What I do, and a turtle.

As I kind of expected, things went from a relaxed and easy pace to all kinds of insanity at work today. It's a short week for me, as I'm taking off to see the hub and kid this weekend, and I'm vacating work a day early. Of course, now that I have plans for that, all the supplies I had ordered are now trickling in, and there's work (a lot of it) to be done on the 3 experiments I'm working on.

I was going to head over to knitting tonight, but I was starving (forgot to eat) and I'm tired. So I picked up a sandwich on the way home and watched Heroes and House instead.

The front half of the week is typically brutal. I have a regularly scheduled experiment on Monday, and I'm usually busy with that all day and through most of Tuesday. It's not difficult work, but it requires fairly intense attention during the active times, and for a good chunk of time, it's a matter of constant, careful motion. All the steps are time-sensitive, and there's a lot of moving from one place to another. This week I got a reprieve (sort of). I was able to pause my experiment at a point where I don't usually stop, and I'll take it up again next week. Of course, now I have to look forward to working with some seriously scary reagents, and I'm more than a little nervous about it. (Next week, I get to work with trifluoroacetic acid, and yes, I will be working in the fume hood for a change. Acetic acid is no big deal, neither is hydrochloric, but this stuff intimidates me a bit. Okay, a lot.) Plus, I really want everything to work, so I have to be very very careful how I do things next week. Should be interesting - I need clean, non-contaminated samples, but maybe, just maybe, I'll have some good results by the end of the month.

Anyhow, I got to do something very cool today, and I played with lasers. No kidding. I'm learning how to use a million dollar piece of equipment, which oddly seems less intimidating than it used to. (We really have excellent toys here.) There's more training tomorrow, plus a session on how to use a much less interesting piece of equipment in the lab (it doesn't have a laser.) I spent the afternoon staring in frustration at my computer, finally figuring out that the answer to a problem I was having was much simpler than I thought, but does mean that I lost some time and have to repeat something I did last week. Then I did a little bit of prep work for the third project that I'm doing preliminary work on, which I'm super excited about. I have a laundry list of small things to do waiting for me in the morning, and with any luck, I should have another shipment of supplies arriving, because I'm waiting for a custom order to come in.

Sometimes I gripe about my job - it's busy, it's hard, and the personalities around me can, at times, be a little different. At the same time, I love the variety of things I get to do. Most of the time, I'm not sitting at a desk; instead, I'm doing and making things. I am however, tired. Tomorrow will come soon, and it will be busy. Time to knit another row or two, and then to collapse and hopefully sleep. I'm hoping for a quiet night. I'm also grateful for an iPod app that generates white noise. There's little else that knocks me out so quickly.

Still here.

Things picked up for a while, and now are slowing down a little bit, at least temporarily. I've found an apartment to rent, my application has been accepted, and a small deposit to hold the apartment is winging its way to its destination as I write.

The usual stresses and difficulties haven't changed, but this week should be a little easier as a) it's shorter, and b) my biggest source of stress and difficulty is out this week. This leaves me more able to go about things according to my own schedule, which helps a great deal.

I seem to be off to a slow start this morning - we got back in town from a mini-vacation with the inlaws yesterday afternoon. I started to get the house picked up from some work we had done - wallpaper removal, popcorn ceiling removal, painting - messy stuff that has left a residue of dust everywhere. I'm trying to look at it as an opportunity to get rid of some of the clutter as I put rooms back together. Yesterday, I poked around in the bookshelves, and pulled some books out to give away, and moved unread books that had gotten lost in the shuffle to more visible locations. Now it's easier to shop the bookcases again, find just the right reading material.

I'll post some fun travel photos tomorrow, and update the knitting news. I'm in sock mode, which means about 3 being worked simultaneously, but hopefully at least one of those will be finished up shortly. Trying to resist the call of the new and finish up some of the lingering projects. Small and portable is winning right now, thanks to the current decluttering efforts.

Day 2

I swear to you I had fewer of those 2 days ago. It's been a week. Thankfully, tomorrow is Friday, and the boss is out, which means I can relax and have a better day.

Julie freaked me out about carpet bugs, which prompted me to pull out my roving and spin a little bit. I am not very good at making yarn with my spindle, which isn't much of a surprise. I don't play with it very often, and honestly, I don't really have time to take up spinning, even though I do find working with the spindle to be really relaxing. I think most of my yarn is safely stored in plastic bags inside plastic tubs, but there's one area in my house that I'm a little nervous about. I think I'll dig into that area this weekend, but it's hiding a lot of things I don't really want to deal with.

