Karma, Part II

I nearly finished my Christmas shopping tonight. In addition to Christmas presents, I needed to pick up a few more things for cookie decorating in a couple of days. I found myself at BB&B and realized I should have started there. As great as Wilton products may be, Betty Crocker is more my speed. (Not that I need that expensive Wilton kit either, but you get the point.) And I had a 20% an entire purchase coupon.

Anyway, I overheard a lady asking an employee if they have 20% off coupons (usually just off one item) available, which they do not. I am in the habit of keeping a BUNCH in my car though, and offered to go get her some. I brought back six or seven coupons, and she and her friend kept thanking me and saying how sweet that was and Merry Christmas.

I seriously do this type of thing all the time.

My reward is a new $300 starter for my car.

Karma fail.

Ready for my close up

I do enjoy my digital camera - it is an easy-to-use point and click that takes great pictures. A while back, I said something about being ready to upgrade from my Canon Elph 850IS, and my Mom suggested I put it on my Christmas list. The camera I will eventually upgrade to will likely cost a little too much to put on a Christmas list, plus I have not put ANY thought into what camera I want! I do think it will be fun to learn to use a more advanced camera and a macro lens to take close up pictures. In the meantime, my camera does fine taking photos with the macro setting, it is just impossible to tell the camera exactly what I want it to focus on.

The High Line Park in NYC

Hot chocolate with handmade marshmallow from City Bakery.

Tiles on the floor at Ellis Island. (As an aside, if you have any ancestors who came through Ellis Island, the records are mostly or all online now and you can search them!)

Mushrooms from CF's yard.

My kitty...who was just chillin' on the dining room table watching us unlock the door when we came home last night?! She is NOT supposed to be up there.

 Um, strawberries.

Reward

My reward for going to NYC with CF's sister was seeing friends. Yay! I got to see several college friends, some college friend partners, and a former coworker.

I also did touristy things.

 

 

 

 

Karma

I do not remember all the details of the happenings that have made me think of this post in the past two weeks. I am not sure I like the way karma is working out for me with the few examples I can recall.

I forgot my camera battery in the charger when CF's sister and I went to New York City for a few days. I managed to talk a guy down to $40 for a "Energizer" replacement that was already charged. I was afraid of how little charge it might have, so limited my photo taking. Sad, because it was NYC and there was plenty of which I could have taken photos.

I helped a lady on the subway in NYC pick up the papers she dropped all over the ground.

It was raining today, and there is a gigantic flock of crows that roosts at night in the town where I work. Walking to work, I got a rain drop in my eye, but at least I did not get pooped on by a bird.

My Ex is engaged. I accidently dropped a mug I like on a glass he gave me and broke both.

CF's family left last night. I had been driving his 2-door car, and he my 4-door car (with new tires) as he took his parents and sister around for almost two weeks. Today, I met with the associate pastor of the church I have been going to in order to talk about things in which I would be interested in getting involved. When I left work late (after talking about life with the other post-doc), and got in my car and turned the key? Nothing. Well, not nothing because the wipers (which were fixed over the summer), the radio, etc. all came on so the new battery I got before CF's family came works fine. Who knows what expensive wiring will have to be redone. On the bright side, I was near my mechanic, got it towed for free (thanks triple-A!), and CF still lives here so he could come pick me up.

CF is heading to look for a place to live in the New State on Sunday.

I invited people over to decorate cookies next week.

What else is coming my way?

Very nice

Lest any of you wonder if CF is worth it. He is off picking up his parents and sister at the airport. I left work early and this was on the table...

...with two tickets to the Trans Siberian Orchestra for the weekend after his family leaves.

Missing out

I am not quite sure how to explain this without you, the reader, thinking I am complaining or super depressed or something. It is true that the holiday season can be rough for the elderly who are alone. It can also be rough for other people who want to love the holidays but have lots of life stuff going on.

Basically, I feel like I am missing out on the big things in life that I really want to be taking part in for myself: marriage, children, hitting the last two continents (South America and Antarctica), being able to save money for a vacation, a car, retirement. Things a 32 year old could, and some would argue should, be able to do.

This is something I have been thinking about more than I should recently for obvious reasons: CF leaving for another state soon, seeing my family, not seeing friends, CF's family coming in two days for 12 days, friends having babies on the way or actually having them, family/friends/exes getting engaged and/or married, the holidays, travel.

Right now, I seriously feel like the only thing I have to show for this is a PhD. Some would argue that is impressive. Whatevs.

In addition to this, I do not feel like I have a place right now. I have no desire to move to where CF is moving. I want to move back to family and friends. If I end up not doing some of the things friends and family have done in their personal lives, I want to be close enough to be an actual part of their lives. Participate and live vicariously in real life, instead of just online.

