance for bullshit, arrogance, pretentiousness, and condescension has decreased dramatically as I've gotten older. I simply don't deal with with any variation of rude.

(5) My best friend threw me a 30th birthday party last year. It was the first time I'd really celebrated my birthday in 15 years.

(6) I'm completely creeped out by birds. Nearly terrified of them, even. I can usually hide my fear if I have to, but given the choice, I'd avoid contact with all avian life on a permanent basis.

(7) I had a southern accent up into high school. I don't remember exactly when I got rid of it, but I remember it being a very conscious decision.

(8) I cannot stand cilantro. It tastes like soap. I hear that this is a genetic thing, but all I care about is that it stays out of my food.

At this point, I should tag some people to do their own meme and this thing will continue to be passed along like the paper chain letters of yore. But I figure that if anyone who reads this wants to do their own, they'll just do it. I don't need to tag you. :)

I'm a Knitter

2007-04-24T17:45:00.000-06:00

I promised Jackie pictures of some of my knitting projects eons ago. Especially since I have picked out most of the yarn and patterns with her! And I even posted about it not long ago. So here they are.

This newborn cardigan & hat set are a gift destined to be given as soon as I get my act together. The baby was born a few days ago, so hopefully I'll get it completely done tonight. All I have left to do is to block the sweater so it loses some of its lumpiness (and a possible slight asymmetry). But look at those buttons! I sewed them on all by myself!! (Jackie did sew up the sides for me last time I was there visiting; it kept looking funny every time I did it).

I also made the same cardigan a couple of sizes larger and (obviously) in a different color for another baby. This still needs its buttons sewn on and to be blocked as well. This taupe cardigan is going to be part of a gift set with a little chocolate brown baby bolero. A newborn shrug, if you will.

Obviously the shrug isn't nearly done. All of the lavender yarn is just temporarily holding stitches; the whole thing will be brown when I'm done. I have one arm sewn on (a herculean feat for me!) and am very proud of the fact that I didn't call Jackie once for cross-country hand holding on that part! It took a lot of concentration, though, and I am not afraid to admit that I had some harsh words for the yarn when it kept knotting itself as I sewed. When it's all done, along the bottom & front edges there will be a ribbing pattern similar to what you may (or may not) be able to see on the end of the sleeves. I also love that in the back of the bolero is a little eyelet pattern. If I recall what the pattern says correctly, it's a Celtic symbol (?) meant to bring good luck & health to the wearer. At any rate, the baby destined for the bolero is going to be one fashionable kid. How many newborns have a trendy little shrug to wear to their first social engagements? :)

I'm also working on my first real toddler-sized sweater. The cardigans are pretty easy to make but this sweater intimidated me at first. I'm pleasantly surprised with how it's turning out!

It still needs arms, obviously. And the green yarn is just holding the arm-intended stitches. I actually need to go buy new needles to make those; I thought I had the right size, but I don't. I'm hoping that it will be done soon. This project actually has no intended recipient, though. I think the purple yarn makes it look pretty girly (though the unintended gathering on the arm stitch holders right now may be skewing my opinion), so I'll probably just give it to whomever is the right size at the right time of year.

Mal? Really?

2007-04-16T21:26:00.000-06:00

After reading about this on both The Historian's and Heather's blogs, I decided to take this little quiz for myself. I like Firefly relatively well, so why not? I have to say, I'm a little surprised to find out that I have so much Malcolm Reynolds in me. Kaylee and Simon I can understand. Malcolm? I would not have thought that. I suppose it's nice to know that I am "generally good." I would definitely protect my crew from harm. I know that much.

My results:
You are Malcolm Reynolds (Captain)

Honest and a defender of the innocent. You sometimes make mistakes in judgment but you are generally good and would protect your crew from harm.

Malcolm Reynolds (Captain)		90%
Kaylee Frye (Ship Mechanic)		90%
Dr. Simon Tam (Ship Medic)		90%
Zoe Washburne (Second-in-command)		80%
Inara Serra (Companion)		65%
Derrial Book (Shepherd)		60%
River (Stowaway)		55%
Wash (Ship Pilot)		40%
Alliance		40%
Jayne Cobb (Mercenary)		35%
A Reaver (Cannibal)		0%

Click here to take the Serenity Firefly Personality Test

I wonder what set of responses I would had to contrive to end up being mostly Reaver.... (For the record, I answered the rather direct "Are you a cannibal?" question in the negative. That probably did me in on potentially being a Reaver.)

Long Time No...Post?

2007-04-14T15:36:00.000-06:00

Hello friendly readers! It's clearly been a while. I have had very mixed feelings about maintaining my blog for the last several months, hence the dearth of posts. I still am not sure about it, but for the moment I'm here. My temporary job is going relatively well. I generally enjoy what I'm working on and I'm even able to do a bit of research of my own! I've taken on a second project which will keep me employed through the end of the calendar year. In the meantime, I'm working on figuring out what I want to do. In a lot of ways, I'm very conflicted about my career (or lack thereof). I still find it very odd that I'm now Dr. Meredith; I'm rather unsure what to do with myself!

As Jackie can attest, I've been working on a boatload of new knitting since I finished school. I don't have any pictures of recent work at the moment, but hopefully I can take some in the next few days to show off. I've been getting a little more ambitious with my recent projects. I've branched out from making only blankets and scarves and I now have learned how to make things that are not rectangular shaped! Woo! I found a pattern for a baby cardigan that I really like and have made two in quick succession. I'm about halfway through a toddler pullover sweater, too. (It currently has no arms, but the body is done at least). I have even made one legwarmer! I've been rather productive in my newfound spare time.

Also in my free time, I've returned to my roots as a news junkie. :) In the New York Times yesterday, I read about this: scientists have isolated proteins from a Tyrannosaurus rex. Seriously! It's pretty darn awesome, in my opinion. Let's just all agree not to try to clone any dinosaurs, m'k? That cannot possibly end well.

Temporary Job is Better than No Job

2006-12-12T10:03:00.000-07:00

I am extraordinarily thankful this morning to have received a temporary job offer here at the university for the next 6 months. I have job applications out elsewhere, but have yet to hear anything back from any of them so I've been staring impending joblessness dead in the face since I defended. (I had managed to pretty much ignore it while writing, other than to submit a few applications). I have little to no idea what I'll actually be doing in this position, though I know that it won't just be be a continuation of my present research. And for that, I am grateful as well! I think a change of direction right now would do me a world of good. So today is a good day. I am going to be employed, and I am grateful.

A Holiday Meme

2006-12-05T15:04:00.000-07:00

Jenni tagged me for a meme, and for once I am on the ball. Here it is:

1.Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate? Hot chocolate. I used to like egg nog a lot, but I think too much about what's in it now. And it kind of skeeves me out. Though I will still probably drink a little bit of the store-bought kind if my Dad buys it.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just set them under the tree? Definitely wrapped. They were always in different wrapping paper from the others and had different handwriting on the labels. My parents always gave us one gift; Santa brought the rest.

3. Colored lights on tree/house or white? On the tree, it depends on the ornaments. On a tree I would do for my house, I'd probably put white lights and matching ornaments. Maybe some ribbon. But on my parents' tree at home, it's a free for all. All of the ornaments my siblings and I made as kids and all the ones my Mom made during her super-crafty years are joined by all the other ornaments purchased over the years. I think the lights that end up on the tree are whichever ones my Dad comes across first, either colored or white. In recent years my siblings and I have taken to switching the lights to the different patterns (blinking, etc.) while my Dad's not looking because it makes him a little crazy. He hates it, and it's funny to see him get a bit worked up over the Christmas tree lights. My parents have never put lights on the house, though they recently bought those netted lights that Dad tosses (somewhat willy nilly) over the bushes in the front yard. He also acquired a lighted reindeer that now sits in the front yard slowly turning its head back and forth. I won't comment further on those "decorations".

4. Do you hang mistletoe? No. I don't think I could identify mistletoe, even if it were labeled.

5. When do you put your decorations up? It would never be before Thanksgiving, I know that much. But sadly, I usually don't decorate my own apartment. In years past it's been the case that I was leaving to go home mid-December and it wasn't worth the effort to decorate for only 10 days or something. But even this year, when I'm still not sure when I'm going home yet, I haven't decorated. It just seems a little silly and unnecessary for one person. I did buy a little, real tree one time several years ago, though, and it certainly smelled good. It was very cute in the corner of my apartment.

6. What is your favorite holiday dish? There's a casserole that my Grandma made many years ago for Christmas that sounds really gross, but is actually freakishly good. It's pineapple casserole with cheese and breadcrumbs. I have no idea where she got the recipe, but we loved it and my Mom has continued to make it ever since. We're stunned every year that we like it because on paper? Kind of gross.

7. Favorite Holiday memory as a child: My birthday is 3 days before Christmas. For my 5th birthday party, my Mom hired a guy (turned out to be a college kid, I learned later) to dress up as Santa Claus and come to my party. We were in the middle of the party (eating cake) when the front doorbell rang. I raced to the door, opened it up, and Santa was standing there in all his Santa glory. He had come down from the North Pole just before Christmas for my birthday party. And he brought little gifts for everyone! I felt like the most special kid in the world. So it's not exactly a Christmas memory, but it's close enough.

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa? My mom told me! It was in a "you know he's not real, right?" context, but up until that point I was still holding out some hope that it might be true. I guess I was probably 10 or so, so I should have known. (About 10 minutes after the Santa conversation, I also had her confirm explicitly that the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny also fell in the Lies My Parents Told Me category).

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve? Nope. There is no gift-giving love on Christmas Eve in our house. Most of the presents don't even come out until late Christmas Eve night, even now!

10. How do you decorate your Christmas Tree? If I did my own, it would be very neat and tidy. Very Martha Stewart-ish. Though I love our tree at home, too, because it has literally 30 years of ornaments on it. If I ever have kids, I'll definitely do a tree like that with the same homemade ornaments to bring out year after year.

11. Snow! Love it or Dread it? Love it. It rarely snowed where I grew up, but it did once on my birthday. I don't remember if it lasted until Christmas, but I do associate Christmas that year with snow so maybe it did.

12. Can you ice skate? Yes. I love it.

13. Favorite Holiday movie: The old school Rudolph. With the animatronic, fuzzy, claymation characters. I love it every year.

14. What is your favorite Holiday Dessert? My mom makes tiny pecan pies that I love. I don't really like pecans all that much, but something about the tiny nature of the pie makes it just perfect.

15. What is a favorite holiday tradition? We go to Mass on Christmas Eve. And every year, Mom says that we have to get there 45 minutes early because Church will fill up quickly. And every year, someone in the house is running late. So we inevitably get there only about 20 minutes early and have to look for seats in odd places. Some years we manage to find a pew off on a corner, some years we're on the overflow chairs set up in the back of the Church. A couple of years ago we were even on chairs on the side of the altar, literally in front of everyone. It's always chaos, but it's almost tradition at this point. And it's almost the only time all year that my whole family is together at Mass. Despite any lingering whining about tardiness on the way to Church, I enjoy it. We still go to the same Church my siblings and I grew up in, so there's a sense of familiarity about it that makes me genuinely happy.

16. What tops your tree? My parents used to have a lovely angel that went on the tree for many years. Something happened to the angel a few years ago, though, and now it's a really terribly gold star. It looks very odd. I always think I'm just going to take it off just to put it out of its misery, but I never do.

17. Which do you prefer: giving or receiving? Giving. Definitely. I get so excited about seeing people open my gifts! (But looking back, I gave my parents some HORRIBLE gifts when I was young!)

18. What is your favorite Christmas Song? The First Noel.

19. Candy Canes? Love 'em. But only the peppermint kind. The fruity ones are a little bit nasty.

So now I have to pass it on. I'll tag Jackie, Pigs, and Eddie. Happy holidays! :)

Friends

2006-11-21T14:27:00.000-07:00

I have the most outstanding, amazing, supportive friends ever. Whenever I feel down, I just remind myself of how lucky I am to be surrounded by such great people. It perks me right up. Whether near or far, we can always pick up right where we left off last time we were together.

I'm headed to California tomorrow to visit a couple of these fantastic friends for Thanksgiving and I'm very excited about it. I haven't seen them since June and we've all had some very stressful months in the interim, so I'm hopeful that we can all sit back and relax for a couple of days and just enjoy each other's company. That to me is the perfect holiday.

So happy Thanksgiving to all of my wonderful friends out there! May you all be surrounded by friends and family and happiness this weekend. :)

My Sigh of Relief

2006-11-19T11:11:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Dr. Meredith! :D

Eight years of graduate school later (in two different degree programs), I've finally successfully defended my PhD thesis. I don't think I've ever been so happy or relieved about anything in my entire life. There are moments from my defense that still make cringe a little bit (I couldn't have added 2 and 2 at one point if you had asked me), but overall it went well. I think I handled most of my questions well and I actually got off a little bit easy because of a technicality in the rules. I know that thousands of people earn their PhDs every year, but for this weekend at least I am darn proud of myself. :)

My parents came out here to attend my defense and that was really nice too. I think they were a little bit overwhelmed, but I'm glad they got to see it. Neither one really has any idea what I do and I kind of like the thought that I was able to impress them.

As it Approaches

2006-11-15T13:16:00.000-07:00

I found this post several months ago on another blog and bookmarked it. I thought it would be wise/worthwhile/comforting to read it again as my thesis defense approached. It details many of the different types of committee members one can have on their thesis committee, and some of the combinations that might make one's defense easier or harder. As I reread it now, I feel the need to remove "comforting" from that list of descriptors.

I fear that I have put together a more difficult committee than is necessary. I have two people that I know will find something barely tangentially related to my work to latch onto at all possible times. I've run out of ways to figure out how to prepare for that. (Plus, they're both coming back into town from elsewhere around the country specifically for this event; I hope my scheduling has not pre-irritated them.) My thesis advisor has never not slept through a presentation of mine, so I am working on the assumption that he'll sleep through my defense. Then he'll pipe up with some criticism of my work that he's never mentioned to me before; this seems to be his MO. My thesis topic is somewhat interdisciplinary, so even my "outside" person isn't really all that outside. And the last member of my committee is a new faculty member; I haven't a clue what to expect from her.

I still have a list of questions/topics on which I could royally embarrass myself if they come up. I have two days to whiddle this list down (preferably) to nothing. But the real fear is the questions I cannot anticipate. I know everyone worries about this, but taking comfort in knowing that everyone has to go through this rite of passage really does nothing to quell my fears right now. I have just over 48 hours to go. I cannot wait until this is over and I can sleep, eat, and maybe even live again.

So Close

2006-11-09T15:19:00.000-07:00

Well, my thesis is turned in. Actually, it has been for nearly a week. I'm still living in fear that one (or more) of my committee members will call me up and say that it's not good enough and I shouldn't defend. But as the days go by and I hear nothing but crickets (and the train that goes by at 4 am outside my apartment), I'm hopeful that they think it's ok.

My defense is a week from tomorrow. I vary between thinking that I'll do well and being completely terrified. At this point, though, I'll be over the moon just to have it done.

Things I Have Learned

2006-10-27T14:17:00.000-06:00

I like to learn things. Since Sunday, I have been amassing a list of the new(-ish) knowledge I have gained. It's terribly exciting.

(2) When making a huge batch soup with pasta, do not put ALL of the pasta in on the first cooking. It will simply suck up all of the soup broth in the refrigerator overnight. The broth is the essence of what makes soup soup, so without the broth you really just have pasta-y stew. (I have actually learned this about a dozen separate times. I just keep forgetting).

(3) Desperate Housewives is on at 8, not 7. So don't sit down with a bowl of lukewarm noodle-ful soup-stew at 7:15 hoping to catch the remaining 45 minutes of DH. You'll find Ty Pennington instead and only be disappointed.