It rained all day and wasn't a good day for photos. Hopefully tomorrow the pollen will have been washed away a bit and it will be slightly drier. Roads were flooded for my morning commute - high tide + rain + living at sea level = hazardous conditions. If it's a little better, I'll snap a shot of the wrap I've been knitting away on. Let's face it - it's a novelty scarf, but it's silk and it feels fantastic, and I'm feeling totally unashamed of it.

This cheesy 80's moment

Brought to you courtesy of a lousy day.
Humor me. I gave notice today (3 months) and it didn't go so well. But, hey - I made it this far. I can make it another few months, right?

I'm challenging myself to blog every day this month. If nothing else, it may help me get out the camera more.

Getting a few things off my chest

Sorry - have to do this so I can keep my mouth shut in real life.

To my new office mate: Hi. Glad you've joined the lab. Well, not really, because you represent a financial commitment that my boss isn't willing to make to me. In any case, thanks for taking an interest in my life. However, I'm able to manage my time without your input, so feel free to stop asking me what I'm working on, how it's going, why I'm not going to conferences/meetings/poster presentations, where I am, where I'm going, where I've been and other questions of that ilk. If you don't see me at my desk, I'm probably in the lab, darkroom, another lab, or the other lab. Oh - and don't worry about the number of hours I'm here - trust me, it's enough, and it's not your business. Thanks! P.S. I don't really want to talk to you about jewelery, face-lifts, my weight, your weight, or how The Biggest Loser is your favorite show because you like "seeing the fat people run around." I don't really think I have much in common with you.

To the clueless grad students: I'm done helping you. You're rude, obnoxious, disrespectful and some of you are just jerks. Just because I'm female doesn't mean that I don't know what I'm talking about, and even if you don't respect the fact that I got my degree and you're still earning yours, I have more years of experience than you do, and you should realize that. You mistake arrogance for confidence, and I'm not in the mood to argue with you, nor do I have the time to do so. P.S. You're wrong, by the way, but you can figure that out yourself.

To the new postdoc I like: No, it's always like this. It's always a frat-boy atmosphere, and liking what you're working on isn't enough to get you through this. It's 6 months in, and you're unhappy. They're never going to listen to you, they think they know everything, and they will always be overconfident and dismissive.

To my potential new employer: Please hire me. Please please please. I love your lab, I liked your people, and I want to go away and do something different now. You seemed really nice and encouraging, and I think you liked me, and I'm really really desperately hoping to come work with you. I know you said you'd get back to me next week, but please make it early in the week because I'm a nervous wreck.

Once more, into the breach.

Really Random Friday

I've officially had an extremely odd week, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. If you're one of the few people crazy enough to have stuck around over the past couple years (and if you have, you know who you are), you've seen me finish grad school, work for a while, find a postdoc, and now face a serious career crisis. The current question - should I stay or should I go? On one hand, the economy stinks, and being dependent on government funding isn't a great plan right now. On the other hand, I love, really love, what I do, when I'm interested in it. This week, I had decided it was time to go. As in, I decided that Wednesday, and proceeded to enthusiastically start looking for other career options, and found a few things that really appealed to me, and was starting to make Big Plans.

Then I got my dream second postdoc interview opportunity. The one that fell into my lap, that seriously, there's no way he can want me to work in his lab. Amazing stuff. Incredible, fascinating, really ultra-cool and exciting science with someone who quite honestly may be up for a Nobel prize someday. Add to that a location that I would probably prefer to my current digs, and a surprisingly fewer hurdles for my husband to find a job. Plus - as a final bonus - a great knitting community and a lot, and I mean a lot, of yarn stores around and opportunities to wear knitwear. Plus, proximity to MDSW. Seriously - this is not a bad thing. Oh, and I have friends in the area, and I also kind-of sort-of know 2 knitters in the greater semi-near area.

But this means I have to really think about what I want to do, and I don't know. It's a possibility (interviews usually lead to good things at this level, almost always, but it's not a given) that has suddenly hit me at exactly the point where I was ready to move on, and had really decided I was okay with that. I don't know what I should try to be when I grow up.

So, instead of thinking so much, I'm going to try to finish a pair of socks this weekend, check out a sale on silk yarn at my LYS, and maybe even finally make it to the farmer's market. Oh, and run. Because I haven't gone in 2 weeks, and I might be going crazy.

Go look at this. It's pretty.