I will keep applying to those jobs and trying to get my first post-doc publication finished and make it through the next couple months trying to be nice and finding reasons to be happy. Christmas music and a balsam-scented candle are doing it for me right now.

I get it...sorta

CF is STILL not done with his PhD. He STILL does not have a defense date. He STILL has not set up a meeting with his committee chairperson.

He is not taking an unusually long time. Although in animal sciences, they often finish on the quicker end, and at the moment he is at the beginning of year 6. He has a job, several publications, lots of presentations, and, oh, did I mention a job? Not that I am in a hurry for him to leave for the job {sad face}, but still. I still, no matter how many times I ask, do not understand why he has not talked to anyone about a defense date.

The irony is that I totally understand how he feels. I have told him I worry that he is not advocating for himself. I have explained that the reason I finished was because I kept pushing, and even that takes time. I have repeatedly pointed out that no one will come to him to say, "Hey! Ready to defend?" As far as I can tell, I am the only person who keeps asking him these questions and pushing him to finish. So I end up being the bad "guy", but I just cannot help it.

Being a pain in the butt has not helped. I wish I could figure out what would help.

Very Virtuous

Often, when talking about CF, people will tell me that I am very patient.

At a Halloween party last weekend I was relaying a story about Thanksgiving last year when we were visiting CF's American "families". [In reality, I think they are the equivalent of what you might consider best friends if your family lived close enough to visit more than once a year.] We stopped by parents of one of his exes from long ago and they invited us to dinner the next day. The ex and her hubby were not going to be there, but I do not think that would have stopped CF from accepting the offer. Seriously. And we went. The thing that made it the most sad was that there weren't even homemade rolls, because my Mom's rolls are GOOOD. The two friends we were talking to could NOT believe I had gone. One admitted she was now judging me.

After my moving almost two years ago and CF STILL NOT BEING DONE WITH HIS DISSERTATION, he pushed off his start date for work and intended to stay where he was living. One hour from my new apartment-on-the-lake. With Thanksgiving, his family coming for two weeks, Christmas, and a New Year's Eve wedding between then and his start date. It (surprisingly) did not take much to convince him to move in with me for two months, as he realized the back-and-forth and figuring out family stuff was not going to be fun.

Now I have realized that him moving here is a VERY good thing for practical reasons. He left ALLLLLLLLL his packing until the two days before he was actually moving. He knew I had work to do and could not help a bunch, but asked if I would burn a bunch of paper waste. I was almost done when he revealed that there were SEVERAL MORE BOXES OF PAPER in a storage room. Some of the mail had his first roommate from 3+ years ago's name on it. He said he had kept meaning to use all that paper for a bonfire but kept forgetting. I wish he had let me in on the plan because I would not have forgotten.

Lots of his stuff is in storage for the time being. This move helped him clean some stuff out, pack some stuff he does not need while living here, and most importantly - not leave all his packing and burning and cleaning for between Christmas and New Years.

His 15 minutes turned into an hour and 15 minutes last night while I waited to head out for our first grocery shopping trip together. (We have grocery shopped together before, but not since he moved in on Monday.)

Honestly, though, for me this is a test of sorts. He may not realize it, but I will let him in on the secret some day when he is not being angry at graduate school.

Patience is a virtue, I suppose.

P.S. I started adding tabs to my blog because I was jealous of tabs on other blogs. :-)

Holiday-crafty

I debated about inviting people over in December to decorate cookies. After seeing this post of homemade ornaments, though,  I am thinking that would be fun and involve less monotonous cooking. (I would clearly still bake, because I like to, but just not bake a whole bunch of the same shaped cookies.)

Maybe a good compromise for CF and I to do a tree together is to not use any ornaments from either of our stashes, but to make them all! This could seriously end up being a problem because his tree is always white lights and red and/or silver ornaments. Mine is not.

As an aside, if anyone has a good way to convince another person that light colored curtains and light colored walls and light colored wood and pale flooring and white lights on a tree with no color other than red can get BORING, do let me know.

A new home?

I was pretty involved in my church growing up - bell choir, choir-choir, recorder ensemble, youth group, search committee. It was a great community. Some of my teachers went there. Some of the adults would always give me big hugs when I was home from college.

I never really found that after leaving for college, and living in Boston only tried halfheartedly. When I moved to the Midwest, I thought church would be a good way to get to know people...only the ones I was interested in were too far away for me to get up and get there on a Sunday morning.

Now that I am closer to work, I am also closer to some churches I would want to visit. So I did! Not only that, but I went into it intentionally looking for a new church home. The greeters were super friendly, and given my intent was happy to be a little social. They invited me to their brunch they were having to raise money for a new Christmas tree, and also a meeting after the service for the young adults in the congregation. I went to the latter, but had to get to work so skipped the brunch (bad move, I am sure, because you could smell it during the service and one of the greeters told me they eat well in that church). They had great music; I smiled to myself about the teenager complaining to her mother about her hair conditioner behind me; they seem to have a nice mix of traditional and more modern aspects of a Protestant service.