(4) Everything involving thesis writing takes about 10 times longer than you think it will. Just go ahead and plan for that.

(5) My microwave has roughly the power output of a Glade^® candle.

(6) I need background noise when I'm working. Having listened to every CD I own in the last week at least twice, I'm moved on to leaving the TV on. Cable networks play CSI and all its variants a lot.

(7) Also related to #6, some network (maybe one of the Turners?) plays about 3 episodes of X-Files in a row in the middle of the night. The first few seasons of that were really quite good. But it's a scary show to watch in the middle of the night.

(8) I heart Pandora. You should heart Pandora, too.

(9) Four alarm clocks does not an on-time wake up make.

Counting Down

2006-10-13T11:41:00.000-06:00

I've set a date for my thesis defense. It's very exciting. In a terrifying, please-don't-let-me-fail kind of way. I take some comfort in the fact that in only a few weeks my thesis will be turned in and 14 short days after that I'll be done. I expect the manic mood swings characteristic of my last few months to be wrapping up then as well.

I wonder if anyone has ever earned a PhD in clinical psychology (or something related) by studying the mental well-being of other PhD candidates. I think it could be an interesting study.

Sam

2006-10-07T02:16:00.000-06:00

I remember a brief scene from The West Wing when Sam Seaborn was having some difficulty writing a speech. He's writing on a pad of yellow legal paper on the desk in front of him. In one smooth motion he stops writing, rips off the top sheet, crumples it up in his fist, bangs his fist on the table three times, throws the crumpled up ball of paper into the corner, and picks up the pen to start writing again.

I feel Sam's pain.

Not coincidentally, my computer is also named Sam. Yet ComputerSam does not crumple in a very satisfying way like a piece of paper does. ComputerSam does not crumple at all, in fact. And slinging him willy nilly into the corner is probably a bad idea at this juncture. But I feel Sam's pain.

Gosh I'm wordy when I've run out of relevant work-related words.

Procrastination

2006-10-06T12:07:00.000-06:00

Pigs pointed out the irony that I wrote a post about my inability to write my thesis. That irony is not lost on me. I'm now dogsitting this weekend at a friend's house and am looking so eagerly at a copy of Molecular Biology of the Cell that I'm about to rip it off the shelf to read it. I haven't wanted to know anything real about biology since I took 9th grade biology in the early 90's. That's how badly I am in procrastination mode right now.

Luckily this whole graduate school thing/debacle will be over one way or another in a matter of weeks.

If I Had Known Then What I Know Now

2006-09-29T12:29:00.000-06:00

It turns out that there's a lot of writing involved in science. Like, massive amounts. A dissertation is freaking long. It might have been nice had someone warned me about that back in the day. I might have opted for a career in underwater basketweaving instead.

I enjoy the research aspect of science. I like asking questions and setting up experiments (or observations, as is the case in astrophysics). I like hunting down and fixing problems when things have gone awry. I like analyzing data. I like thinking about what it all means, how it fits into the big scientific picture, what new questions an experiment leads me to ask....

I do not like writing about it. In fact, I despise it. On a list of things I'd like to be doing right now, "multiple root canals" and "sharp stick in the eye" both appear slightly above "writing". And when I decided to go to graduate school oh so many years ago, it truly didn't occur to me exactly how much writing is involved in an academic career. Sadly, the science is only part of it.

So here I sit. Staring at my dissertation file. Wishing that the barrel of monkeys I have acquired to write it for me would get off their bums and finish the job. I'm on a timeline here. And I have root canals to schedule and sharp sticks to find.

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In other news, you should check out the picture of Pigs's new baby, Piglet. He's a cutie. :)

All I Have

2006-09-09T21:40:00.000-06:00

I don't want to keep seeing the last post that's been up there, like, two weeks. But this is all I have to offer you right now:

It's a picture from my trip to Rhode Island earlier this year. It's lovely place. I wish I were there now.

Back to work....

As Suggested By

2006-08-29T15:35:00.000-06:00

Staci just posted this meme/email forward on her blog, so I thought I would follow suit. :) Following are things you might not have known about me....

Four Jobs I have held:
1. Tagger at Polo/Ralph Lauren warehouse (I literally put price tags on clothes destined for Ralph Lauren outlets. I barely tolerated the job, but it came with a wicked good discount!)
2. Holiday HoneyBaked Ham counter salesperson (immediately pre-vegetarianism)
3. Dental Office runner (did office work as well as lab/equipment stuff)
4. Awesome, awesome babysitter (circa age 16)

Four movies I would watch over and over:
1. Dead Poet's Society
2. Roman Holiday
3. Sleepless in Seattle
4. The West Wing (Not a movie, I know, but something I could watch for hours on end. The good seasons, at least.)

Four places I have lived:
1. Dallas, TX
2. Greensboro, NC
3. St. Petersburg, Russia (only for a summer)
4. Durham, NC

Four of my favorite foods:
1. Cheese
2. Homemade pasta. With Cheese.
3. Belgian chocolate
4. Asparagus

Four places I would rather be:
1. Emerald Isle, NC
2. Tallin, Estonia
3. St. Petersburg, Russia
4. Brugge, Belgium

Four friends I think will respond:
Hard to say. I'm not known for being good at responding to these things when my friends send them, so they might not be eager to respond either. By all means, though, go ahead and respond and/or pass it on! :)

My Secret Interests

2006-08-25T15:01:00.000-06:00

I sounded really whiny in my previous post. Blah. In an effort to combat that, I've come up with an upbeat list. These are some of the things in which I'm secretly interested:

1) Studying piano again
2) Philosophy
3) Learning Martial Arts (in a practical sense, a la Sydney Bristow)
4) Becoming multilingual, and not just in a tourist way
(Addendum to #4: Linguistics)
5) Having a job that is completely different from everything I've done and studied all my life.
6) Learning how to chop evenly and quickly, like a professional chef
7) Taking voice lessons
8) Epidemiology

Same Ol' Stuff

2006-08-25T14:29:00.000-06:00

It seems like every third post or so I am apologizing for not posting more. Or for not having anything interesting to say. I doubt anyone wants to read about my typical day which seems to go: Get up, Work, Come home, Work Some More, Sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat. It seems like my entire life has been boiled down to one activity. Everything I do is now completely in support of The Thesis. And it's every bit as dull as it sounds.

I crawled out of the hole that is my office yesterday and saw some people for lunch yesterday that I had not seen in weeks/months. A professor that I might consider a friend (hard to say where that line is drawn between supervisor/colleague and friend sometimes) asked where I'd been. I looked at him dumbfounded when he gave me a hard time about spending too much time working. I mean, I get grief from all sides for still being in graduate school after 5 years, and he's asking me why I'm not getting out and having some fun?? It must be nice to be so smart that you actually can do it all. Do great work, have a fantastic family, take fun, exotic vacations.... I don't really wish for that much. If I could just get someone to come unpack my apartment and occasionally make me some dinner, that would be amazing. Let alone going "out" on the weekends or, heaven forbid, a date.

Speaking of the new apartment, I moved a few weeks ago! There are still boxes everywhere. I keep having to rip them open to look for something specific, but because this apartment is smaller than my old one, I don't have room to actually put everything somewhere. This new place is especially lacking in shelf space. So, a lot of stuff is going to have to just live in the boxes in my little storage room, I guess. I'll only be there for 6 months while I finish up school and then I'll leave for who knows where. Wherever I can find a job, I guess. But if I ever actually get unpacked and really moved in, perhaps I'll post some pictures of my newest abode. It will probably be sometime right before I have to pack up and move again. :)

More from the Beach

2006-07-21T10:08:00.000-06:00

I've never been at the beach during a full on hurricane. I get the heck out of dogde before it gets there. But, I've been there in the days leading up to a hurricane. That is a lot of fun, I have to tell you, especially if you enjoy being beaten senseless by the water. Which I do. :) This year we had a little excitement as we got to see a wimpy little tropical storm blow by.

It turned out that most of the rain from the storm fell well inland; all we got was a little drizzle and some wind. By "some wind", I mean a brisk breeze (circa 50 mph) that could make you lose your balance and nearly blow over if you're not careful. A brisk breeze that fully exfoliates the bottom half of your legs if you're standing on the sand. Seriously, it was a mighty wind for us land-locked folk and yet, not even close to being a hurricane at that point.

A few of us walked out on the end of the island that afternoon to take a look at the view. I took this picture while we were out there and I swear, if it were not for the clouds (and the fact that I know where I took it), I might have thought it was the Sahara.

You can see the sand just flying by in this picture. It looked pretty cool. The other entertaining thing the wind did was to tear off the tops of the waves out on the water. Just as a wave would get ready to break, the very top would get blown backward, creating this almost eerie mist of water over all the waves. This isn't a great picture of it, but you might be able to see what I mean:

My favorite annual event at the beach is our evening sail. We've managed to go each of the four years that we've been at this particular beach and I hope we continue to do so. The catamaran leaves from a local port and sails out toward a nearby lighthouse during sunset. It's a beautiful sail, and I just love to be out on the water like that.

This year we saw a pod of dolphins (or porpoises, I can never tell the difference) which was totally awesome! Sadly, my camera battery had died so I'm waiting to see the pictures Jackie took of the dolphins/porpoises. (The above picture of the sailboat sails are about all I was able to get before my camera shut itself off). The dolphins were pretty close by, though, and frolicked around the catamaran a little bit before continuing on their way. It's always fun to see them up close.

The Nature Walk of Plagues

2006-07-13T09:44:00.000-06:00

I have oodles of pictures to post about my annual beach vacation, but I think I'll start with our afternoon at the aquarium. After what seemed like about five years of renovations, the local aquarium on the island where we stay was finally reopened. I typically don't love aquariums, but given the swirling tropical storm overhead that prevented us from actually being on the beach, we decided to spend an afternoon at the new and improved aquarium.

They definitely did a nice job on the expansion of the aquarium itself. I used to go here almost annually with my family as a kid, so I have some vague recollections of what it used to look like. But, now there's a nice large ocean tank with plenty of fun fish:

Technically, the above lionfish was not in the large tank, but it still qualifies as a "fun fish" in my book. Look at him--he's got all kinds of crazy tendrils! Actually, the lionfish was in a tank with an eel:

One of my favorite things was this octopus. I thought it would be bigger when I saw the sign for it, but it's still cool even if it's small.

There's the obligatory jellyfish tank (though nothing rivals the one at the Monterey Bay Aquarium):

Outside the aquarium building itself there is an open area that overlooks the sound and surrounding marshland. There's also a short nature walk. The wind was blowing in relatively fierce gusts that day, so even in the normally quiet bay we could see some small waves. Most of the marshland was devoid of any evidence of wildlife, but I'm guessing all of the cool birds and turtles were hunkered down to ride out the storm. Grant, Chad, Brent, and I decided at this point to venture out onto the nature trail. I should warn you up front that on this particular day I was wearing a skirt and some cute little sandals. I didn't really think when I started the walk that this would be something I shouldn't do in cute sandals. There should have been a sign or something.

Grant picked up a laminated handout at the start of the trail that detailed some of the things we presumably could see along the walk. (At least, that's what we thought it was for.) The first labelled stop was about poison ivy. We didn't think much of it at this point, although we laughed that they would choose to begin with a discussion of poison ivy and how to identify it. I just figured that there was probably some poison ivy nearby and they didn't want children playing in it. We continued on up the trail.

At the summit (and by summit, we're talking about a total change in elevation of maybe 15 feet?) the boys stopped to ponder the great expanse of land they had conquered:

After conquering the peak of the hike, we continued on around the back side. Later documented stops along the trail included discussions of snakes, swarming insects, and alligators. It was around the point of the alligator discussion that I really started to wonder exactly what kind of messed up hike of plagues we were on. I mean, this hike was for families and school groups. And they're not pointing out the local vegetation or the turtules or the egrets.....they're talking about man-eating alligators and swarms of swamp insects. Not to mention that I didn't consider how saturated the ground would be after all the rain and we were basically hiking through mud (in my cute sandals).

Finally, we were nearing the end of the hike. There was one bridge left to cross over some algae covered marshland and then we would have completed our Nature Walk of the Killer Attack Creatures. Grant went first over the bridge. About halfway across he yelped (in a very manly way, I assure you). Turns out the bridge was a "floating bridge" which didn't so much float as it sank beneath the algae covered swamp for the middle ~3 feet of the bridge. We had to either walk through (or leap over) the stank green "water" in the middle of the bridge or turn back around the way we came. All the boys had no difficulty powering across the bridge. But, you might recall, I had on cute sandals. Mud I can remove from my sandals, algae and smelly swamp water simply would not do.

So I did what any self-respecting woman would do. I took off my sandals, held them up in the air, and ran across the bridge leaping over the underwater section. I can think of no better way to end the nature walk of alligators, swarming insects, and snakes than to take off my shoes and leap over a swamp on the way out.

Happy 4th!

2006-07-05T15:46:00.000-06:00

My brother arrived last week for another summer of fun-filled working and general hanging out here with me. Sadly, I've been so completely drowning in work that yesterday afternoon was the first time I have been able to actually do anything fun with him. For nearly a week, I saw him at breakfast, had him drop me off at work, saw him at dinner, and saw him again when he popped his head in my room to say good-night. And I feel terribly about it. So I was glad yesterday afternoon to be able to take half of a day off to hang out with him.

We made it our goal to see some fireworks for the Fourth of July and despite there being fireworks all over the place around here, it took us the entire afternoon to figure out what to do. Finally we settled on going to a pro soccer game at the local Big Stadium where they claim to have the best fireworks display in the state. Never having seen a live soccer game before (or even one on TV in its entirety), I wasn't sure what to expect. At the very least, we ended up with some good stories to laugh about.

I was silly enough to pay attention to what was written on the soccer team's website about avoiding traffic delays and we arrived at the game 1.5 hours early. There were very few people there when we arrived, but we did get to see some of the pre-game entertainment. In the parking lot were crazy men on motorcycles doing stunts.

Those motorcycles turn out to be quite loud. We watched for a little while and then headed in to our seats. We still had well over an hour to kill, so we walked slowly around the nearly empty stadium (twice!) to see the sights and finally went in search of some dinner. Once in our seats and fed, we proceeded to watch the team warm up. You cannot tell in this picture how bright and sunny it was at this point, but trust me. It was a beautiful afternoon.

But once the game started, the skies opened up and the predicted "scattered showers" dumped down upon us. I think that some meteorologists have a different definition of 'scattered showers' than I do. This particular experience was not dissimilar to someone standing above you with a large bucket of water that never empties. The game went on for about 15 minutes in the pouring rain before the powers that be finally delayed the game and suggested we seek shelter on the inside concourse.

45 minutes (and one crowded lap around the stadium) later, the game resumed. Still in the rain, but this time with added occasional lightning. Maybe it was supposed to be ExtremeSoccer, and we just didn't get the memo. Anyhow, at halftime we were entertained with one of the funniest things I have seen in a very long time: Mascot Soccer. Mascots from local universities, sports teams, Chick-fil-A, and even the local aquarium competed in a little 10-minute game.

Great hijinx ensued. The two Chick-fil-A cows got into a little tiff, there was a 8+ mascot pileup at one point (which I attribute to a distint lack of peripheral vision in those huge costumes)... But I think that the Octopus mascot (the light purple guy with extraneous arms around waist level, in case you cannot tell) was by far my favorite. The poor guy had quite the turning radius and I think was somewhat soccer-challenged as a result.

The real soccer game finally ended late in the evening (we won!) and we eagerly awaited our original purpose: the fireworks. Eight (or at least it felt like 8) patriotic songs later, we got our wish.

So, in closing, I hope everyone out there had a happy, entertaining, and dry 4th of July this year. :) Ours was good, just not terribly dry.