Unrelated photo

It's a bit of a blogging tradition that especially if you don't have much to say, you should still post a pretty photo. I haven't been out much lately, so this is a bit of a stretch. We've officially hit my crazy time of the year, and my sporadic updates get even more scattered.

I leave for Washington DC very early Thursday morning. After that, things will slow down very slightly, but I'll be with family for Thansksgiving, which is coming up fast, then it's just a few weeks before Christmas and the new year. It starts to all blur together for me starting around Halloween, frankly.

This year, I'm not doing any holiday knitting. My plans are to get through my meeting, hang out with friends, and to come back and work to generate more data and hopefully be working on a manuscript by the beginning of 2009. Other than that, I'm just hoping to survive the holidays.

This year, I'm not planning on any crazy baking, either. Last year I was so sick of baking that the smell of butter made me ill. It is baking season (I made a loaf of pumpkin bread and some chocolate zucchini bread today) but I'm not going overboard. I'm planning on making a few batches of cookies and cooking lots of soups and roasts for my family. Maybe some more breads, too.

On the knitting front, well, I finished a dishrag this weekend, but that doesn't seem exciting enough to post. The big red blob is ALMOST done, and I'm looking forward to the end of that project. There are some tough memories knit into it, but also, well, it's boring. I'm working on some garter stitch rounds and then binding off, but the stinking thing is huge now, and each round takes me a while. I started a Lace Ribbon scarf out of some really nice yarn, Handmaiden Sea Silk in periwinkle. It may be for my mom. It's my kind of comfort knitting right now. My orange sweater still needs seaming (I need time that I don't have to work on it.) Oddly enough, socks are beginning to sound more appealing again, and I'll take some yarn and needles with me for my flights, but I don't expect to get much done.

Facebook is still sucking up a lot of my time, thanks to word games I play obsessively. But now I really should go read and prepare....

On my to do list...

Catching up on the blog is up there, but more pressing things to deal with. Just a quick note to suggest that people check out this. If you like photography, even if you aren't that into science, these are phenomenal images.

There is knitting to talk about, some seaming, and yes, some buying happened again. Will spill all, but first I have to finish a poster for presentation next month.

Snapshots

Badia is in time out.
Time for something else.

I should feel guilty.

And I sort of do. I spent most of the time I was awake on Saturday working in the lab. I started an experiment so I can have something to talk about for my individual progress meeting on Wednesday. But I did sleep half the day, went book shopping after work, and spent the evening watching a movie. I finally got around to seeing Pan's Labyrinth. I'm rather behind on movie watching. It was a good movie - I'm glad I saw it, but I can't say that I liked it. I'm wimpy, and the violence in the movie was a bit intense for me, and more gruesome than I honestly care for.

Today was not a productive one. I did a lot of laundry, hung out with my family, knit, and read. I don't have a photo, because I am a bad blogger. I'm working on Go With the Flow Socks (ravelry link) from Interweave Knits, published within the past couple years in the magazine and also in Favorite Socks. It's not a quick knit for me, and I don't know why. The stitch pattern is dead simple, and even I have it memorized. I have been creeping along on these, and finally managed to turn the heel and almost finish the gusset decreases after some prolonged knitting. I read The Alchemist's Daughter. It was okay. Since I picked it up on sale, I think I got my entertainment dollars out of what I paid for it, but I wasn't that impressed. I needed some escapist reading today, and I got that much out of it.

Spent part of the evening getting some desperately needed exercise, and have put in a bit of time on working on reviewing a manuscript. I don't think it's ready for publication, but sometimes it's harder than you might think to put your criticism on paper. I'm almost done, but need to commit some more time tomorrow. To which point, my boss has already e-mailed me tonight and asked me if I had intended to provide feedback. Sigh. I can't win. And really, I don't want to go back tomorrow. It's become far more aversive than I want to admit lately, and I wish I could stay home more and more each day.

Food books

There are times when I think it would be fun to be a serious food person. I'd love to have the time to cook - really cook - learn good techniques and some technical skills. Unfortunately, my lifestyle and my schedule don't really fit that dream. So I make up for it by reading.

One of the last times I went to the bookstore, I picked up Garlic and Sapphires, but Ruth Reichl. (Image from Amazon.com, as is the link). It was on the bargain book table, something I have a hard time resisting. A hardcover book for $3.00 usually needs to come home with me if I think it might be at all good.

