Wednesday in the life
I lost the plot a bit today, and didn’t track things as well as I could have.
7:00am: Get up, and let the dancing cats outside so they can check for nocturnal activities in the yard.
7:35: Eat breakfast, read feeds from the Wii, etc.
8:30: Arrive at work amidst a rain shower. Check email and remember to post yesterday’s Day in the Life entry. Reply to a nutritionist collaborator about a study we plan to do in October - she wants some information about our ethical approval documents. Luckily I’m the ethics “person” for my big research group, and I have exactly what she wants to know.
9:15: Help two colleagues take blood samples for an experiment. Everyone has a try, and everyone gets poked. Three tubes of blood result. My arm is sore. I need to get better at this, especially since people look to me as “the blood person” even though I am pretty inexperienced.
9:45: Try to recruit a couple more subjects for an exercise trial we’re on the verge of finishing. Send emails and hope for good responses!
10:08: Break for morning tea - remembering to pay Charlotte, our cafe lady, for the piece of carrot cake I ate yesterday.
10:40: Back at desk, having sorted out a possible seminar date for the nutritionist collaborator to visit us.
11:00: Trade emails with food scientist colleagues to get some freezer space for food for the October trial.
11:15: Chat with postdoc friend about neck ailments and osteopaths, and give Kiwiman a quick back massage.
11:35: Start considering lunch. Chat with some more colleagues about assays for a trial happening next month - the one with the project planning meeting yesterday.
12:30-2pm: Lunch at the mall. Bought awesome new lip gloss and eyeshadow, plus antacids for this dastardly acid reflux that’s bugging me. Pregnancy, bah. Also bought a quiche for dinner.
2:00: Read press release about potential company merger.
3:30: Give Kim some more feedback on an SOP (a standardized method for doing something in the lab). Download the latest version of a Greasemonkey script that runs in the background of a website.
4:30: Chat with Boss and Kiwiman about the potential company merger.
5:00: Go over some details from the project planning meeting I held yesterday. Discuss assay designs and requirements again with other scientists in the group.
5:30: What the hell have I been doing all day? Work through some tasks in Remember the Milk. Field a last-minute question about how to dispose of some blood in a safe and environmentally sensitive way. Throw up my hands and say I’ll deal with it tomorrow. Stuff the things I haven’t gotten done yet today - the angry European reviewer response on the sample prep paper, and my performance review which will be discussed on Friday - into my bag in the vague hope I might feel like doing them at home tonight.
6:15: Get spirited away by Kiwiman. Off to make the quiche!
2 comments August 13, 2008
A day in the life: Tuesday
Here we go again:
6:00am: Woken by Sam kitty, who wants to snuggle under the blanket
6:30: Woken by Frodo kitty jumping on top of the blanket containing Sam
6:45: Get out of bed
7:30: Eat breakfast, again while reading feeds on the Wii
8:15: Get to work. Put lunch in the fridge, and try to figure out why one of my for-fun domain names isn’t resolving correctly. Read the Mighty Boss’ comments on our tide-us-over funding application. Make some further comments on the application and send it to Boss.
8:45: Download a bunch of interesting papers from the latest issue of the Journal of Proteome Research. File them in EndNote as I go.
9:05: Check that pesky domain name again, and now it’s resolving to the appropriate place. Start a Drupal installation going…and chat with Anali about CMSes, hosting, and domain names.
9:30: Chat with Boss about the funding application, which now needs to appear to fit a political need. Continue Drupalling and WordPressing in the background.
10:00: Go to a seminar by Kiwiman’s PhD advisor, who talked about the genetic diversity of wine yeasts and bioethanol production. Cool stuff that made me want to pull out my undergraduate genetics textbook again and read up on the basics.
11:00: Arrive back at my desk and remember to modify that funding application. Keep playing with WordPress and Drupal themes in the background. Scan through the rest of the papers from the Journal of Proteome Research.
12:00pm: Stop for lunch. Homemade chili - yum!