Lounging Around

2006-06-14T18:26:00.000-06:00

Up front I should acknowledge that I am writing to you today from the lovely lounge chair in the backyard of our beach house. I'm sitting out here taking in the last hour of sunlight and while I'm supposed to be working, I've decided to take a moment to say hello to my four readers. :) Hello!

Despite being utterly unsuccessful in my job search, my trip to Canada was quite nice. I got to hang out with some friends that I haven't seen in a while, hear some pretty good talks (ignoring all the dreadful ones) and eat some pretty tasty food. We played hooky one day and headed up into the Canadian version of Rocky Mountain National Park. My absolute favorite place on the drive was Lake Louise:

It's hard to see in this picture how perfectly aquamarine the water was, but trust me when I tell you that it was beautiful. I think I audibly squeaked when I saw it, that's how startling it was. Not only was the color amazing, but the water was so clear! Here, take a look--

The whole place was a sight to behold. I'd be pretty happy taking another vacation up there where I could spend several days in the area hiking and taking in the beautiful scenery.

The beach has been lovely. I wish that I had finished my thesis and could really relax fully here, but I took a few days off at least and didn't work at all. Plus, a change of venue is always a good thing. :) Tropical Storm Alberto came through today, which I think was a new adventure for most of us. It rained on and off, but most of what we got was wind. A lot of wind. The surf was whipped up into a frenzy like I have rarely seen it in person before! And the sand was blowing around like it was the Sahara. I think my legs have been completely exfoliated from the knees down more than once today. Having grown up relatively near the beach, I am pretty fearless when it comes to going in the ocean, but I do have a healthy respect for storms. And that respect was about the only thing that kept me from grabbing my raft and heading into the ocean today. :) Wow, did I want to play in the huge waves! I took some pictures that I'll post next time to show you what it looked like. But the storm has passed and the weather appears to be looking up for our last three days here. So with any luck, I'll still be able to pack in some quality beach time and come home looking not quite so pasty white and stressed out.

2006-06-02T21:21:00.000-06:00

*sigh*

Yes, I do get that it's just Canada. [Insert appropriate apologies to all Canadians here for making Canada sound like America Lite.] Somehow the other people on the trip (and, frankly, The US Department of State) have me all concerned for my general well-being and state of preparedness. I'm working on not getting so worked up over it.

I did hunt down my passport, though. The last thing I want is to be forbidden from re-entering the US and end up missing any portion of my vacation.

Oh Canada!

2006-06-02T19:25:00.000-06:00

After one long day (11.5 hours) and one morning (5 hours) of driving, I finally arrived back home on Wednesday. It definitely feels good to be home. I really missed my apartment and being around people I know! Academically and professionally, my move across half the country was the right thing. Personally, it was more akin to torture. But I survived and returned home mostly undamaged. And that's what's important.

I found out when I returned home this week that my apartment complex has decided to raise their rents a non-trivial amount. So, I can no longer afford to live here after July. Which leaves me about a month to find a new apartment. It wouldn't be so bad to move (I've gotten good at it this year!), except that I have no job after November/December. And if I find a job, there's no guarantee that it will be anywhere near my current location. Hence, I cannot sign a 12-month lease unless I win the lottery and find myself swimming in extra money. So I'm trying to find an affordable 5-month lease on an apartment. *sigh* These kinds of abodes are not plentiful, let me tell you that.

This weekend I embark on the first of three trips I have this month. Two are work-related, one is vacation. The vacation I'm looking forward to, the others not so much. I'm headed to Canada for a few days starting Sunday, and I'm actually starting to get a little bit distressed about the whole "leaving the country" thing. I actually read the State Department Travel Page today to learn what I should do. This left me with a whole new list of things to worry about. For example, I have no idea if my medical insurance will cover me "abroad"! Nor have I registered with the American Consulate in Canada yet! I don't know what the local laws are regarding anything and it's possible that I may not be able to find proof of ownership for my laptop before I leave. (The last thing I want to do is have to pay some kind of duty on my computer in order to bring it back into the US or something). I feel completely unprepared for this kind of exotic travel. That, and the whole money exchange thing always gives me a headache. So wish me luck in my Canadian job-seeking endeavors next week.

Wicked Cool News

2006-05-25T15:47:00.000-06:00

I ran into some very cool articles today during a web-surfing adventure over lunch. I totally want my own invisibility cloak one day! How fun would that be???

I find the idea of detecting a fourth dimension fascinating too, but it kind of makes my head hurt.

My own research is never this exciting. I like it, but it's never invent-an-invisibility-cloak kind of exciting. :)

Days Go By

2006-05-22T22:52:00.000-06:00

Apparently, prompt updating of my blog is not one of my virtues. Sorry about that. I've had quite a time lately. I went home a few weeks ago and faux graduated. I haven't defended my thesis yet, of course, so I went through all the associated graduation motions for my family. And while it was nice to see my family (whom I haven't seen since Christmas), the whole event was rather trying on my nerves. Everytime I was socializing, entertaining, walking, driving people around, and smiling like I was having fun, I wasn't working. And the only thing I could think of was how much time I wasn't spending on work.

And work? She is not great. Someone else's mistake some five years ago basically cost me two years of work. I redid enough of one project to be certain that it was now worthless. I'm still working on redoing my other major project. I've had to add an entirely new study to my thesis to fill in the hole left by the project I had to abandon. My timeline has me completing the new study by the end of June, which means many late nights ahead. All in all, the whole debacle only pushed my defense back by a semester. Which is ok, I guess, because I still cannot find a job. But that's a whole other whiney post. :)

The good news is (1) that I'm heading home in a week. I will be back at home for the summer and after that, I have the option of coming back here in the fall to finish up or staying at home. I have heard that my advisor is back in the office a few mornings a week now, so I think my decision on what to do in the fall will depend a lot on how he's doing. And (2) I'm headed to the beach on vacation in 16 days, thank the heavens!! As ill-timed as it may be, I really need a vacation. I need to see some friends, even if it turns out to be just an occasion to work in a new environment. I think a week of surf, sand, and the friends I miss everyday will do me a world of good.

Peter Gabriel

2006-04-26T21:02:00.000-06:00

Peter Gabriel was on the radio in the dressing room of my gym this evening. I've been keeping a running tally of the inappropriate gym music that's been playing in the evenings at my gym on the fitness-y site I share with my friend Jackie. Peter Gabriel is much better than some of the other recent selections, but still. Not what I need immediately after disembarking from the elliptical.

Speaking of which, I kind of overdid it tonight. For some reason I got really dizzy about halfway through my workout. So much so that I decided to quit before I passed out and fell into an ungraceful heap in the corner of the room. There's nothing dignified about that. I think maybe I ate dinner too recently before heading to the gym. I'm pretty tired lately, too. It could be any number of things. I'll just try again tomorrow.

Despite going to the gym regularly for roughly the last month, I still don't like it. And by "don't like", I mean "hate with the firey passion of 1000 angry lions". There's nothing fun about it. I hate it from start to finish. I hear that at some point I won't hate it as much. But I'm not counting on it.

The Week in Review

2006-04-10T21:55:00.000-06:00

I've spent the last week trying to salvage my graduate career. I found a mistake last week in the data I've been using for my thesis. I didn't make the mistake; it happened before I even came onto the project. And I still don't completely know how it happened. But the immediate result is that at least one chapter of my thesis is, if you'll excuse my language, complete crap. I've spent the last four days trying to evaluate how much it affects the rest of my work. And it's not like I'm hanging around with extra time to kill between now and when I defend. I certainly hadn't budgeted for this detour. But I guess I'm glad I found the problem now and not two more months from now. Why none of my 8 collaborators didn't notice this 5 years ago, I do not know. (Why I didn't notice it when I started this work 3 years ago I don't know either.)

I've been going to the gym as often as I can recently. My friend Jackie and I have a little bet going on to get ourselves in shape before we go to the beach this June. I've been trying to go early in the morning to get my treadmill time in before work. I really hate running. I do it because I think I have to in order to get in shape. But man, is it boring. I'm usually running along, sure that at least 10 minutes have gone by and when I look down it's been approximately 20 seconds since I last looked. I wish I could actually get something accomplished while I am there running along, going nowhere.

In other news, I'm going to go see my sister for Easter next weekend. She lives only a couple of hours away from now that I'm here in the midwest. In recent years, I've often only been able to go home and see my family once, maybe twice a year. So that's usually only been for Christmas and maybe Thanksgiving. (It's too bad that those are the two holidays we get time off for and they're only a few weeks apart!) I'm pretty excited about getting to spend Easter with my sister, even if it's only for 2 days.

Lightning, Thunder, and Tornados, Oh My!

2006-04-02T22:54:00.000-06:00

I heard a tornado siren for the first time in my life this evening. That was entertaining. I wasn't sure what it was at first! I quickly figured it out. All in all I think I stayed pretty calm. But I did spend a quality 45 minutes in the bathtub (the only interior window-less space I have) with my cell phone and laptop, waiting to be blown away. I had the TV turned up loud and kept cracking the bathroom door so I could hear what the weatherpeople were saying. I don't the tornado actually touched down in town, but I know there was some property damage on the other side of town.

I'm not loving springtime in the midwest.

Sundried Tomatoes

2006-03-28T23:34:00.000-07:00

It was the sundried tomatoes that did it. I blame them. That's what finally pushed me over the edge. I had a pretty lousy day, but I managed to keep it together for the most part. By dinnertime I realized that there wasn't actually any food in the house. So I got my recipe together for a salad that I had seen on FoodTV over the weekend and headed to the only grocery store I have found so far. I got everything that I needed except the sundried tomatoes. The store literally has jars of pickled pigs feet available for purchase, but no sundried tomatoes. I don't understand it because sundried tomatoes are not uncommon; it's not a though I was looking for organic kefir. Yet according to the grocery person I asked (and my own thorough search), they don't carry them.

And so right there, in the canned fruits and vegetables aisle (and ostensibly over one missing salad ingredient), I had a little meltdown as quietly as I could. I couldn't possibly have been more embarrassed at that moment, but I also couldn't really do anything about it by that point. So if you ever hear an urban legend about the girl who started weeping over the lack of sundried tomatoes, it's quite possible that the storyteller is talking about me.

Insomnia

2006-03-25T23:56:00.000-07:00

I can't sleep. That's why I'm sitting in front of the computer at nearly 1 am on a Saturday night. I've done every sleep inducing task I can think of (short of drinking warm milk because I simply find that foul): I read my book for nearly an hour, I put on some soft lulling music, I closed my eyes and tried to will myself to sleep.....alas, no. Here I sit.

I wish I had something terribly insightful to say. Some terrifically funny or ironic story of the past week to share with you, my 1-3 readers. But I don't. It's been a normal week. I've gone to work during the day, I've come back to the apartment for dinner, I've done some more work at night. I've spent quality time pondering my future, my lot in life, and why there have been no good sitcoms on the air since Friends ended. I've done my laundry, gone to the gym, and made both healthy and non-healthy meals. It's just been another week that I've crossed off the calendar. It makes me kind of sad to have had another 7 days go by and feel like I have nothing tangible to show for it.

Happy Day!

2006-03-21T21:06:00.000-07:00

It was a good day. Blow Out is back! Whoohoo! :)

I have no idea why I love this show, but I do.

American Idol, Chemistry-Style

2006-03-17T20:01:00.000-07:00

I have to preface this post by saying that my new office is in a chemistry lab. I'm not physically in the lab, but I am in the office space next to one. And the door between my office area and the lab leaves about a 2 inch gap at the floor. So I can hear (and smell) everything that goes on in there.

Which brings me to the conversation I overheard earlier this week.

Several graduate students were in the lab and I thought I heard a guitar. I took my rather painful earbuds out of my ears and confirmed that yes, indeed, there was a guitar in the next room. A guitar in the lab, in fact. And not just one guitar, but I believe there were two. And horror of horrors, there was singing. Bad singing. By Chemistry graduate students. When the singing stopped, the discussion of the merits of the previous night's episode of Americal Idol began. A little more guitar strumming started before I threw my headphones back on and turned up the first thing I could find in iTunes. I'm pretty sure this now emcompasses my own little first level of hell: Chemistry students (badly) singing (bad) pop songs in the lab while accompanied (poorly) by other graduate students on the guitar.

Gifts!

2006-03-12T17:52:00.000-07:00

I also wanted to mention that as always, I have some of the greatest friends in the world. I don't thank them nearly enough. Two of my best friends from Duke sent me a package last week with some Duke gear to put in the apartment. My favorite piece? The Coach K bobblehead, of course:

I like to think of him as sort of my own personal Magic 8 ball. Ask Coach K a question, tap his head and he'll answer 'yes' or 'no'. He really can only answer those yes or no questions, though.

I also received a Duke apron which was promptly hung in my miniscule kitchen:

So yeah! New Duke gear always makes my day better. (Oh, and so does another ACC tournament championship...)

As Promised

2006-03-12T17:20:00.000-07:00

It was almost two weeks ago that I last posted, I know. So here are the pictures I promised.

My car had a bit of a milestone on the way here. We rolled over to 100,000 miles. Woohoo! I sometimes like to photodocument my trips, so I took a picture to commemorate the occasion.

Alas, that's pretty much the only picture I took during the road trip. It was more of a destination-focused trip and less of a "World's Largest Ball of Twine" trip. Although I do want to see that someday. :)

I used to share a little office with a friend of mine. We didn't have a lot of room, but we got along well. And we had both a door and a window. I was more interested in the door at first, but I grew to enjoy having a window to the outside world. Here's the view from my old office:

I now share a larger office with 4 other people, only one of whom is not an undergraduate. Luckily, things have gone well so far. I get the impression that orders were given before my arrival that they were to be quiet and not bug me. (Which is fine with me!) I have the desk in front of the window and the natural light is nice, but I don't have quite the view I used to:

As to my apartment.... well, I am renting a furnished apartment. And it's great that I didn't have to bring any of my own furniture. But, I still kind of feel like I'm living in someone else's house. Or one of those long-term hotel rooms. I did completely reorganize everything when I first came in. I spent my first few hours here hauling furniture from one room to another. I moved my desk into the den (and out of the bedroom) and am using the kitchen table as more of a storage area than an eating area. But all in all, things are good. Here are a couple of shots:

I can certainly live here for a few months. I do miss home, though.

New Digs

2006-02-27T22:48:00.000-07:00

I'm all moved in. It didn't take long, considering that nearly everything in here I had packed in my car. And my car is not that big. It's starting to feel a little bit more like home now that I have my pictures back up around the place and on my refrigerator. I like to keep pictures of my friends and family up all over my fridge; it makes me happy to see everyone I love all the time!

But...

Let's talk briefly about my packing skills. Not physically putting things into boxes and bags, but choosing what to bring. I brought with me :

8 bottles of wine
7 pairs of shoes
6 tubes of mascara
5 kinds of tea
4 bags of coffee

I did not bring:

an iron
any knives
tools of any sort
pens, pencils, or writing utensils of any kind

In short, I brought nearly nothing useful. (Though on the tools front, I have to say that I am at least creative: I did manage to assemble my brand new, extraordinarily cheap shelves from Target with a butter knife. I also used the heel of a nice pair of boots to hammer in a nail on which I have hung my calendar!) I have managed to fill most of the holes in my packing thanks to Target, but still. My own thought processes, or lack thereof, amaze me sometimes.

Coming up in my next post: pictures!

The Perfect Dress

2006-02-25T21:24:00.000-07:00

Tonight I saw the perfect dress for me to wear for my graduation. Putting aside the fact that I have a Mt. Everest sized amount of work to finish between now and then, it seems an appropriate time to start thinking about the dress and shoes for the ~15 minute graduation ceremony. I like to think I will have earned something fancy like this.