I had not read anything by Ruth Reichl before, so this was more or less a pleasant surprise. This is not an incredibly substantive book - it's light and fluffy, a memoir of working as restaurant critic for the New York Times. Reading the reviews on Amazon.com, I can see how people come to the criticisms they do. It does become a bit repetitive, and there is only so much reading I can do about how wonderful a food tastes. Personally, I'd rather be eating it than hearing how good it tastes, but I can get some vicarious enjoyment out of it. There are elements of this book that do become tiresome, but the book was also clearly written during a time that was very important to Reichl, and one she remembers fondly, and wanted to memorialize.

I wouldn't rush out to buy this book, but if you like reading about food and high end restaurants, pick it up at the library or at a used book store. I'll be keeping an eye out for her other books, which are supposed to be better than this one.

More to come this weekend. Things are a bit brighter than they were at my last posting, although I won't claim things have suddenly become sunshine and roses. My family is doing better, and I'm able to see some positive things again. (Thank you for the e-mails etc. They helped, even when I didn't feel like talking so much.) Somehow I have also forgotten that I need to be at work today, and now I need to run the vacuum to suck up at least the top layer of dirt in my house, shower, and run off for a few errands before I spend the rest of the day in the cave of the lab. I'm hoping to find enough time this weekend to cook something good for dinner, maybe try out a chocolate chip cookie recipe from the New York Times. Evidently, if you leave the cookie dough to sit for a day, the cookies are better. This is something I want to test, even if my waistline doesn't agree.

I am not my job. It's not my whole life. What doesn't kill me will only make me stronger. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

Tired.

Some days it's harder to blog than others. Right now, I'm overwhelmingly tired. More than anything else I can think of, I'd like to take a day off to sleep in late, do some light cleaning, and have some quiet time to regroup. Probably not going to happen, but it sounds really good right now.

SOS began on Saturday, and I cast on for Whitby (Nancy Bush, Socks on the Road) in some Dream in Color Smooshy Sock that I had picked up a while back. The color is great, and since it's a thicker yarn, I managed to finish the first sock last night. If today were my dream day, I'd go back to sleep for a few hours and then cast on the second sock. As it is, I'll probably get to it tonight. Whitby is a pattern that I've tried before, and stopped multiple times. I had issues with gauge, not purchasing enough yarn to knit the sock, incompatible yarn choices - you name it. It's nice to be able to cross this off my list of things I want to knit, but it's oddly anticlimactic. I bought SOTR before I learned how to knit socks. I liked so many of the patterns, but they seemed so hard, and I kept putting off making the attempt. Really, it wasn't a big deal after all. I suppose there's a lesson in that. Anyhow, I'm hoping to finish off both of the Whitby socks by the end of the weekend. I don't have a whole lot planned, and these are very quick. The biggest drawback to them is the pattern down the front of the foot. I don't think the cables would be very comfortable with shoes.

I've been scanning books to figure out what I want to knit next, and I keep looking at a sock in the new Cat Bordhi book. I'm torn between 2 socks. One I really like, but is not easily adjustable to my size based on the stitch pattern, but I might be able to play around a little bit with gauge and get it to my specifications (it's really not that hard - I need 7.5 st/inch instead of 8, or to find something I can knit at 8.5 st/inch) The other pattern I like is easily calculated to size. Either way, I admit that I'm intrigued by the construction, and I'll probably attempt both in the near future. I've already picked out the yarn I'm using next, and wound it into a cake, so the motivation is there. Plus it's also thicker stuff. I forgot how quickly socks can be made on size 2 needles compared to 0s. (Secretly, I prefer the thinner socks, but I'm finding the display of rapid progress to be really gratifying.)

In my increasingly escapist pursuits, I bought Dance Dance Revolution this weekend after spending an afternoon at a friend's house playing video games, including Rockband. Much more fun than I had imagined. It got very hot and humid here, and despite the fact that it tends to rain every night at 8, I haven't seemed to grasp the fact that if I want to run, I have to get up early instead of running after work. Sometimes it takes me a long time to get clued in. Hopping around in my living room is at least helping me take the edge off my stress.

Speaking of which, my minor meltdown on Friday was followed by a rotten weekend, a temper tantrum on Monday, and my finally realizing I've had enough on Tuesday. I'm taking steps to improve the situation I'm in at work, and considering my options. I really really like what I do, but I'm not happy where I am. That's a tough combination, especially as I realize that my tolerance for an unpleasant work environment is pretty high, because really, that's part of how the training works. It's a messed up system, which I could go on and on about. Instead, I should probably take a quick shower and get a move on.