1:00: Work on my performance review. Talk to someone in HR about going on the company’s leadership program. He can’t figure out why my name isn’t on his list to do the program. He adds me to his list, so I’ll attend a program in the near future. It’s only taken 18 months for me to point out to HR that they didn’t have me on this list. Sigh.
3:00: Prepare for a project planning meeting this afternoon.
3:30: Run the project planning meeting. Conditions are perfect. Feel happy with my ability to manage a project. This one has only just started, so I’m hopeful that my good feelings will continue for the next 3 months as the project ramps up and winds down.
4:50: Return to desk. Update to-dos in Remember the Milk. Stuff around on the web for a while - typical end-of-day stuff. Feel guilty that I haven’t gotten back to the response to the angry European paper reviewer I was working on yesterday. Too much to do.
5:30: Chat with a coworker about the results of the project planning meeting, and what stuff we need to order to do the project.
5:45: Neaten desk and go home!
1 comment August 13, 2008
A day in the life: Monday
Taking a page from Anali, a more creative blogger than I:
6:45am: Awaken, causing cats to jump off the bed, who then loudly insist on being allowed to go outside and pee on the places that have been unguarded overnight
7:03: Get out of bed
7:45: Eat breakfast while reading feeds on the Wii - since Kiwiman is on the desktop
8:15: Drive to work, 1 km down the road (I know; we’re pathetic)
8:20: Start making comments on Kim’s SOPs for lab assays. Make myself feel good by ticking off a couple of tasks in Remember the Milk.
8:45: Catch up with Davanea - it’s her first day back at work after her wedding and honeymoon. Receive a cool keychain from Fiji which includes a bottle opener. Wish that I could put it to better use immediately.
9:15: Monday morning meeting with the larger lab group - a tortuous affair. The less said, the better.
10:30: Return to my desk, and finish off those SOPs for Kim. Start going through my response to the angry European reviewer who has just reviewed my paper on sample preparation methods for the second time, and who asked me to change exactly the same things he did the first time. This time he’s recommended publication, which is a silver lining.
11:00: Monday morning meeting with the smaller lab group - slightly less torturous because it’s only a few of us, but we were all at that meeting at 9:15 and so have already talked about what we planned to do this week. Why are we here again? Remind coworkers that I can help them with their performance reviews before they have to meet with Boss about them. Talk about the studies we hope that our equipment will let us do this week.
11:30: Chat with Boss about my response to the reviewer. End up feeling quite pissed off that Boss isn’t more supportive of my writing (in this instance, not generally) and that the reviewer’s comments are making my paper worse, not better. Grumble and work through lunch, hoping to get this done. Surely sending it off while being in a bad mood will only lead to good results, right?
12:06pm: Entire building (make that neighborhood) experiences a power surge. Curse quietly, reboot computer, and recover various Word files involved in the reviewer response for this paper. Eat a couple of fruit bars.
12:48: Undergo a second power surge. Curse much, much more loudly (unfortunately nobody else seems to be around to hear it). Become even more cross about this paper.
1:20: Get tired of power surges and take a work car to the university to help a fellow PhD student on my old project sort out a figure for his paper - on which I am fourth author of five. Oh well; at least it’s a publication. Wonder whether I was third author when I first saw the manuscript?
2:45: Drive back to work, having sorted out the figure, chatted with the PhD student, and said hello to Postdoc. Remind myself that I don’t miss the university at all.
3:10: Arrive at my desk to hear an update from Boss about the small application for tide-us-over funding we’ve been working on for the last week. Cut four lines out of the application to make it fit within 3 pages.
4:00: Strike up a conversation with Boss and Coworker which ends up mostly being about nothing, but at the same time is about websites, startup companies, content management systems, domain names, and really hideous illnesses. Impress Boss with my CMS and GoDaddy knowledge.
4:40: While the conversation still rages in the background, put a couple of interview times in my calendar for a colleague’s postdoc position - he made me feel worthy by asking me if I’d be on the panel.
5:00: Check out Davanea’s honeymoon photos on Facebook.