My perfect dress is, of course, from an episode of Sex & the City. Here's a picture of the dress from the HBO website:

I would not look like Sarah Jessica Parker, clearly, but I love the dress. It's chiffon and by Richard Tyler. I'm sure it will be impossible to find the actual dress, but I am hoping I can find something similar. And I am thinking about buying my first really expensive pair of shoes to go with it.

Note: Kansas. It's still flat.

2006-02-23T22:17:00.000-07:00

It's been weeks since I last posted and yet this one is still going to be short. In the last week I have packed up my apartment and office, shoved it all into my car, and taken off for the midwest. I stopped to stay with some friends this evening who live in Kansas, thus taking me all the way across the lovely state during my drive today. And indeed, Kansas is still flatter than a pancake. In case you were curious.

More later, after I drive some more, get all my stuff out of the car, and unpack it all.

Delightful!

2006-02-06T08:21:00.000-07:00

I had a lovely Saturday! Nicer than I have had in a very long time. Saturday afternoon I hung out with my best friend and we finally went to see The Chronicles of Narnia. It was great! It didn't look at all like the story looked in my head when I read the book, but it was still great. Saturday evening I went to a friend's house to play games with some friends from school. And that was great too! I had not sat down and played games for an evening in literally 3 or 4 years. I forgot how much fun that can be. And to top it all off, I didn't work at all. I didn't think about working or worry about the fact that I wasn't working. I don't know how I managed it for 24+ hours, but I did. That's probably why the whole day was so great.

I submitted an application yesterday for the postdoc position that I want the most. It's outside of the country (yay!) and I have very little shot at actually winning this fellowship (boo!), but I worked very hard on the proposal and I think it it quite good even if no one on the selection committee ends up thinking it is. It will 3 months before I hear any response so now, as usual, it's just a waiting game. I'm trying to be optimistic, but I know I'll be pretty bummed if things don't work out. But I take comfort in the fact that even if I don't find a job at the end of all this, Starbucks is always hiring.

I'll be moving to the midwest in about two and a half weeks I guess. Hopefully by the end of the week I'll have all of the apartment stuff taken care of (the property managers won't let me sign a lease yet!) and that will be the last big thing to finish. Not counting packing, of course. But I've decided to keep my apartment here while I'm gone since it will cost nearly the same thing to break my lease and store my stuff as it would to just keep paying rent for 3 months. So I don't have to pack all that much. And that's a relief. The only think I hate more than unpacking is packing itself.

Writer's Block, from Pigs

2006-01-31T11:01:00.000-07:00

Pigs had this idea and I am blatantly stealing it. (In my defense, she says that we should!) It seems like it could be entertaining.

"If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, (even if we don't speak often or don't really know each other) please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL memory of you and me. It can be anything you want - good or bad - BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON'T ACTUALLY remember about you!

Sounds like fun.

Post away." (Pigs, 2006)

(At least I make an effort to let my reader know from where I have taken the above work. Unlike my college level students. *sigh* )

Babies, Babies, Babies

2006-01-24T13:40:00.000-07:00

I hereby declare 2006 the year of the Baby. Three good friends of mine are having children so far this spring, and all are due within about 10 days of each other. Wow! Plus, another couple I know (my confirmation sponsors, actually!) are also having another child in a couple of months. All this adds up to very few diapers for me personally, but a whole lot of knitting. I have found that I do really enjoy knitting and making baby blankets or little baby hats are nice, fun little projects that I can do for relaxation. I kind of wish I had some friends to knit with around here, as I am all about a little bit of socializing with some tea and knitting and chit-chat, but that's ok. I'm also happy by myself on my couch.

Speaking of babies, here is a picture of my "baby":

She's not actually my dog. She (Clara, the dog) technically belongs to my former roommate, but Clara lived with both of us for about 3 years back on the east coast. So since I helped to raise her I still think she's a little bit mine. I was puppy-sitting for Clara a few weekends back and had my suitcase open to do laundry when Clara decided that my pile of dry cleaning would be the right place to take a nap. I couldn't find her and looked all over the house only to find her nestled in amongst my dress clothes. How cute is that??

It's been a while

2006-01-19T13:27:00.000-07:00

I know I haven't posted much recently. It seems I don't really have much of interest to say! I have kept rather busy at work. I am in the last few months of graduate school and finally all of those little details that I have been putting off until later have to be done. Apparently, it's now officially "later".

I just returned from an astronomy conference; there were 3100 people there. That's a lot of astronomers. I presented my dissertation talk during one of the sessions. I think the talk went well, although I had another minor shoe mishap. This time, instead of stepping in a hole, my shoe just slipped off my foot as I walked up to the stage. I don't think much of anyone noticed, though I about burst out laughing. Thankfully my back was still to the audience.

I think I have the details of my move pretty well worked out. I found a tiny furnished apartment, so I am headed out there in a month to spend three months with my collaborator. Hopefully, I'll have the bulk of my thesis done by the end of that time. I can come back here for about 6 weeks, defend my thesis, and then move to wherever it is I can find a job.

I recently got my evaluations back from my class last semester. There were several "I loved this class" and there were two "This is the worst class I have ever taken and I will never take another astronomy class because of you". There wasn't any overarching theme behind the criticisms so I guess that's a good thing. Everyone had a different complaint. I know I cannot please everyone and people tell me I should have a thicker skin, but I can't help thinking that I could have done a better job and more people might have been happier.

Not-So Rockin'

2006-01-06T20:30:00.000-07:00

Did anyone else see Dick Clark on New Year's Eve? I think that sitting there listening to him speak as the ball was dropping was the very moment that I decided that there was no way I could get out of moving. So I'm headed halfway across the country in about 6 weeks. I have commitments here up until then, and I don't want to keep going back and forth (it's an 18-hour drive). Yesterday I quit all of the committees in which I participated and I quit my other teaching job earlier in the week. In the next few weeks I have to pack up and store all of my belongings and find a tiny, furnished, short-term lease apartment that I can afford 1000 miles away. Just the added bonus activities one wants the semester before defending their thesis. I am hoping to only be in the new place for 3-4 months before I can come back here and move again to wherever I can find a job (or a Starbucks that's hiring).

I saw my advisor today for the first time in about 2.5 months. What would have been a 3 minute conversation last fall took over an hour today. The good news is that he is in good spirits. Sadly, his right side is almost completely paralyzed and his speech is pretty bad. I don't know how he ranks on the scale of recovering stroke victims, but I don't see him ever returning to work again. He knows he won't ever teach again, but thinks he can still do research. I just don't know how he will. It's sad.

At any rate, I hope everyone had lovely Christmas and New Year's holidays. I didn't get to do nearly as much visiting with friends & family as I had hoped I might, but I guess that's how it goes sometimes. 2006 has got to be better. I know that much.

Moving?

2005-12-09T16:33:00.000-07:00

It turns out that writing a thesis sans thesis advisor is harder than one might have thought. With my advisor gone long-term (no one expects him back before I graduate anymore), I'm exploring my options of how to handle this. One of my collaborators (or my advisors collaborators, depending on how you look at it) has graciously offered to host me at his university if I want to come there for next semester. So I am debating the prospect of moving.

Logistically, it's a total nightmare. Breaking my lease, figuring out how my student health insurance would work several states away, packing, finding a new place to live in a state where I know two people.... it's a total nightmare. But academically, this is probably the best thing for me. I would be with a group of people who do similar research to my own and this collaborator is one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. He earned two Ph.Ds, simultaneously. I'm just trying to work myself up to the point where I can really comprehend moving a third of the way across the country for a few months to finish my thesis before moving to goodness knows where a few months after that to start a postdoc. (That's dependent on actually getting a postdoc, of course.)

Sweat Heart

2005-12-06T21:26:00.000-07:00

My last day of class is tomorrow. Wow--this semester has flown by!! I'm not going to even bother pretending that I'm not counting the hours until I am done with my class (13.5, in case you're curious). This semester has not been the worst on record; I actually developed both a persistent, prolonged eye twitch and a stutter a few years back during the semester I was studying for my first qualifying exam. (The stutter was highly entertaining to me!) But, between teaching completely on my own for the first time and then having my thesis advisor become more or less incapacitated it's not been stress-free few months. So I'm very much looking forward to ~10:51 am tomorrow.

But I just had to share a couple of tidbits from some of the papers I recently finished grading. Let me preface this by saying that my class is highly populated with humanities majors, not scientists, and I bet about half the class are upperclassmen. Some selected quotations:

"... married his collage sweat heart"
(It was hard not to write a snarky art class-related comment about this one.)

"aw inspiring feet"

And my personal favorite, a passing mention of Penthouse magazine. In a research paper. On cosmology. I kid you not. I couldn't even figure out what to say about that one.

These students are soon to be college (or collage, depending on how you see it) graduates.

The good news about my teaching experience is that most of my harshest comments about the semester are of the form "I will not do it this way next time" rather than the fast clip-clop sound of my high heels on the cement, fleeing from a career in academia. So that's a plus. The whole point of this experience for me was to figure out if I liked teaching enough to actually want to try to find a faculty job at some point. I most certainly do not want to give up on research, but I'm no longer dead set on finding a non-teaching job.

Does Spelling Count?

2005-12-04T17:34:00.000-07:00

I am deeply saddened. I am almost finished grading the research papers from my class. And they are not good. The grammar and spelling alone are abysmal; any sense of coherence one might expect in a semester-long research assignment is rare to find. Even the papers that are well organized still are replete with there-their-they're and too-to-two type mistakes. I sometimes don't understand how these students have made it this far. Have they never been graded on spelling and/or grammar in their work before?

I perhaps should have seen this coming. Several students asked specifically whether spelling and grammar would count. How exactly would they have approached the assignment differently, I wonder, if I had told them "No"?

Shoulda Coulda Woulda

2005-12-02T22:15:00.000-07:00

I should have been a meteorologist. I have the worst weather luck of any astronomer. I've been "observing" since 7 and have seen nothing but the undersides of clouds. (And even that is only on the sky-cam, as they won't even open the telescope itself in this weather!)

*sigh*

Just Like Oprah

2005-12-02T20:36:00.000-07:00

You know how Oprah does that list each year of her "favorite things"? Well, I am just like Oprah. (Except that she is wealthy and powerful, with her own television empire and a personal trainer. But other than that we are very similar.) I have favorite things, too.

(1) Pepperidge Farm Whims: these new crunchy clusters of tiny cookie pieces. They are divine. And they are likely to be my downfall, as I apparently can finish off a can of these in a weekend and there are supposed to be something like 7 servings in a can. That's absurd. But they are delish and addictive. Kind of like Pringles in that way.

(2) Christmas Cards: I love shopping for Christmas cards. I pick out 8 or 10 different boxes and usually sit down on the floor of Barnes and Noble or Hallmark or Target or wherever I am and examine each set carefully, weighing the card message against the possible recipients. I take the Christmas card decision very seriously. Finally, after some odd stares from passersby and quality debating with myself, I choose my cards. I go home, get set up in front of the fireplace with some wine and a movie in the DVD player and get to work. (Then, of course, I get done writing about 10 cards and get bored/tired with the prospect of writing some 30 more and usually take a break). But the purchasing of Christmas cards is one of my favorite holiday events.

(3) My gas fireplace: You have pretty fire and warmth with the flick of a switch. What could be better? Plus, it's like instant romance when necessary. :)

(4) An easy knitting pattern: I have discovered a very quick, yet rather pretty double cable scarf pattern. I am currently most of the way through my third one of these. These scarves will be featured heavily under the Christmas tree this year. But there's something very satisfying about a project you can complete quickly; it's almost instant creative gratification. (I use the word creative here rather loosely, as I am just following the directions from a pattern I bought: I didn't design anything here).

(5) Sudoku. It's completely addictive. I highly encourage you to give it a try.

Target

2005-11-27T18:48:00.000-07:00

A brief excursion to Target this evening brought to mind three things:

I spent less than $25. This is likely to be a first for me at Target. I will have to check on this, but it's possible that hell hath frozen over.
I know I've mentioned this before, but I once again was confronted by the Sugar-Free Oreo. And I still do not understand why.
I am perplexed by people who appear to be perfectly healthy and capable, yet when confronted with a non-automatic door will turn and walk over to the other side of the exit so as not to have to reach their own arm out to open the door.

If Only My Middle Name Were Courage

2005-11-27T14:31:00.000-07:00

I have decided that flying home from Thanksgiving on Saturday instead of Sunday is the best idea ever. I was home by dinnertime last night, giving me the entire day today to do my laundry, straighten up the house, and catch up on the work I knew I wouldn't do while visiting with my family. Not to mention that the airport waiting time is significantly decreased. (Unless, like me, you wore a big comfy sweatshirt to the airport and were therefore pulled out of line for a full security pat-down before even walking through the metal detector. But that's got to be rare.)

Having an entire day here are home to recover from the trip and get some work done has also allowed me to catch up on the grading of research papers. In addition to just grading the papers themselves, I am using an online service that checks for plagiarism. I emphasized to my class over and over (starting from the first day!) that I would be doing this. I had hoped that people would take me seriously and this would just be a formality. Sadly a few people thought I wouldn't catch them. And now, I have to figure out what to do with a student who took half of their paper directly off of a website. *sigh* I figure that I will start with an email that looks like this:

Dear Cheater,

Please come to see me at your earliest convenience to discuss your research paper. I caught you cheating and you have severely irritated me, the person who assigns your grade and has the authority to hand your butt over to the Honor Council.

Sincerely,
PissedOffInstructor

I will probably leave that second sentence out. But after that? I wish I had more courage to confront this student. Right now I want to hand out an F and be done with it. I'm not particularly good with face to face confrontation, though, so I fear that I will back down once seated across the desk from this student. Somehow in the next 18-24 hours I have to work up the nerve to deal with this, though, because it's entirely inexcusable. But why is it me that is nervous about confronting a cheater? Shouldn't it be this student that's afraid of me?

When it Rains

2005-11-18T12:11:00.000-07:00

Why is it that when things start to go badly, everything starts crumbling at once? In the last week (1) I have found out that my advisor is not doing well (he's going into his third week in the ICU, but luckily is starting to be conscious again) (2) my mother had a minor yet sudden surgical procedure (3) my car died and is in need of $1500 in repairs so that I can drive again without the danger of spontaneous combustion (4) my first thesis committee was a disaster, thanks to an uninvited faculty member who took it upon himself to join the meeting after overhearing someone mention it and proceeded to rip apart everything I presented. It's hard even to know where to start.

Suffice it to say that I'm counting down the hours until this week is over. Hopefully next week can't be any worse. (Of course now that I've said it, I've completely jinxed myself and everyone I know. Sorry about that.) And I now have only 7 more lectures left in my class, thank the heavens. It's been a good experience and I am glad I did it, but I could certainly use the extra time next semester when I don't have to worry about class. Especially now that I will be finishing my Ph.D. more or less sans-thesis advisor.

On the bright side, I am taking the evening off. I haven't done that in quite a while. I'm going to see Harry Potter. I cannot remember the last time I saw a movie in the theater. Plus, I am headed to see my family for Thanksgiving next Wednesday. It will be the first time we've been all together (and that I have seen my parents) since last Christmas. Granted, we're all staying in my sister's tiny apartment, so there is the distinct possibility that not all of us will survive the weekend still on speaking terms. But so far, things look promising.

Update

2005-11-05T22:05:00.000-07:00

According to the doctors, my thesis advisor had a stroke last week. He's still in the hospital, but thinks he'll be able to come home early this week. I'm hopeful that he'll make a full recovery in time; he's not that old, so this is all rather unexpected.

Thanks for the good wishes--

In Your Thoughts

2005-11-03T19:55:00.000-07:00

I spent my late afternoon/early evening in the ER waiting room today. My advisor had a seizure and collapsed in his office this afternoon. The doctors are not sure what's going on, though my own research into his symptoms (combined with the few things the ER doctors did tell us) points to something I don't care to even say out loud right now. They're going to run more tests tomorrow and bring in some specialists, so we all hope we'll know more then.