AND I got home today to a nice note from one of the greeters and his wife in the mail.

I think I will go back.

Take a hint?

Last weekend I headed into lab to finish an experiment. A regular, six hour-ish day in lab to finish up the repeat of an experiment I have done before. No big deal. Then it did not work. This is a 'control', which means we use it to show that the other parts of the experiment DO work. No control = no data.

Wasting one day of lab time is not a super big deal in the grand scheme of things. I do not mind repeating an experiment if I can figure out what went wrong. The frustrating part is if the only option I have is just to repeat it again with no changes because I did not do anything different from usual. This also came after realizing why a different experiment was not working. So in addition to feeling like I have someone squeezing my chest half the time (which I can only assume is some sort of stress/anxiety type feeling), I am hitting that point of wanting to quit science again.

I have a theory that science makes you come really close to wanting to quit, but then gives you good data. This has happened to me many times before.

However, some failed undergrad lab mentoring experiences aside, the teaching and mentoring aspects of my life have never made me want to quit.

As I put my job applications out there and wait to hear back about a training grant (which several people have all but told me I should get after the good review of the grant), I go back and forth about whether I should go with a primarily teaching undergraduate school or one with "equal" parts teaching and research. I am applying to two undergrad institutes and two with grad programs this month. I do not have a grant or paper yet, which makes me less competitive. I do have some good teaching experiences though. I think this makes me a stronger candidate for the undergrad institutes. We will see what happens!

P.S. All of the jobs are in the Northeast where my family and friends are. Never mind that CF is starting a job a Great Lake away from me in a couple of months. I am sure there will be more about that at a later time.

Two sides

There are two sides to every story. I get the whole "occupy where ever" thing. Some of those people are unemployed, but some have also decided that this is more important than their job right now.It is impossible to see the whole picture if you are not there.

There are some aspects of news coverage and opinion pieces I value over others.

For example, it helps when you talk to people to figure out what they are about though, as this woman did. [And yes, I linked to a Fox story!!]

...rather than accusing parents of raising their children more poorly than you do and all entitled and pierced. I actually feel sorry for this woman's children. She says nothing is "free". I wonder what they have to do for her respect and love. It she did not write this when she was having a bad day, I would hate to see what she writes if she IS having a bad day.

Feelin' the same way

I seriously feel like I am in my last year of grad school all over again. I desperately want to finish the experiments I am working on so I can finish my paper so I can submit it and work on other experiments I want to do [so that other people in lab stop getting to do the experiments I have been talking about...a post for another day].

I spent a month trying to figure out why I could not detect a particular protein after an experiment. Come to find out, I think there was a problem WAY back when I set up the experiment. The problem is, the other post doc thought there might be a problem but had not said anything about it for a month. Awesome.

I need to finish applying to jobs. My grad advisor was quick to respond that she would write letters. Another former committee member has not responded to two emails about it. My former boss from when I was a tech is traveling and responded that she will get back this weekend and would like to talk about the letters. I immediately had a tightening in my chest and had to take deep breaths. The only *problem* I can anticipate is that another former member of that lab is applying for some of the same jobs. She and I have emailed about jobs and I emailed her this week that I was applying to them. Although she had previously emailed about them, I already knew of these jobs so as far as I am concerned there is no reason why I should not apply. She is likely a more competitive applicant anyway. Now I am worried that the boss lady will not feel comfortable writing letters for both of us to the same jobs. We will see.

I then work to convince myself that I am competitive enough, even without all the magic pieces applicants for tenure-track positions might possibly have. I try not to give in to the notorious Imposter Syndrome.

Earlier in the week I actually went for a run hoping that it would help me deal with stress (of course ongoing exercise is what would more likely help). Tonight I am going for the yoga. If that does not work, I will have to drink...after those job applications are ready.

I'm a fan

Listen if you have not heard it before.

Randomness

Saw this on someone's wall on the FB just now:

Sometimes people cry not because they’re weak. It’s because they’ve been strong for too long.

(A quick g--gle search attributes this to 'Anon')

Also saw someone write 'iDead', and while I should not have, I laughed.

Also, in the past week I made pumpkin bread, pumpkin cookies, cheese and veggie soup, and sweet potato biscuits. Yum.

Now back to work.

Communication

I am actually working on my teaching philosophy, but was writing about communication in the classroom and kept coming back to a post I keep meaning to write.

I have interacted with a LOT of non-native English speakers over the past 10 years. Teaching English in China being the most intense period, but after that working with many non-native speakers, tutoring non-native speakers, mentoring and teaching non-native speakers, etc. So it is INCREDIBLY frustrating to me when non-native speakers feign ignorance about specific communications. Specifically email communications in recent experiences.