5:06: Get inspired to blog. Write a short entry about being inspired to blog, without really doing much blogging per se. Start on this entry. Check Google Desktop’s timeline view to help remember what I did today. Note that it tells me not only about what I did, but also what Kiwiman was browsing on the web at lunch.
5:36: Figure out how to bring up the exact times of my web browsing history in Firefox. Ewww. Glance at the offending paper again, but become resolved not to look at it any more today.
5:51: Hit “Publish”.
6:15 (est): Get dropped off at home on Kiwiman’s way to Monday night squash. Feed cats and ponder dinner.
1 comment August 11, 2008
Random
I was just talking to my boss about Drupal, which I still love and want to migrate this website to someday, and on a whim I visited the old home of this site at its previous hosting provider. Reading the old entries from seven months ago (just before PhD thesis submission day) made me long to blog again.
Lately I’ve been holding back, mostly because I know that I only have a few readers, and I know exactly who those readers are. There are things I wouldn’t want to say in front of them. This attitude is pretty incongruous with maintaining a public blog presence. I’m still working on it. I admire my anonymously blogging friends - but I also like having the freedom to be myself on my blog.
This just made me laugh out loud.
1 comment August 11, 2008
RBOC
Several of my scientist blogger friends have occasional posts entitled “RBOC”. For most this stands for “Random Bullets of Conference”, but the last word can also be replaced with your favorite word starting with C. Personally I like “Random Bullets of Crap” for a non-conference-related post.
- Dr Brazen Hussy has had my attention lately: first she went all GTD on me, doing it in awesome style, and then she came up with some virgin cocktail (’mocktail’) recipes as requested! Productive AND sweet!
- A woman at work bought a F&$%*&@ 16 Gb iPhone 3G this week. It cost $699 to buy and the cheapest “iPhone plan” is a whopping $80/month. If only I didn’t have this series of huge expenses planned for later this year…though Revel and I put our heads together and figured out how to get a budget plan for $20/month. This is what I normally spend on phone use, but unfortunately requires purchasing the iPhone at the astronomical cost of about $1200. Maybe next year.
- I have reached the stage of pregnancy where I have to pee every five minutes.
- I have also reached the last paper in the (unconnected) set of four I’ve been writing for a year. It is the second of the two papers which stem from my PhD research. It’s exciting novel work, but it’s not quite holding my attention like it should - can you tell?
- Graduation is in two months. I’ve reserved the standard expensive funny-looking gown and hat combination for the event. (We rent here in NZ, unless you’re planning on becoming an academic and wearing it again and again. Renting is expensive enough, thank you.)
- Work is in a nice state of limbo because we didn’t get our big grant funded. Consequently my small lab has turned into a low-pressure environment, and we went to the pub yesterday afternoon.
- I’ve been assured that the company wants me back after my parental leave (which will span all of 2009), and that a permanent position will be in the offing, but not until I’m back.
- PackRat is a lovely Facebook game that’s taking a lot of my attention these days.
- We’re off to see The Dark Knight tonight! There may even be yummy BurgerFuel for dinner afterwards. Yum yum yum I can’t wait.
- Scales say I have gained no weight in the last five weeks, so I must continue to listen to my urges to have milkshakes and chocolate. Kiwiman says I must have *lost* weight, and that this could be due to not having empty alcohol calories. If this were the case, I would have been a beanpole by May! Hooray, Barker hypothesis. Bring on the deep-fried foods - erm, I mean servings of fruit and vegetables.
- I have been a little hungrier than normal around lunchtime.
- I am wearing stretchy maternity pants, which are nice and comfortable, but which still aren’t too necessary yet. They don’t have any pockets, which I am finding quite annoying. No place to put my mobile phone-which-isn’t-a-F&%$^*$-iPhone!
- Next Monday I report to the District Court for jury duty. I hope I get picked for a juicy trial. Time off work FTW!
- Unfortunately, if jury duty lasts more than three days, I will miss the work-sanctioned trip to the Food Show.
Add comment July 24, 2008