I know very few people read this, but if those of you that do wouldn't mind keeping my advisor and his family in your thoughts tonight & tomorrow, I (and they, I'm sure) would appreciate it.

Thanks,
Meredith

I Heart Standard Time

2005-10-30T23:48:00.000-07:00

I think we should "fall back" an hour every weekend. It's quite nice. We'd catch up to the right time eventually, trust me. And just think of the extra hour of sleep you'd get every Saturday night!!

I am not so fond of darkness at 5 pm, however. It's kind of freaking me out.

Exam #2

2005-10-26T21:28:00.000-06:00

I just finished grading the second exam in my class. I thought this second test was considerably easier than the first. In fact, I was worried on the day of the exam that it might be too easy and would mess up my whole test-dropping strategy at the end of the semester. (I'm dropping one of the three test grades in an effort not to have to give make up tests all semester). But my worry was in vain. The average came out to be one point higher than on the first test. *sigh* So I'm kind of disappointed again. Both averages have been at least 5 points lower than what I was aiming for in writing the exams. I am going to curve the grades at the end of the semester, of course, so the actual numerical score doesn't matter all that much as long as I have a good distribution of scores. But still. I have to wonder if my instruction is, in general, poor or if they are not studying or if the test is just not good or if it's a combination of everything. So I continue to worry.

And darn if writing good exams isn't a hell of a lot harder than I ever thought it would be!! I have all kinds of new respect for some of my former professors who managed to consistently write very good exams all semester long. It's a skill that I have no idea whether or not I possess. And so far, it seems to be a skill no one can teach. They just tell me that I will "learn how to do it as I go".

Failure

2005-10-20T22:13:00.000-06:00

I read an article the other day about the mental health of graduate students and the fear of failure. There were a number of very good points made about how, for many graduate students, the fear of failure can be absolutely debilitating. And what defines "failure" for PhD candidates can be completely warped when viewed from the outside. Anything other than a tenure-track faculty position at a major research university is interpreted as failure in the academic culture (according to this article). And let me be the first to assure those of you not familiar with the situation: there are not nearly enough tenure-track positions at major research universities to go around. A whole lot of us are going to "fail", in this sense of the word. This attitude certainly pervades the environment here in my department.

I have pondered this a lot lately, being in the midst of applying for fellowships and post-doc positions. It's a huge decision to make: to stay in academia or to leave. (And mind you, we are all in the midst of writing our dissertations and finishing up our thesis work as we're contemplating our futures in the backs of our minds.) There are pros and cons either way, but there is such a stigma associated with choosing to leave the traditional academic world! Around here it's often referred to as "bailing", as though the PhDs who decide not to stay in academic research are somehow not as good, not as smart. As though they couldn't make it to the coveted tenure-track position if that were what they really wanted. My officemate is telling his advisor tomorrow that he has decided not to pursue a post-doc, and instead is going to seek a non-research job in industry. He's nervous, because the disappointment (and even anger!) from his advisor will be real.

The article also reported a pile of statistics from a study of ~3000 grad students at one particular university. A few for you to peruse:

45% of grad students in the study said that stress-related problems impacted their academic performance
95% felt overwhelmed in graduate school
54% had felt so depressed they found it difficult to function
1 in 200 had actually attempted suicide

Here's my question: who were the 5% of grad students that didn't feel overwhelmed? Seriously. I have never meet any of them. And the 1 in 200? That surprised even me. I don't have a good feel of how this compares to the population as a whole, but other than the suicide one, the general trends seem to fit very well with what I observe in the population around me.

I often call graduate school a completely surreal experience. It is difficult and harsh. And this bizarre definition of failure that so many of us have does nothing to help. As for me, I'm still on the academic track. It's a day to day thing still (hour to hour even, depending on the day), but for the moment I think this is what I want. I'm off to more collaborator meetings this weekend and possible post-doc discussion. Think good employment thoughts for me. :)

Just Popping In

2005-10-13T05:23:00.000-06:00

I'm in California for the next couple of days at another pseudo-job interview. It's not technically a job interview, but I've been invited to come give a seminar and people know I'm graduating this academic year and frankly everything right now is a job talk. So here I am. There are actually two people here I'd really love to work with, so I am reading up on them this morning. I obviously cannot sleep this morning.

You might think that I purposefully sought out the sketchiest hotel in the area, but no! It's just an added bonus after the trip I had getting out here. I hate to speak ill of an entire state based on only a few isolated experiences, but I will still do it: California does NOT do a good job with their road signs. It seems that signs reading "Left to Highway X" really mean "Left several blocks up at that street marked with a sign pointing toward the military hanger and then go around the corner to the light and take a right toward the entrance to the highway". I missed my highway twice just trying to leave the airport. Sometimes I think perhaps I don't have the smarts to really get a Ph.D.

Sugar Free Oreo Cookies

2005-10-09T21:12:00.000-06:00

I should mention up front that I was going to call this post "Sugar Free Oreoes", but I couldn't figure out how to spell the plural of Oreo. Is it Oreoes? Oreos? Hard to say. So I went with cookies.

I was at Target this afternoon buying shampoo and household cleaning supplies, when I turned around and came face to face with the cookie aisle. This happens to be on the other side of the household cleaners aisle which seems strange to me. But I wasn't left with much time to ponder this unlikely juxtaposition because my eye was caught by a bizarre sight: a box of sugar free Oreo cookies. What, may I ask, is in a sugar free Oreo? I thought that creamy goodness in the middle of the Oreo was pure sugar (and probably some lard which I choose to ignore). I mean, wasn't that the whole point of the Oreo Big Stuff of the 1990s fame--a cookie 5 times the normal Oreo size with 3/4 of an inch of filling? So what has replaced the sugar in the Oreo filling? (Technically, I know the answer because I looked at the label: name your sugar alcohol, and it's in there. Hence the requisite "excessive consumption may have a laxative effect" warning). I just think the whole idea is preposterous. If you are going to eat an Oreo, just eat a damn Oreo. This whole sugar free cookie/cake/candy/snack food fad is just going over the top.

In other news, fall is over. We get about two weeks of fall here. One day, the leaves start to change. The next day, half a tree is no longer green. A week later all the leaves are on the ground. Days following that, the first snow arrives. We're supposed to have 12 inches of snow here by tomorrow afternoon, though I am hoping for less. I don't have the time or the patience this week for the traffic mess that will bring. But I thought I should tell you, winter has begun.

Monday, a Timeline

2005-10-03T22:02:00.000-06:00

4:55 am: Hop out of bed, throw on clothes
5:00 am: Hop in car, head to apartment complex office to drop off rent and go to gym
5:01 am: Drop off rent
5:01:20 am: Stare incomprehendingly at dashboard of car when car won't restart
5:01:20 - 5:06: Continue trying to start car, stare bewilderingly at dashboard and occasionally at key, wonder what that clicking noise means
5:07 am: Abandon car, walk back home, continue bewilderment
5:10-5:25 am: Shower, wonder what time AAA opens, wonder what time car dealership opens, wonder if you'll make it to class by 10:00
5:30 - 6:00 am: Wait for a civilized hour to call for help, panic
6:01 am: Call for help, wake best friend
6:15 am: Return to car with "Please do not tow me" sign
6:15:20 am: Successfully attempt to restart car on a whim, bewilderment, mild cursing
6:16 am: Return home, successfully restart car 10 times in a row
6:17-6:45 am: Panic
7:00 am: Arrive at car dealership, drop off car
7:50 am: Drop off best friend at work, take her car back across town to own office
8:15 am: Traffic jam caused by police training exercise on the highway during Monday morning rush hour
8:40 am: Second traffic jam caused by minor fender bender
9:05 am: Arrive in office
11:30 am: Call car dealership, no word on car
2:00 pm: Call car dealership, no word on car
3:30 pm: Call car dealership, no word on car
4:45 pm: Car dealership calls, don't believe diagnosis but agree to repairs
4:50 pm: Depart office
5:15 pm: Job interview
7:00 pm: Tutoring
8:30 pm: Return to Office

Pigs may have Tuesdays, but apparently I have Mondays.

Effortlessly perfect

2005-09-29T22:20:00.000-06:00

A few years ago, the results of a study conducted at my alma mater on undergraduate women were released. One of the most memorable comments current students had about their experience was regarding the pressure they felt to be "effortlessly perfect". Women, they said, were expected to be beautiful, intelligent, and socially adept without ever letting on to any effort this perfect package might require. Men are not held to the same standard; they are allowed, and even expected, to let the world know how hard they work. I think some people outside of the university (and certainly administrators there as well) were surprised by this response, but for many alumnae that I know, this came as no shock. We agreed that we certainly felt the same pressure while we were students there. What I wonder now is whether this attitude extends well beyond my little undergrad institution and affects women at large today.

I feel the same pressure today as I felt then, but surely some (if not all) is self-inflicted at this point. I have very carefully crafted the persona that I can handle any- and everything on my plate (despite the obvious fact that I work until midnight on a daily basis and, this past week aside, rarely take a weekend off) because surviving in my particular male-dominated field almost seems to require it. And I don't want to just survive. If I am going to do this, I want to do it well! I want to be somebody, and I want to make a real contribution. I already stand out as one of only a few women in the department--the last thing I need to do is develop a reputation of not being able to handle it. So I do it all, probably even more than I need to. With good shoes and a smile on my face. And I continue to perpetuate the myth I have created around myself.

A Real Winner

2005-09-20T20:22:00.000-06:00

I had a student email me this afternoon with questions about our exam tomorrow. He was deeply confused about three things: (1) The location of the exam, (2) The starting time of the exam, and most importantly (3) What my TA meant during the review session when he told the class that it would be a 50-minute exam. I assured my concerned student that the exam would be in our normal classroom, during the normal 50-minute class period just as I have been reminding the class everyday for the last week and a half. *sigh* I wonder if this student has ever actually attended my class. Ever.

I also have to deal with two students tomorrow whose last homework papers were nearly identical. I encourage my students to work together on the problems, but I was very clear that I expect them to write up their own homeworks. There's a difference between working together and turning in the exact same paragraph-long discussions, word for word. That should be a fun conversation.

A skirt update: my staples held yesterday, even through a tutoring session after work! So in a fashion pinch, remember: office supplies are your friend. The skirt retained its basic structural integrity during the removal process last night, though the zipper itself has seen better days. I'm going to have to figure out how to replace that. I'm kind of wishing I still had my Holly Hobby sewing machine, circa 1982.

Update: I actually found my old turquoise Holly Hobby sewing machine on eBay!! Wow.

I'm alive, barely

2005-09-19T14:05:00.000-06:00

You might have noticed that I used to keep a blog here. I remember those times fondly, those were good times. Time to sit down, think about what's going on, share it with a few friends.... those times are apparently long gone.

Sorry about the lack of posts guys; things have become barely-under-control busy for me. I am my own personal medical experiment in sleep deprivation.

I think my class is going well, but I'm giving my first exam on Wednesday so that will be the first real gauge of what my students are and are not understanding. I'm struggling to write the exam, too; I wish I had a better handle on what's an appropriate question, both difficulty-wise and length-wise. I already told them that the test would be challenging, but my fear is that it will be way too long and/or way too hard. Plus, I have half the department watching me from afar (some from more closeby than others); I can't go to colloquium in the afternoons with fewer than 4 different faculty members asking me how my class is going!! I appreciate their concern on some level, but I cannot help thinking that some are watching simply to see if I crash and burn. I don't need that kind of pressure. Believe me, I'm already putting enough on myself, thank you very much.

In good news, though, my friend Jackie is coming to visit this weekend! Yay!! :) This will be my first out-of-town guest that is not blood-related to me since I moved out here. So I am really looking forward to some shopping, some knitting, some eating of good food, drinking of good wine, and some general sitting around with some girl movies and toenail polish. I'm even taking a day off from work to spend with her! (Well, not the whole day; I do have to teach for an hour that morning. But I'm getting the heck out of dodge right after class--I have some serious socializing to do!)

And just for everyone's entertainment this Monday, I thought that I would tell you how my week began this morning. I had to get to work today a little bit early to do some photocopying before my class, so of course I was running late getting out of the house. I raced to work, hopped out of the car, threw my laptop backpack over my shoulder as I headed up the hill toward the bus stop and "Zippp!" The zipper on my skirt broke. Actually the zipping part of the zipper didn't break, it stayed in place; the rest of the zipper came unzipped below it. (And I should add for my own mental well-being that this skirt is not tight on me, it's not like I am busting out of my clothes). Thank you Target for cutting corners and buying cheap zippers for your cute skirts. Anyway, I get to my office and proceed to try to fix it only to find that the zipper will not move. At all. It's not moving to the point that I may actually have to cut myself out of the skirt this evening. Now, I am a pretty resourceful girl. I first tried a cautious application of some hand lotion to try to grease up the zipper. No go. I looked around my desk for needle and thread, but no. That's safely at home. No safety pins either. The safety pins I tried to fashion out of paperclips turned out to be a less than stellar approximation to an actual safety pin. (That locking mechanism for the pin turns out to be key!) T-70 minutes before class, and I am standing in my office, door shut, stapler in hand, stapling the zipper of my skirt closed.

I kid you not. I am literally stapled into my clothes today.

I spent my entire lecture this morning wondering how well those staples would hold and if, with one wrong move, my entire skirt was going to come flying open. It wouldn't fall off, thank the heavens, because the damn zipping mechanism is still stuck at the top of the zipper. But it would fly open. At the very least, I was certainly less worried than I normally am about having my lecture be absolutely perfect. I was just happy to remain fully clothed.

The Hazards of Six Feet Under

2005-08-25T21:40:00.000-06:00

I enjoy living alone. I truly do. It took a little while to get used to after having had a roommate for so long. The heater, air conditioner, dishwasher, refrigerator, neighbors below, and what might be ghosts in my walls all made interesting and loud noises when I first moved in. Particularly at night. But I adapted and quickly grew to love it. It's quiet when I want it to be, I always have control of the TV remote, and I can spend half the day unshowered and in my pajamas without a second thought if that's what my heart desires. It only gets lonely when I let myself think about the possibility of living alone my whole life. That, on some level, I know is a real possibility and that's sad.

I saw an episode of Six Feet Under last night (Netflix Rocks!) where the dead guy du jour was a woman in her 40's who lived alone. She choked eating a microwave dinner and ended up dying on the floor in her kitchen. Apparently she had no friends either, as it took a week for anyone to notice something was awry and to find her body. I think that's my new biggest irrational fear. And I fully know that it's irrational! It certainly gave me pause, though, sitting on the couch and watching this woman die while shoveling broccoli into my mouth.

Re: my previous post. Just to let you know, I have in fact offered to do interpretive dance for a class grade in lieu of writing a research paper. It was my first semester here. My prof found the idea quite amusing (two of us proposed it to him), but he declined. He preferred the paper in the end. Which was good, because we were only serious about the dance in the most vague terms. But I'm not above doing cosmology-interpretive dance if that's what it take to get my class involved. :)

The Sound of Silence

2005-08-24T11:13:00.000-06:00

You could hear a pin drop in my class today. I swear. These students don't say a word, not even when directly addressed! No questions, no comments, no discussion when I ask for their thoughts.

Granted, it is a class of 75, so it's difficult to really have an interactive discussion, but I don't want to just be standing up here talking my little head off while they sit there and stare off into Neverland (or, worse, stare at me as thought I might have tentacles growing out of my head!)

I'm really really really not a fan of the "turn to your neighbor and discuss the implications of blah" and "write a one-minute essay, now share it with a small group" schools of college teaching, because they seem overused in a completely non-helpful way anymore. It seems to have become a clever proxy for calling the roll or forcing students to come to class. Around here, at least, that is what it seems to have deteriorated into. But a little bit of interaction and involvement by my students would be nice. It's just the first week of class, so maybe their minds are still elsewhere, but I cannot help wishing that they would at least pretend to care for a little while.