A weird photo of a hat

So I knit a hat. A beret, specifically. I used the Purl Bee Beret pattern, which was popular a while back. I have no idea why. It's too big around the crown, and the color isn't particularly flattering; as you can see, it sort of blends in with my neck. (This is a photo of the back of my head - the hat is oversized, but not that oversized.)

I have no idea what I'm going to do with it. But it's done, and it was satisfying to knit. I'll probably make another one, in fact. Just because I can.

I seem to be in the mood to do nothing more than knit in a circle. Socks are too complicated. I have regressed to tubes. I'm on the 3rd skein of Oasis for the Phiaro Scarf. It's still a green tube. A larger green tube, but a green tube nonetheless. I rather like the yarn. It's too heavy to make a garment out of, but it has a pleasant feel to it, even if it is environmentally suspect.

I also started a cowl out of some leftover alpaca and silk. Because one always needs a cowl in the summer in the south. It is a very pale pink and will look horrible next to my face as I am extremely pale. I also don't wear cowls. Regardless - I seem to be knitting tubes.

Today was a rotten day. A really really bad one. I'm not going to vent much about it, only to say that it's no fun at all to work with people who have such negative attitudes about everything that you actually feel ill when they come into a room. All the joy gets sucked out by their crappiness. Even an iPod couldn't save me today.

But all is not lost. There's still this out there:


And one of these days, I'm going to go sit on that bench and knit a tube.

So what have I been up to? Now with less fiber.

• In December, I started running. I've been doing the ubiquitous Couch to 5K program. I'm in week 6, which is the farthest I've ever made it in this program before. I owe that to two things - first off, running outside instead of on a treadmill, and secondly, the availability of a podcast, so I can just concentrate on what I'm doing, and not have to track the time. I'm really enjoying it. I've found that the running is doing a lot to improve my mood and control my anxiety, even though I'm also discovering that I am in need of some new gear. Namely running tights, as my calf muscles become miserable when they are cold. My biggest realization is that I am old, and I don't recover well. However, I was pretty excited when I realized I ran 2.6 miles the last time I went out. Not bad considering how sedentary I've become in recent years. This is a great site for tracking a walk or run, btw.
  
• I'm trying to read books again. This sounds strange, but when you spend a large percentage of your life reading technical articles and textbooks, searching for more things to read, and writing technical articles yourself, it's really easy to go home and try to turn off your brain. I'd fallen into the habit of watching too much TV. Now I'm just trying to finish some of the books I pick up. The first book finished this year was The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove by Christopher Moore. It wasn't remarkable, and in fact was a very silly and fluffy read, but that's what I could manage. I'm also reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. Yes, I typically read several books at once. Just like I knit...
• Work. There's been a lot of it. It hasn't been going so well, frankly. I'm a research scientist by trade, and I've spent most of the last year trying to get a method to work. I finally got it, but then I couldn't boost the sensitivity enough that I could make the method work for what I wanted it to do, which means that we had to re-evaluate my project. This also means that I have spent a year not generating useful data, and that, my friends, is depressing to a research scientist. As much as I know I am not my data, or my publication record, and that those should not be tied to my self esteem, it still is amazingly challenging to stay optimistic in the face of hard work for naught. The good news is that I've switched projects, and now I have a new method that's not working...
  
• I've even gone out to see 2 movies in the past few months. We found a cool theater here, and I've now seen both Juno and Hotel Chevalier in the theater. Plus, I went out to eat at a real restaurant both times! The movies were good. The restaurant I went to before Juno was very good - a French Moroccan place - and I will definitely be going back. The TiVo is pretty full of stuff to see as well, and if the Packers weren't in the playoffs, I'd watch a movie tomorrow night.
• I've missed Jon and Steven a lot. I'm rather bummed that the writers strike is still ongoing. But, that also means that I've used Netflix more, and have been watching Freaks and Geeks (excellent, but painful) and Babylon 5. Yes, I am a nerd, and darn proud of it.
  
• I also have another confession - I'm a bit of a news junkie. Following the political race has been fascinating, and despite not really loving any of the candidates, I've spent a lot of time following the news. I've also repeatedly gotten a recommendation for "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me" which I listened to for the first time in lab today. I loved it. Now that I've got my laptop connected for wireless at work, I'll be listening to a lot more NPR in the lab. I also like Science Friday. Told you I was a nerd.
  

I can't think of anything else at the moment, and I want to read for a little while before I fall asleep. The Historian is sitting next to me, so that's probably going to be my choice. I'm reserving judgment until I'm done with the book, but I will say that it has been keeping me entertained for a little over 100 pages so far.