long day

Monday.    

More boxes taken to my storage unit on the way into work (and yes, I finally packed a few boxes of books, old paperbacks mostly).  A meeting at work about a NMR metabonomic profile of a coral pathogen - such potential with this new approach!  News that a grant was rejected.    Conversations about tri-parental mating and a problematic GC-MS, thoughts on a proteomics abstract and a discussion on where to submit a manuscript.  One graduate student looking too thin and frustrated and another over four months pregnant.  A technician wanting some time off to take a HTML code class at Trident;  a postdoc out of the lab for the day.  A phone conversation with a solar water heater rep and a fascinating phone conversation with a geothermal heating and cooling guy.  A quick look around the www for recycled/antique/used tiles and farm sinks and a quick phone call home to my mom who is off chemotherapy for awhile.  Tomorrow is my first class of the fall semester - yep I've got a class and let's just hope I remember to go.  I've become one of 'those' professors that forgets to go to their own class (now how horrible is that?).  Home and dinner to cook for the Ancient Wonder Beagle, home and some planting, home and some time spent admiring the sunflowers that are gracing my side garden.  A call from my brother.  An early evening spent listening to Beth Orton's 2006 Comfort of Strangers.  A late evening spent craving quiet and the sounds coming from my garden in the darkness.

Long day. 

Comments

[layanee]

When you say you have had a busy day, you really mean that You Have Had a Busy Day! And such important business also. I always try to put my job in perspective with the phrase "It's not as important as sending food to starving children" but I don't think you could say that.

[John B.]

I hear you.

Re the question you asked me over at my place: will you be letting your students know about your blog? I of course have no idea what your students' impression of you is, and your sense of the extent to which you want to maintain a boundary between your academic and private selves is, of course, your business and not mine, but this place you've created is such a comfortable space that I think those who visit* would be glad to know of it.

*In my own case, some few of my students have ever visited my blog, and of them, I know of only one former student who continues to visit. I suspect most of mine are, at best, indifferent to my blog, but I've had no trouble arise from any quarter by letting people at school know of it.

Best of luck to you this new semester.

[Pam]

Layanee: Yeah, I'm not sure that this busy is a good busy, ya know?

John B: I didn't tell my students (graduate students in my lab) about this site for a long, long time and then one day it slipped. I rarely, if ever, talk about it. Last summer an undergraduate found it, by accident, and I think she read it for awhile. Generally, I probably bore them. I think they check in from time-to-time, probably to make sure I'm not complaining about them or posting silly pics of them - but they're cool overall.

Now, with regard to colleagues - I'm really reluctant. I find myself rarely writing about science because it becomes so readily searchable, and I know that we I do write about science, I usually speak in broad generalities. Honestly? I don't think many of my colleagues would like kindly on this. They're pretty uptight and narrow.

Best of luck to you this semester too. Oh, I managed to remember to go to my class. It always takes me awhile to get it back into my schedule.