Perhaps I should start doing interpretive dance during my lectures.

One Down, Forty One to Go

2005-08-23T17:40:00.000-06:00

I've been more than a little be preoccupied recently, so I apologize for the lack of posts. Classes started yesterday. I was a little bit terrified around a half hour before my class. I was ready, but terrified. I couldn't help but think of the sheer multitude of things that could go wrong. My mental list included, but was not limited to: technology snafus, falling down, saying something stupid/wrong, falling down, clothing mishaps, boring my students to sleep, and oh yes, falling down. Don't know why I was so worried about tripping over my own feet, but I managed to convince myself that I would inevitably do a face plant during lecture.

But I managed to remain vertical and all went well. My favorite faculty member (Dr. FacultyMember?) came by my office about 20 minutes before class to check on me. He asked if it would make me nervous if he came to my class, I said yes, so he just walked down to the classroom with me to make sure everything was set up, wished me luck, and left. Turns out he's my "mentor" in this whole graduate student teaching experience. Who knew I even had a mentor! But class did, indeed, go fine. Granted, it was just the first lecture, but I finished everything I had planned (in roughly the right amount of time) and even managed to get a few laughs out of the class in the process. So, go me!

Of course, I already have had a student ask to take the final exam at a non-designated-final-exam time. So it goes. *sigh* The student addressed me as Professor LastName, though, and that was pretty cool. I kind of like the sound of that.

Odds & Ends

2005-08-09T12:20:00.000-06:00

Lots of little things have caught my attention in the last few days. Yesterday, as I walked to my office, I looked up and saw over a dozen big black birds circling my building. Only the building with my office, not any of the others nearby. They looked like vultures, though I suppose that's technically rather unlikely. I wondered, as I hauled my weekend worth of work up to my office early Monday morning, whether this was a sign from above regarding the future of my career. I seem to be oscillating wildly anymore on what I really want to do when I graduate. Presently, "become a hermit on a boat in Maine" is topping my list.

I'm so sad that Peter Jennings died. My parents always watched Peter, every single night when I grew up. World News Tonight was our dinner table entertainment. I attribute my insane adult addition to the news to Peter Jennings alone. What a great journalist he was. I spent my lunch today watching little video clips from the tributes different networks have put together. It's just sad.

During my websurfing recently I found the Starbucks locator page. It turns out that there are 29 Starbuckses within a 10 miles radius of my house. Geez Louise. They really are taking over the world! The Onion even did a little blurb a while back about how Starbucks was opening a new Starbucks in an existing Starbucks's bathroom. (Sorry, I can't find the link to the actual piece.)

I got a TA for my class, thank goodness. It's another graduate student in the department, of course, which is a little bit awkward for me. But he's actually sort of a friend of mine and we get along well, so I am hopeful that the weirdness will go away. At least now I have someone to help me grade.

My friend Pigs, a teacher, has written a lovely Ode to Summer. You should check it out.

Excitement/Terror

2005-08-04T21:03:00.000-06:00

Classes start here in a few weeks. (As I suppose they do elsewhere). So I have exactly 17 days to finish getting ready for my class. I'm getting pretty excited about it, as I have this completely unrealistic picture in my head of how all of my students are going to love me and learn so much. My class will be super cool, fun, and highly educational. My students will be astronomy geniuses by the end.

Then the terror sets in. I only have ~4 lectures done at this point and my outline for the semester is pretty ambitious for a class that I don't feel entirely comfortable teaching yet. I still haven't settled on the details of what their research papers should be like and the prospect of actually writing 3 exams and a final is completely daunting. Plus, obviously, only 1/4 of the 75 student signed up will actually care about the class and many will probably think I am a horrible bitch.

I feel kind of bipolar or something, what with the frequent oscillations between excitement and terror. It's wreaking a little bit of havoc on my general mental well-being.

And to bring you up to date on the topic of my previous post, I have taken it upon myself (now that I'm done complaining and whining about it) to do something about what I perceive as holes in my education. I have signed up for a mini-Med School at the local medical school. It is a series of 9 weekly lectures by professors at the med school on different current medical topics. It's intended for the general public to increase their knowledge about medicine. Sounds right up my alley. Perhaps I'll follow Craig's lead and buy a really boring book about Reconstruction next time I'm at the airport, too. :)

Filling in the Holes

2005-07-25T16:37:00.000-06:00

Looking back on my academic career thus far, I am beginning to wonder about all the things missing from my education. Someone should have pulled me aside as an undergraduate and said: "Look, you'll really regret it if you don't take any English classes. Probably the same for history, philosophy, psychology, biology, and religion. Your bizarre affinity for the Russian language not withstanding, being multi-lingual in useful languages would be an asset. Feel free to branch out at any time." I truly wish someone had said that to me. Because now, I do regret all of those things.

I think it's not simple to go back, though, and develop even the most basic, broad understanding of one of the fields from which I am now so far removed. I cannot help but look at the amount of time it would take me to learn conversational French and wonder if that time wouldn't be better spent working on another paper. Or forming a new collaboration with a colleague in my own field. That's what my advisor (and, frankly, the rest of the faculty here) would tell me to do. And how does one learn history while on a time budget? I can probably still recite the US Presidents in order (thanks Ms. Cleary!), but even the highlights of the van Buren administration now elude me. I don't need a book detailing the economic developments leading up to the fall of communism in East Germany, I need "High School World History for Dummies." Those are harder to come by, in my experience. And while my "Learn to Speak Italian in 10 Lessons" CDs are very entertaining, I cannot say that I have developed anything more than a repertoire of vaguely useful phrases. Linguistically, the language eludes me.

These topics are nothing, however, compared to my illustrious career in biology. I have not taken a biology course since 9th grade (circa 1990). I check with my biologist and doctor friends every so often to make sure we're still believing in this whole DNA thing, but beyond that? I'm seriously deficient. It's a travesty. And yet, where do I begin to fix that?

Our higher education system just seems so odd to me sometimes. We become so specialized, so focused on one narrow topic that other things seem just to fall by the wayside. And I don't necessarily think anymore that this specialization is to our benefit. I'll have my Ph.D. in under a year, but all that will mean (in a practical sense) is that I studied one tiny thing, really hard, for a long time. You would think that a Doctor of Philosophy might actually know some philosophy. But in my case at least, you would be wrong.

The Grating Incident

2005-07-18T11:02:00.000-06:00

I am a very mobile talker. I think it stems from forcing myself to move around when I first started teaching. The very first classes I ever taught were 3.5 hours long each, and I found that if I didn't move around, I would actually get pretty bored from just standing up there and lecturing. So I made a conscious effort to walk around the classroom as I talked. I didn't do laps or anything, but I walk around a bit, pick up random things to use as props and demos, that kind of thing. Plus, it kept my students more alert and involved; it's always good when the teacher does not appear bored.

The downside to this is that this behavior has become kind of ingrained in the way I lecture. And now, I am finding, I do the same thing when I am giving a talk or a seminar. I have always been one to dress up nicely when giving a presentation unlike so very very many people in my field (see a previous article noting the acid washed denim man-capris), but now, in order to curb my excessive movement I make a concerted effort to wear rather high heels. The ones I wore at my last conference were a modest 4 inches.

But one should always check out the floor before stepping up to give a talk in high heels. At the conference I attended several weeks back, our meeting was in a large university lecture hall. It must have been used for chemistry or physics lecture at one point as the front of the room had a large table/bench. The floor also had the obligatory "Oops, I've spilled the 16-gallon tank of water I was using for my demo on the floor" grating in the middle of the floor as well. (I've never really known what those were for.) The grating was clearly secretly designed with a secondary purpose: to catch the heel of my shoe and grab hold for dear life. Here I am, giving my first talk at a conference, dressed in my suit and very awesome heels, being very conservative with my movement around the room, and then bam! The slender heel of my shoe has become one with the grating. And tripping over my own feet and falling flat on my face in front of an auditorium full of famous-ish people simply will not do. I tried gently lifting my foot, hoping the shoe would just slip free from the apparent bear trap that had been set up, but only managed to lift my foot out of the shoe almost entirely. Gingerly placing my foot back into the shoe (keep in mind, I am still giving my talk at this point), I gave it another shot, leaning my weight on the non-captive foot and giving the hostage shoe a little twist. Finally! I was free! I hightailed it to the other side of the speaking area, finished my talk, and did not go near that side of the room again.

Don't Ask Me

2005-07-15T13:31:00.000-06:00

I had lunch a couple of days ago with one of my research groups. (I encourage you to interpret the word "research" rather loosely in this context, as the sum total of what I contribute to this group is the occasional technical consult). One of the researchers had invited a new, incoming graduate student to join us. The two of us were introduced and left at the table alone for a few minutes while everyone else went to grab some food.

New Student proceeded to ask me the usual "What do you do?", "What year are you?" types of grad student questions. Then he asked what I am going to do when I graduate. I was stumped. It was the first time, I think, that I said aloud "I have no idea" and really meant it. I tried to laugh it off in the it's-not-a-big-deal-right-now kind of way, but beneath my feeble attempt at humor I realized that I truly don't know what I want anymore. That's not the best realization to have over tuna salad. And New Student? He practically scolded me!! He told me that I had better get working on finding a job, that I am running out of time. The condescending tone of voice was enough for me to be over the conversation and start looking around for the familiar safety net of my advisor and the rest of the group.

I'm graduating in May 2006, mind you. I fully realize that fellowship deadlines are in October and November, and I need to start looking at post-doc listings this winter. I also have to plan my fall course, teach said course, finish my thesis research, write my thesis, and prepare for at least two conferences and an invited seminar this year. But since I now have been castigated by an incoming student, perhaps I should move "find direction for life and employment well-suited to achieving detailed life goals" to the top of the priority list.

Travels

2005-07-07T10:19:00.000-06:00

Wow! I'm finally back in town and at work. It seems like it has been forever! My conference went pretty well I think. No one threw any rotten fruit or vegetables at me after my talk and I even had a few nice comments after my session. So all in all, I did not die. And that's good. I have yet to have a conversation with my advisor about the presentation, but when we talked yesterday he did not give me any indication that he had any comments at all. So who knows.

After the conference I came home for about 36 hours during which I cleaned up my house, picked my brother up from the airport, and left town again. David and I spent a week touring the southwest, a place neither of us had ever been! We saw the Grand Canyon, Vegas (well, I had been to Vegas before), and Zion & Bryce Canyon National Parks. It was a great trip. When I get my stuff together, I'll write some more detailed posts about the trip. There were some pretty ridiculous and fun moments. For now, though, please enjoy some pretty pictures. Here is the Grand Canyon at sunset:

And some wildlife that tried to steal my Chex Mix:

We also stopped at Meteor Crater in Arizona. Even if you are not interested in geology and/or astronomy, I still think you would find it impressive. Big, big hole in the ground. The white spot in the center of the crater is an area where they've done some geologic research; there's a fence over 6 feet tall around it, but the crater is so big and deep that you cannot even see the fence!

After the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon is a little less impressive. The geology is very different, though, and still very pretty:

We also saw more wildlife at Bryce Canyon. Below is a clever raven who found a way around the park's "do not feed the wildlife" policy.

Very Quick Deep Thoughts

2005-06-23T17:36:00.000-06:00

Why oh WHY would a man wear faded, acid-washed, denim capris? It's an abomination to the senses. And seeing it is kind of like watching a train wreck: you can't not look at it.

What exactly does Pringles put on their chips--oops, I mean "potato crisps"-- to make them so addictive so quickly? I mean, who actually eats 10 potato crisps and then seals up the can saying, "I've had my single serving of Pringles; I'm done now." Why don't they just go ahead and call a third (or half) of a can a serving and be done with it? Oh, and acknowledge that they are drugging all of us to make us eat more. That said, I did notice that my can of Pringles has 0 g of trans fat. That makes them "healthy" apparently. (What crap.)

I've been tagged by Pigs for a meme. What is a meme? Regardless, I'll work on it and post it asap. Meanwhile, if you've not read Pigs's blog you should. She's funny and a great writer. That's my public service announcement for the day. :)

In case you were wondering

2005-06-22T06:38:00.000-06:00

The opposite of "soundproof" is apparently "dorm room walls."

Seriously, what do they build these things out of? Paper mache?

Here we go a-conferencing

2005-06-21T15:08:00.000-06:00

Ah summer. The season of warm weather, sunshine, beaches, late sunsets. It's also the season when the undergrads leave campus and one can walk around without bumping into people and find decent parking. But that's a thought for another day.

Summer is the season of conferences. Conference = a "business trip" we science types take to an exotic locale to speak and think deeply about the groundbreaking & trendsetting new discoveries of the last year or so. We kiss up to the bigwigs in the field and give presentations on our own little bits of research, hoping for someone to stand up and say "Look--she's a genius! The next Einstein!" (Wait, maybe that's just me.) But really, we also revel in the chance to go somewhere cool.

It stands to reason that a lot of conferencing takes place in the summer. This is when most faculty are not teaching and can actually take the time to go to Kuala Lumpur or the Canary Islands or Sydney for "work". And if you have to be in Lisbon for a week for work anyway, well you may as well stay another week or two and bring the family over for a little vacation while you're there. :)

Summer, however, is perhaps not the best time to schedule a week-long meeting in Columbus, Ohio. No offense to Ohio as I am sure it is a lovely place, but I can think of about 1000 other places I'd rather be right now than a freakishly cold dorm room in Ohio (complete with permenantly dirty bathroom and microfridge!). I don't really know why the conference housing is university dorms, but it is. I had a complete undergrad flashback when I checked in this afternoon. I don't miss dorm living at all.

I'm giving my very first talk this week. Thursday afternoon to be exact, if you'd like to think good thoughts for me. :) I've given plenty of presentations and seminars and the like at school; public speaking doesn't really bother me. The science of what I'm presenting does bother me a little. I feel like I know just enough to pick out the weak spots in my arguments; I just don't know that I have my feet under me enough on this project to stand up to the audience when they call me on it and convince them that I am right. It's a little nerve-wracking, too, doing this on the eve of my last year of grad school. I'm getting ready to start applying for postdocs and I cannot afford to make an ass of myself and then ask for a job.

Anyway, prepping for this conference has given me migraines for weeks and cost me countless hours of sleep. So I am glad it's finally here. Wish me luck; maybe I'll post again after the conference picnic tomorrow. There's supposed to be some kind of Beer Bash.....who doesn't love several hundred drunk scientists? :)

Morning Woes

2005-06-15T21:17:00.000-06:00

No two clocks in my house are set on the same time; they range from 2 minutes fast to 13 minutes fast. I do this partly because I hate to be late, but mostly because I am not a morning person. I am a master at convincing myself that I don't really have to get up in the morning. I come up with all kinds of wacky reasons why I should not get up yet. My favorite was when I decided I couldn't get up until the number on the clock was divisible by 7. I have no idea where I came up with that. I am an uber-geek even in my sleep!

So my conscious self has finally had to resort to some CIA-worthy covert ops to get my body up in the morning. I have two alarm clocks now; one in my room, and a really loud one hidden in the den. I periodically move it around in the den to force myself to actively seek out the beeping when it goes off. Neither clock is set on the right time (or even the same time), but they are carefully aligned so that the alarms go off exactly halfway through each other's snooze cycles. There is beeping about every 4 minutes in the morning in my house. It also turns out that my sleeping self often doesn't register that the clocks are fast until I am mostly awake. So the ambiguity of time in my apartment in the daytime is worth it to me if it will confuse me enough in the morning to actually wake up.