My fellow post-doc, as nice and smart as she is and in spite of the wonderful science conversations we have, just does not read emails. Seriously. Sometimes they are about things like the department retreat. Additionally, if she notices something is broken or not right, she often will not mention it to the lab manager. (I know this because if I find the problem and ask her if she noticed anything previously, she says yes.)

My boss had apparently initially intended to put the other post-doc in charge of coordinating with 4 people to have lunch with a speaker last week. I was in lab when the boss came in and ended up being the one doing it. Not a problem at all. In the email I gave the details and specifically requested people let me know if they could make it because of the limited space and extra people on the list. The day before the spots filled up and I had not heard from one post-doc. I specifically emailed her to say I had not heard from her and the spots were now filled so there was not room for her at lunch. And then she showed up. And we were short one sandwich. And it was awkward.

I have known firsthand how difficult it is to be in a country where you are not comfortable speaking the languages. I have done it three times. It does not make it okay to not try, especially when certain communication is critical for your job.

I am done venting. Back to attempting to write and going to bed...

Writing?

So I have a million things to write (for work) and got little done tonight except going through some job postings I had flagged.

-- The University where I work there are several labs who work on topics similar to the lab in which I work. One in particular is actually a "rival". This is sad because we are at the same school and collaboration should make all of our research progress, right? Due to previous transgressions within the rival lab, the PIs no longer speak. The rival lab just came out with another paper. I need to get my butt in gear on my paper! I have a good start, but it is not nearly ready to submit to a science journal yet! Today I wrote two sentences and changed another paragraph*. This can hardly be called progress.

-- My PI can support my salary until next summer. In about four weeks, I will hear back about a grant that would cover my salary for two years. This is AFTER many application deadlines for tenure-track faculty positions that I have seen online. I have been looking at job postings, but am not feeling the pressure to find THE job yet. However, a high school friend called tonight and asked if I had found anything closer to them...so I checked at specific schools instead of looking at a central site...and found a job at the University where I had really wanted to apply for grad school but then missed the deadline. (I have been frustrated in the past few years when I get spacey and mess something up, but clearly this is nothing new.) AND the deadline isn't until later in October. WOOHOO! Just because of the location and size of the school, I think it would be a great job, and I have more time to get my materials together!!

One might wonder how my teaching and research statements are going for said job applications. (Luckily I keep my CV up-to-date, so that is just a matter of tweaking for a job application.) In a moment of inspiration last night, while reading "How to write your teaching statement", I wrote a chunk of that but then did not finish it. The research statement explaining my immediate and long-term ideas for a research program is still a blank page. AHHHHH!!! I do think about these things when I am not actually writing them, so I like to think that when I do write them I get a lot done at once. Wish me luck.

*I did not ONLY do that today. I also did some experiments and figured out what an undergrad left me with, and fixed an old piece of equipment and figured out some new stuff to order and...

Catch up?

I have kept thinking of posts over the past three and a half weeks, but moved, did not have internet, was out of town, etc., etc.. I am getting settled in and last week finally cooked my first real meal at my new place: pork chops with peaches I picked and bulgar wheat with tomatoes from my new downstairs neighbor and cucumbers.

Today I got my cat back from CF, who has been watching her for three weeks while I moved and went to the MS Challenge Walk back in Massachusetts. As my move got closer and I was still trying to figure out how and when to move my stuff, I started worrying about what to do with my cat. CF, for all of his farming background, still has a soft spot for pets. He gives her more wet food than I do and even started leaving his toilet seat up for her so she could drink out of the toilet (for some reason her preferred water source). The first time I went over there after dropping her off, she ran and hid from me. This weekend she came right up and wanted to be on my lap all weekend. She was NOT happy when I scruffed her to put her back in her carrier to bring her to her new home. You would think I was torturing her?! Then she went straight under the bed after I let her out.

With a screened-in porch, I just left the door open to see how long it would take her to explore out there. After sitting behind an invisible door like this a couple of times, she finally went out and lounged in the sun...and ran back inside any time I came near in case I was mad.

I will be back at some point to post about something. ;-) Life, academia, starting the job search, CF finishing at some point...

The skinny

It has been a LONG month. Only it has flown by because there is so much going on. In the next couple of weeks I will: move, go to the department retreat (if moving goes okay), walk 50 miles on Cape Cod, be alone when I am home because my cat is going to stay at CF's through all of this, and then start a class. In a couple of months CF is moving to another state across a great lake. That is probably a story for another time.

Tomorrow I should be getting my keys/signing a lease so that I can get this view and cut my commute from ~35 miles to ~15. I think that is a good deal. :-)