1. Summer in Providence is perfect. There is the bay and the beach and endless drinks on restaurant patios. It is blissful and I have such great friends to spend it with.
2. The lab is so busy this summer! We have FOUR undergrads and a high schooler. Only one is officially assigned to me, but the other postdocs in the lab are preoccupied getting themselves off to new jobs, and the grad student is a little unaware ("so when she comes and sits by my rig, I am supposed to teach her things? "), so I am generally their point person for ordering/borrowing keys/experiment planning/freaking out when they don't get fields. They are fun to have around and as pretty much everyone who has met me knows, I can be a bit of a mama bear, and love teaching anyone anything. But...my productivity is definitely down.
2a. Things my out-of-this world undergrad can do on her own after a month: stereotaxic injections (into the VTA of pups no less: not an easy target!), tissue collection, ELISAs, genotyping, a few different behavioral tasks.
She is almost done with her first figure's worth of data. When I'm still a post-doc in ten years, I'm pretty sure I'll be working for her.
2b.An incomplete list of things our super-eager high schooler thinks are "the coolest ever": PCR, the thermocycler, the electrode puller, me, the vibratome, the paper flowers I hung above the rig, fluorescent cells. When she sits and watches me patch, she gives me feedback on every cell "Oh, that one has a huge opening. Super good job...why did the line fall off the screen?"
3. I made all my travel arrangements to go to the big easy for SFN in October. Super excited to see everyone!
4. I am writing big huge grant which is due to the grants office in 76 days. It would fund me for two more years in my current lab and then three years of my own lab (!) I am estimating I have an approximately 2.8% chance of actually getting it.
4a. I have exactly one paragraph written. And an outline for rest of it, most of which is in my head.
4b. I think I decided to completely change direction of the second half of it? But I need to talk to my boss about it and I won't see her again until a week from tomorrow, by which time there will be 68 days left to write. Or 67. COUNTING IS HARD, even for an Abbacus.
5. Three weeks before the grant is due, my cousin is getting married in LA. So, a trip to california, which may or may not be spent in a hotel room, writing, depending on how far I am.
6. The first two weeks in August, I am teaching a course in my school's summer pre-college program. I am doing this because a) it pays ludicrously well and b) my coworker got a lot of positive feedback over teaching these courses when he was on the market for a faculty job. SO. Two weeks, three hours a day, me and 26 high schoolers, talkin' about brains
5a. 26 is the current registration. It will probably go up. They are going to eat me alive.
7. The weekend before I teach, that is, a little less than two weeks from now, I go to Buffalo to see the lovely Johanna get married, and to visit my friend Allison and her babies!
8. And this week, starting in a few hours, I go to Philadelphia to do some science. Crucial experiments that are the only big thing reviewers asked for when we submitted this paper. Technically challenging recordings from animals other people have been working on for months. With a coworker I sometimes clash with. NO PRESSURE.
8a. I am sort of excited to live in a hotel for a week because it is going to be a billion degrees on the east coast and hotels have spectacular A/C. My apartment, on the other hand, has no A/C.
So, that's what's happening. None of it is bad, per se, it's just a lot of stuff, in a short time. And while it's a short time to get everything I need to do done, it's also sort of a long time to be under so much pressure. I feel like once I step on the train, I'm on some unstoppable track, and there's no getting off. My life goes completely out of my control for a while.
All of this is long way to say that a) I might be a total hermit for a while and b) come October, i'm getting really drunk