This morning turned out to be particularly challenging. I had been working quite late last night and only intended to sleep for a few hours before getting back up again. The alarms began around 4:30 this morning. I alternately smacked around for the snooze button on my nightstand and sleepwalked to the den looking for the hidden clock in an effort to lay down in silence for just a few more minutes. At some point I decided (while getting back into bed to snooze another 4 minutes) that I should put my glasses on; that way, I could see the clock next to my bed and know that I am oversleeping. Seemed like very logical reasoning at the time. So I got back into bed and slept very carefully with my glasses on. A few snoozes later, I decided I should get in the shower to wake up. I got as far as getting my towel before deciding to get back into the bed. And that's how I woke up an hour later in the bed, wearing my glasses and clutching my towel.

Bizarre.

Migraine City

2005-06-14T23:58:00.000-06:00

There are days when I wish my head would just go ahead and explode. It sure feels as though it is on the brink. My migraines are (as best I can tell) brought on by either (a) stress or (b) certain lighting situations. Sometimes both! The recent batch of the last week have been predominantly of the stress variety.

I know the headache will be bad when I can pinpoint the exact location of origin. The "pointy headache" is a personal favorite of this variety. It feels not unlike an icepick pointing radially outward from my head, usually behind one of my eyeballs. (The accompanying eye twitch is always a nice added bonus). Variations on the pointy headache include the "my eye is too big for its holder" (often with the pointy headache somewhere in my forehead above the eye) and the inward pointing icepick. Strangely enough, I feel as though the inward directed pointy and outward directed pointy are separate headache entities.

The pointy headache is different entirely from the "my head is in a vice" experience. The vice headache feels exactly as it sounds; a clamp has been affixed around my head and tightened so as to squeeze the two sides together. In a bizarre twist of nature, sometimes adding pressure to the areas of pain actually relieves it a little! (I have done vast experimentation on homeopathic headache relief while waiting for the pain killers to do their little dance of let's-make-her-wait-it-out-before-we-work).

And we just won't talk about what bright lights (or any lights at all for that matter) do to my head during a migraine. Computer screens, I have recently determined, are equally as enjoyable what with the added fun of high frequency flickering.

Anyway, it's been stressy around here for the last week or two. I can't wait for my upcoming conference to be over so I can have my head back from the evil demons that appear to have taken it over.

Beach Time

2005-06-02T21:48:00.000-06:00

I went on vacation last week. Woohoo! An entire week at the beach. It may seem like a decent enough time for vacation, but it never ends up being enough. We're thinking 2-3 weeks next time. :) I vacation with some of my closest friends whom I met while in grad school, round 1. (I've been to grad school twice in succession, but that's an entirely separate story). You know that saying about how you don't get to choose your family, but you do get to choose your friends? And they become your chosen family? Or something like that? Well anyway, that's what these friends are to me. They're like my family.

We've been summer-vacationing together for about 6 years. Twice we went to the North Carolina Outer Banks, once we went to San Francisco, and now for the third year running we've gone to Emerald Isle, NC. I absolutely love Emerald Isle, it's one of my favorite places. I hope that we always are able to get together each year and do this. I have this vision of all of us, 10 years from now with our significant others, our kids, and our own personal beach house. It's a lovely vision.

At any rate, I'm terribly depressed now to be home. It seems to be a recurring theme among my beach buddies right now; everyone wishes they were still sitting on the sand, fruity drink or scotch in hand, listening to the waves. Can't wait for next year!

All you ever need to know

2005-05-17T22:24:00.000-06:00

I never really learned to work well with others. I suppose that was one of those essential skills I should have picked up in kindergarten, but never quite got to. This lack of teamwork skills plagues me to this day.

My crisis du jour yesterday was putting together an abstract for a conference coming up. I didn't realize that the abstract solicitation had come out, and this particular conference is limiting the contributions to 240 posters. 193 abstracts had been submitted. Mine was written in an hour and out to collaborators by mid-afternoon. Here's where I begin to vent.

I've had some serious issues with some of my collaborators. Authorship, for one. My advisor is part of a pretty large collaboration and this group has collected the data that I am using for my thesis over the course of the last 4-5 years. So I appreciate that they all deserve authorship and the opportunity for input on my papers. (And I get over the fact that none of them add my name to their papers despite my having been part of the observing team since I started here.) But I have been chastised in the past for putting too many authors on an abstract for a poster at a bi-annual meeting. We're not talking about an earth-shattering Nature paper here. It should not have been a big deal. Yet I got a serious email-bitch slap for that "mishap" of mine. I've also been instructed to add a former undergraduate student of one of my collaborators as an author to a journal paper that I wrote. The claim here is that this undergrad did some work similar to mine a while back and deserves to get some recognition. Never mind that I have neither met this student nor used any of their work or results in my paper. Their former advisor just want to get them some published credit.

So imagine my joy at sitting here still, more than 24 hours later, waiting patiently for my collaborators to get back to me with their critical reviews of all 250 words in my paragraph and a half-long abstract. All while there are 32 spots remaining for the conference. I seriously do not like working with other people sometimes.

The social calendar

2005-05-16T18:05:00.000-06:00

I had quite the eventful weekend. I hosted a wine tasting party at my moderately tiny apartment on Friday night. (It was sort of like a Pampered Chef party, but with wine!) I was pretty excited at the prospect of making lots of appetizers and desserts to go with the wine; I like to be creative in the kitchen. And I think the food went over pretty well! I made quite the spread. I'm not sure what my friends really thought of the wine tasting, though. They said they liked it, but you never know. Sometimes I think your friends are the least honest people around, what with the sparing of your feelings and all. Regardless, I very much enjoyed the wines and spent probably too much on restocking my own wine cabinet.

I was invited to a dinner party by one of the faculty members in my department for Saturday night. Up until that point, I was pretty sure he really disliked me. He didn't really speak to or acknowledge me all that often, and when he did it was usually something critical. In addition, he is a very political guy; when he tries to turn on the charm, you can be almost assured you have something that he wants. So I was rather thrown by the invitation. I couldn't imagine why he would want me of all people at his home, nor could I figure out what it was that he really wanted from me. To top it all off, the guest list appeared to be me and three couples. (I am S.O.-less, in case that part wasn't clear).

Turns out, I was rather wrong about the whole thing. He didn't want anything from me and it turned out to be a rather pleasant evening! There were a few awkward moments in the conversation, but I expected nothing less from a roomful of astronomers and their spouses. :) All in all, I now feel like I really need to rethink my opinion of the host. (Then again, he could help his case significantly if he didn't intentionally look away from me when walking past me on campus).

I also dogsat this weekend. But that experience requires an entire post of its own after a sufficient recovery period.

On the Plus Side

2005-05-10T21:28:00.000-06:00

I have decided, after reading my last several posts and the associated comments, that I have become entirely too negative. There are good things about graduate school after all and I will highlight some now.

I took a two hour lunch today. And no one cared. I went down to east campus where there is a lovely sitting area and met a bunch of other students to grill out. It was a beautiful day, people ate much grilled meat (I had some lovely steamed broccoli and brussel sprouts) and all in all it was as pleasant occasion. Then we went for ice cream at the fantastic homemade ice cream place in town. By about 1:45 pm, I headed back to work for the afternoon.

When my advisor is out of town, I can work at home. And again, no one cares. I can sit at my glass kitchen table, drink some tea, wear my pajamas and slippers and just work all alone in my house.

And while on the subject of hours, I could frankly keep pretty much whatever hours I want. There are the urban legends of grad students who evolved onto 36-hour schedules while writing their theses. Plus, there are even researchers here who roll into the office at 2 or 3 in the afternoon and work until midnight.

It's summer now (university-wise, at least). Around 25,000 people left town last week. It's nice. Quiet. And there is more parking available.

I study the things that interest me. No one tells me what to do; it's up to me to figure out how to answer the questions that pop into my head! I find a problem that intrigues me, I figure out what data I need to solve the problem (or at least how to start to get a handle on the problem), and I follow where that data leads me. That's pretty cool. To me, at least. There is a lot of freedom in science research.

Bored Now

2005-05-09T21:45:00.000-06:00

I have decided that success in graduate school is dependent on about 10% intelligence and 90% motivation, ambition, and fear of faculty realizing they made a mistake in admitting you. I used to be very ambitious. It's unclear to me where that ambition went, but I think it's deteriorated slowly, replaced bit by bit by fatigue. My motivation used to come purely from the love of astronomy; like 90% of other grad students in astronomy, my application essay started something like "Astronomy has always been my passion." (And I can say that with some authority, having served on the admissions committee for two years. I have read a solid 300 application essays over the past few years and except for the guy that wrote about his pet alpaca, they've all been more or less the same). Yet even my motivation has gotten lost in the math and the sheer dullness of what I do on a daily basis. I'm running purely on fear anymore.

Graduation was last week. All but one of my friends is leaving this summer. They all have real jobs or post-docs and are heading out into something new and fabulous. I'll say this up front: I'm so excited for them! Truly, I am. The same kind of thing happened to me, though, a few years ago, the first time I went to graduate school. All of my friends graduated a year before I did and I was left more or less alone in my final year finishing my Master's degree. It was really, really depressing. It's a little different this year, in that I have about 47,000 times the amount of work to do in my final year of my PhD. (as compared to the M.S.), but the sadness remains. And not a little bit of envy. I wish I had a clear view of the job I want (or even the one that I don't want), but it's not like that. I look at my job prospects and I have to admit that unless I want to leave astronomy altogether and end up running a Starbuck's (which is not out of the question), I have no idea where I will be in a year. Speaking of jobs, here is the one thing that nobody tells you early on: in astronomy academia, pedigree is everything. Everything. One of the first things anyone asks you is where you are from. And it matters. It matters a lot.

It's strange how your priorities change in grad school. I used to have grandiose ideas about the incredible discoveries I would make as a graduate student. I was going to change the whole field with my new insight. Four years in, a big deal to me anymore is new office space (which, thank the heavens, I have managed to score starting this summer). Conference travel used to super cool, a chance to get out of the office and go somewhere cool. Now it's just time that I won't be working on my thesis. (Not to mention the amount of time and effort that goes into planning said travel, let alone figuring out how to pay for it!) All in all, I guess grad school is just much more real than I had imagined. It's hard, and it's often mundane and tedious. I have made no huge discoveries and have barely scratched the surface of what people in my field already know. Reality really does bite sometimes.

Guilty Pleasure

2005-05-06T21:19:00.000-06:00

Confession: I love the movie Drumline. I spent too many years in marching band not to. And unlike a lot of people I know, I actually really liked marching band. For me it was just fun. Secretly (well, not so much now) I miss it sometimes.

And the movie? It's no great cinema, but it's fun. You should watch it. Regardless of whether you were ever in the marching band.

Small Rant

2005-05-01T15:06:00.000-06:00

For the love of all that is holy, would it please stop snowing??? It is May for goodness sake. I'm done with this.

There. I have said my peace.

By the Numbers

2005-04-29T11:23:00.000-06:00

Just a few Friday evening thoughts to share:

inches of snow at my house: 6
feet of fog on the road this morning: approximately 1.5
days until I leave for the beach: 21
students enrolled in my class for the fall: 72
students on waitlist for my class for the fall: 6
hours spent at the office today: 3.5
RSVP's for my fabulous upcoming wine tasting: 8

VHS vs. Beta

2005-04-26T21:26:00.000-06:00

My subconscious apparently decided to continue my stroll down memory lane this afternoon. A strange little stream of consciousness process led me to remember back, pre-high school, when my family did not have cable. Instead we had an antenna on the roof of the house for television reception. In the den (which, by the way, had some fabulous 70's-era wood paneled walls), we had a little contraption that controlled the antenna. It had a giant dial that we would turn causing the antenna attached to our chimney to rotate, and improving the picture on the TV. This was back in the day when we only had access to 4 or 5 channels. I don't really know what made me think of it, but I can picture the whole thing so clearly.

This of course led me to remember our first VCR. I distinctly remember my father waffling back and forth over whether to buy a VHS or beta tape player. He went with VHS. (Thank goodness). Apparently the masses thought that beta was the way to go at the time. There was only one place that we knew of in town where they rented VHS tapes when I was little; I remember driving across town to rent movies with my Mom. But back to the VCR. There was actually a pop-up part on the top of the 20 lb. appliance where you put the tape in. Kind of like an old cassette player. The "remote control" was actually a little handheld piece that could fast forward, rewind, and maybe pause. It was attached to the VCR proper by a very long cable. We thought we were so ahead of the game. It was able to record 12 channels (2-13). So no taping Fox, which was on channel 45 at the time!

Sadly, while my father was on the cutting edge with the VHS VCR back in the day, he made a bad call after that. Does anyone remember the laser disc player? Picture a DVD type disc the size of a big vinyl record. The laser disc player was a contemporary of the very first CDs in the late 80's/early 90's. It really never took off. I think my father still owns one, though. Perhaps he could sell it on EBay.

Blast from the Past

2005-04-25T23:43:00.000-06:00

For reasons that still defy explanation, I pulled out my old high school yearbooks tonight. Yikes! I knew I was a geek back then (I say that as though I'm not pretty well geeked-out here in astrophysics grad school), I just didn't realize how super geeky I was. It was bad.

Among the enlightening comments my peers left for me, they said that I was "great to have in a group for class projects", "really nice", and "sweet". My Humanities teacher, Mr. Meyer, claimed that he enjoyed having me in his class, even when I went through my "grumpy phase". (Um, yeah. I have no idea what he was talking about). According to Beth (and other people I took chemistry with) I also had serious problems lighting matches in chemistry class. Who knew? Blake apologized for pulling my hair during English and somebody named Mike said he thought I had more potential than people gave me credit for. And if anyone remembers the Charlie Decker story, I think I'd appreciate it if they reminded me of it; it seemed rather important in my junior year.

And my high school crushes? I had forgotten about most of those guys, but apparently I took them rather seriously at the time. Gracious. How embarrassing.

Anyway, it was an interesting trip down memory lane. I am sure now I will feel no need to repeat the process for another 5-10 years. Plus, I at least can take comfort in the fact that I have come a long, long way since then. If nothing else, I can light a match now! :)

Hey You

2005-04-20T22:01:00.000-06:00

So, I may not have brought everyone up to date. I am indeed teaching this fall. Yippee!! The class I have been assigned to teach focuses on the one area of astronomy that I know the very least about. (What's the opposite declaration of "Yippee"?) Waves of panic have been rippling through my world ever since I accepted the job.

The most recent panic has been over selecting a textbook for this class. We have already established that if I had to choose the one topic I am least comfortable with in astrophysics it would be the topic of this class. (Cosmology, if you must know). But I am teaching this class, by gosh, even if it kills me. Which it might. But I digress. While graduate students are often encouraged/required to attend seminars on effective teaching practices (don't say "um", use PowerPoint instead of the chalkboard), learning styles (learning by listening, writing, actively doing, and/or osmosis), and innovative interactive techniques for the classroom (dear god, please strike down the person who invented clickers!), these "teaching the teachers" classes often fail to give any insight into how to do the more mundane (yet extremely important) things like choosing a good textbook. I have had way too many horrible textbooks in classes to not take this responsibility very seriously. (I should someday link my friend Jeff's comments on Amazon regarding our Classical Mechanics book. Classic.) I found out on Tuesday that I was two weeks overdue in letting the university bookstore know which book(s) to order for my class. The class that starts in August, mind you. So I am frantically "reading" every cosmology book recommended by the last 6 instructors for this course to determine which one will be most effective in helping to illustrate the salient points of the course. Gracious. I am in way over my head right now.

And here's another quandry. What do I have my students call me? I won't have my PhD yet, so clearly Dr. and Prof. are right out. It seems like a bad idea to have them call me Meredith, as there are 75 of them and I need to establish some sense of the instructor-student boundaries off the bat. I cannot bring myself to tell them to call me Miss D., and Ms. D. sounds ridiculous. What am I left with--"Hey You"? "Bitter Graduate Student"? "Queen of Under-her-breath Sarcasm?" "Short, Brunette Person at the Front of the Room?"

These are the things I worry about in the evenings, rather than working.

Digitus Minimus

2005-04-19T20:38:00.000-06:00

I got a voicemail message from my mom the other day. It sounded like this:

"Meredith? This is your mother. I need to talk to you." (very serious tone)

Pause.

"Your brother is having surgery on Thursday."

Dramatic pause by my Mother. Dramatic thoughts of kidney transplants, bone marrow transplants, and/or brain tumors by Meredith.

"On his finger."

Huh?

"Give me a call when you get home."

Clearly, I call home at this point. David (aforementioned brother) broke his finger a few weeks ago playing football in P.E. My father, being a dentist, took David to his office and x-rayed the suspect finger. He saw a break in the pinky bone on the x-ray and wrapped David's finger all good and tight between a couple of tongue depressors and said it would heal.

And heal it did. In the wrong orientation. An orientation which prevented full mobility of said digit, including the ability to completely bend. David says that the doctor told him that the particular location and type of break in the bone would have required it to be re-broken and set with a pin or two, regardless of what my parents had done about it. (Like, say, if they had taken him to the doctor when the break happened). But still. You have got to imagine that my parents are feeling pretty badly about it now.

David and his digitus minimus survived the surgery just fine, by the way. And the doctor says that the finger bends now and everything! It's all bandaged up, though, and David is a little bummed that he can't drive for a while. But all involved will survive.

I'm Such a Girl

2005-04-17T18:19:00.000-06:00

I heard a strange noise coming from my car yesterday as I pulled up to a stoplight. It was new and interesting enough that I decided to stop and check on it, thinking it was probably not normal. So I pulled in to a gas station, parked, and got out to check. My brilliant scientific mind quickly concluded that the noise was probably related to the complete lack of air in my back right tire. I knew there had been some pieces of something that looked like rubber in the road a couple of stoplights back, but I thought I had avoided hitting them. Apparently, I did not.

So, I did what I thought any normal person would do. I sat down on the curb next to my car and called my Dad. (Mind you, he lives 1800 miles away.) He confirmed, based on my description, that my tire was indeed flat and I did in fact have to put the spare on. Now, I have seen this done (and even helped a couple of times!) so I just proceeded to start pulling all my worldly possessions out of my trunk in order to get to the spare. I pulled out the spare doughnut, the jack, and the long contraption used to remove the nuts from the tire. Like any normal person, I also pulled out my car owner's manual to read the tire changing procedure.

So picture me, sitting on the curb next to my car with the flat tire. The spare tire and associated accessories are on the lawn next to me and my nose is pressed firmly into my tire-changing instructions. During this time I swear to you, no fewer than 20 people passed by me, looked at me, and continued on their merry way. From the time I first parked and noticed the completely uninflated tire on my car it took 15 minutes for someone to stop and offer to help.

By that time, of course, I had chickened out of changing the tire on my own. I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to find the right place to put the jack, the car would manage to fall on my head (despite my firm rule never to place my head beneath a car or other heavy object), and I have pretty crappy university health insurance unlikely to cover such accidents. So I was a total girl and called someone to come help me. And to make it all a little more embarrassing, the only person I could call that lived within about a 30 minute drive from where I was was my officemate, whom I don't really like. (He's actually the one that stole my summer class). So I had to call him and his new wife on a Saturday evening and see if he could come hold my hand through the changing of my tire. Mortifying. Anyway, officemate+wife showed up about 30 seconds after a kind stranger finally offered his help.

I have to admit, I was pretty irritated that no one else ever offered to help me. I fully realize this is attitude of mine is ridiculous as I should have been capable of changing a damn tire by myself. I shouldn't have needed help (even if I did end up wimping out). But still. I think it's just common courtesy to offer help. I don't think it's asking too much. Alas, I don't live in the South anymore, so evidently it is asking too much.

Backup Plans

2005-04-12T22:04:00.000-06:00

The past few days have been examples of the periodic low points in my life as a grad student. One of those times when the only thought in my mind all day long is "Why in the world did I decide to do this again?" So, in an effort to combat my impending depression at wasting my life away in a field I currently hate, I have been compiling a list of backup plans. If I'm going to quit, I need to have a plan.

Now, some backup plans are unrealistic. Moving to LA to sleep on my friend Greg's apartment floor and becoming Jack Bauer's nemesis next season, for instance. The likelihood of me becoming a television and/or movie star is actually quite small. (Sitting around a coffee shop mocking said celebrities, however, is much more probable). And I'm really not much of a badass. It seems I would need some badass qualities to be on 24. I probably won't be able to become a technical advisor for Alias either, though their science does need some serious help sometimes.

A bunch of grad school friends and I do have a more realistic plan of moving to Mexico, where we'll open a combination pizza parlor/coffee shop/scuba diving school on the beach. I get to be the barista. I think I could handle days filled with making some coffee and drinking some fruity girly drinks. That sounds right up my alley right now. Get some sun, re-learn some Spanish.... all good. Plus, there are about 8 of us in on the deal, so I wouldn't have to do it alone, either! We could sit back watching the sun set over the water with our tasty beverages, some pizza, and think back on how awful graduate school was and how glad we are to have left.

My actual fallback plan has always been to move to New England and open a B&B. I could decorate the inn, I could bake cookies each day at 3:00, I could do morning wonders with eggs and make holiday-theme shaped pancakes. There would be pretty leaves in the fall, snow in the winter, and little to no astronomy taking place. At all. Very little paper writing. Hardly any use of the computer ever. No review papers to read, no classes to teach... the words "publish or perish" would never enter my vocabulary. It really sounds delightful. Quiet.

In the end, I'm not sure any of it is realistic. I guess reality isn't really what I'm aiming for right now, though.

*sigh*

Good Day

2005-03-30T22:12:00.000-07:00

Today I had a pretty good day. First, I won the battle of wills with my bangs and beat them into submission with a hairdryer. (They look better than that sounded). I finally worked up the courage to talk to my advisor about teaching this fall. The gist: he doesn't really want me to do it (he's worried it will keep me from graduating on time), but he won't stand in my way. So that looks like it will pan out. And, to top it off, I taught my second to last MCAT class of the semester! I'm looking forward to having my weekday evenings back (or some of them at least) when I finish that up next week.

So all in all, not a horrible day. :)

363 and Counting

2005-03-27T22:22:00.000-07:00

To graduate in May 2006, I have to have my thesis submitted by a year from this past Friday. So I have 363 days to finish my research, apply for jobs, and write a thesis.

No worries.

Understanding the Bang

2005-03-25T22:37:00.000-07:00

I got my hair cut yesterday. My hair is now pretty short, for me at least. I have pretty much always had long hair. The shortest it ever was was when I did the Jennifer Aniston 'do, around 1995. The "Friends" bob, if you will. Even then it was down to my shoulders. Anyway, I had 5 inches cut off last night, so now it falls about down to my shoulder blades. It feels incredibly light, which I love!

What I'm not so sure I love is the bangs. I had long-ish bangs cut as well. I haven't had bangs since the era of the infamous "mall bangs", approximately 1988. These are obviously very different; there's not nearly as much product involved for one! But I'm not quite sure what to do with these yet. There is hair in my face! The other bizarre thing is that my hair is naturally pretty wavy/curly. I learned this afternoon that very short hair around my face has a tendency to curl up like a bad perm when not properly handled. I didn't anticipate that. So no airdrying the hair for me, that is lesson 1! Lesson 2 is: do not use a straightening iron. Like I told my friend Jackie this afternoon, that caused me to end up looking like Lucy Camden, circa 1996. Not at all what I was going for.

Suffice it to say that it took me a solid hour this afternoon to get my new bangs in a place where I would actually leave the house with them. It's going to be a learning experience I guess.

Addendum

2005-03-25T12:19:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I forgot one major geek example from my life. Too many people know about it to ignore it. I was a band geek. I wasn't just in the band, I really liked the band. I had fun. I took it rather seriously as a youth.

Total geekness.

In a strange twist of grammar (or something), I just spellchecked my post. It suggested replacing "geekness" with "sexiness". I'm laughing too hard right now to have any real comment on that.

And Now I will Copy Too

2005-03-22T14:49:00.000-07:00

Since Ginny copied Stephanie's geek list, I will now copy both of them. :) It really is quite therapeutic! This post's secondary title could be something to the effect of "Confessions of a Childhood-through-Early-Adulthood Geek." We can assume that I am no longer too geeky...though I am in astrophysics, so maybe that's a bad assumption.

1) I didn't take naps as a child and would pitch fits during nap time in pre-school. I wanted to read books and they wouldn't let me.

2) I got glasses in fifth grade. They were large with purple rims. I wore them attached to a rainbow colored string around my neck so that when I would take them off, they could lie at the ready across my chest for the next impaired-vision emergency.

3) I skipped the 4th grade in a small private school. There is no faster way to be hated by your peers. Unless you were fat and non-athletic, which I was too.

4) I actually started a Babysitter's Club with some other girls in my neighborhood. We did all the same things at our meetings that the girls did in the books. We didn't do much babysitting, though.

5) In middle school/early high school I loved loved loved New Kids on the Block. I even had a NKoTB t-shirt that I wore while at Space Camp. (No further comment needed there.)

6) I wore braces from 7th grade through 11th. To add insult to injury, I had to have 7 teeth removed prior to putting on the braces. So I looked a lot like a rabbit with braces since I had no bicuspids and only 1 cuspid and my shiny new braces.

7) I was jealous that my sister got a retainer. I wanted one too.

8) I built model rockets through middle school and high school. I thought that made me cool. I don't know which of those two sentences made me more of a geek.

I'm sure there's much more, but I've got to keep some secrets to myself. :)

Getting What You Ask For

2005-03-18T00:44:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the worst thing in the world is when someone actually listens to you and gives you the one thing for which you have asked. Take me, for example. I get tired of people hovering over me, be it literally (ie--my mother calling to ask if I need money) or figuratively (as in at work, when my advisor keeps the advising strings tied a little too tightly). What I really would like is to be able to make my own decisions, be they good or bad. I don't want other people having conversations for me and deciding my fate. I'm 28 for goodness sake, I am a grownup. Please treat me like one.

You might remember several weeks back when a teaching opportunity was rudely ripped away from me. (Clearly I'm still not completely over that. Maybe I used the term grownup a little prematurely back then). Well, I talked to the powers that be (the department chair, let's call him DC) about the whole deal. DC and I (thank the heavens) have a great working relationship. He actually sought me out when he heard that I had "been informed" of the teaching change and wanted to check to see if I was really ok. I told him exactly what I thought about the situation and he told me exactly how everything went down, including the parts my advisor failed to mention to me. Long story short, DC wants to give me a chance to teach a class in the fall since I cannot do the one in the summer. So in theory, all is well and I am getting what I want.

Here's the catch. Of course there is a catch.

My advisor does not want me to do it. Apparently, the faculty member in charge of scheduling went to my advisor to talk to him about the opportunity and my advisor (let's call him Pain in My Ass for the moment) has decreed that he would prefer I did not teach this fall. Mind you, PiMA has not mentioned a thing to me about the chance; the word went from PiMA to faculty member in charge of scheduling to DC and finally back to me. I had lunch with DC yesterday at which point this whole conversation is relayed back to me. DC tells me that it's up to me to make a decision on whether or not to teach the class; the class is mine for the taking. He's leaving the ball completely in my court. He, unlike everyone else, does not want to tell me what to do. Of all the times to listen to me and not actually offer his opinion, this is the one he chooses.

So now, I have two weeks to decide whether (a) to teach this class and piss off my advisor the semester before I need him to sign my thesis or (b) to turn down a golden opportunity that has been created for me by DC and dropped into my lap, thus ensuring that DC will be unlikely to go out of his way for me again the semester before I need his help finding a job.

See how getting what you ask for can come back to bite you in the bum?

Whoa

2005-03-07T22:02:00.000-07:00

I love E! as much as the next guy. Maybe more. (Actually, considering the people I'm surrounded by on a daily basis, probably a lot more.) I love some celebrity gossip and spoilers for my favorite TV shows and snarky comments about rich people's fashion sense or lack thereof (see Paris Hilton and/or Jennifer Lopez). I'm a total sucker for it all. But I cannot get behind the headline that greeted me on E! this evening:

"Witness: Michael Licked my Brother"

Ew. Ick. Just no. I have kept myself Michael Jackson-free for as long as possible. I don't want to know anything about the case. Especially not about who licked whom. Why is this stuff news? Why is the trial even open to the press and public? Why did it have to interrupt my gossip reading?

Woe to me.

Grad School Rush

2005-03-06T20:20:00.000-07:00

Coming up soon is the time of year when a whole gaggle of college seniors start going around to various graduate programs to decide where they will attend graduate school. At least in astronomy (I can't really speak to other academic fields), many schools really wine and dine the students, trying to entice these 22-year olds to grace the department with their scholarly presence for the next 4-6 years. It can be a very bizarre thing, this whole courting of students thing. It's all very "sorority rush" to me. (And yes, gasp, I did the sorority in thing in college. It's apparently atypical for an astronomer, hence the blank stares of confusion directed at me when I used to mention to colleagues my days in a college sorority.)

It really is like an academic rush. Because the students are often admitted to the school before being invited to visit, the whole point of the visit becomes the department trying to impress the student. There's a whole dog and pony show that the department puts on, showing off their dazzling research opportunities and the fantastic locale where you are now lucky enough to get to live should you choose to attend Astronomy U. There are presentations detailing the glories of the department, there are tours of the facilities, and there are parties designed to facilitate after hours interaction between students and faculty. The whole thing is often topped off with a weekend-long demo of the frighteningly stunted social skills of an entire department of astronomers. All this to convince students that this department is the one to join instead of all of the others to which they were also accepted.

When I take a step back to look at it, it's all just a very strange event. One I am sad to say that I am not looking forward to this year. I'm just to old to smile and put on a good show any more.

How much Buffy is too much Buffy?

2005-02-22T00:02:00.000-07:00

My friends Jeff and Carrie got me hooked on watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I kid you not. In the matter of about a month I have raced through nearly the entire first two seasons. This weekend alone I watched 7 episodes. In one sitting. This seems unhealthy. (As does my unreasonable crush on David Boreanaz, but that's another story entirely. Am I too old for a crush on a TV star? Does he still count as a star? Whatever. He's hot.)

I'm not going to pretend this is a great piece of small screen cinema. It's not. But it is entertaining. And I enjoy mocking people's hair from the late 90's. That's nothing but good quality fun. Plus it's not deep at all so I can watch it without thinking. Maybe that's not a perk for everyone, but it is for me.

In other news, today my advisor asked me the question I have been simultaneously dreading yet hoping to hear for well over a year now. "When do you plan to graduate?" I'm officially on board for May 2006. Thank heavens. Strangely, he and I have never really discussed my thesis. Apparently, he thinks it's pretty much up to me to outline what I think belongs in it and, you know, to write it. I had been thinking that he and I would go over my plan together and make sure I wasn't doing something stupid or missing something huge. Other advisors have told students what each chapter in their thesis will be for heavens sake! They hand their students a thesis on a silver platter; all the student has to do is actually do it. But whatever. Apparently it's all good and he trusts me. Scary thought.

Oh, and another friend of mine that's graduating this year got a rockin' cool post-doc. He's headed to Cal Tech. And since I assume no one outside of astronomy knows what Cal Tech means within astronomy, let's just say that you can pretty much write your ticket to a faculty job nearly anywhere if you have Cal Tech on your CV. (Grad school at Cal Tech is better, but a post doc will certainly suffice). So way to go Greg, this is what I say. :)