Thursday, August 22, 2013

More Extremely Assorted Items

  • Somehow, now that my child-swap/ Tatoe napping while Bug is at school are no longer in effect, I find myself unable to focus.  I wonder why THAT is.
  • It keeps raining here.  I don't mean a drizzle, I mean torrential downpours. Do you know what around here is a) indoors and b) open on Sunday?  The hardware store and - you guessed it! - the Walmart.  
  • It's a good thing I gave Dr. S such cynical advice about his postdoc advisor, about a year and a half ago.  Subject of advice: projects you take with you. Dear readers, you can extrapolate from there.
  • He asks me some hilarious small-college questions sometimes.  (I went to Small College On A Hill, he went to Buckeye State.)  Like, "This student wants to jump ship from another lab and join my lab.  I should say no, right?  Whose lab?  Oh, the guy here who most wants to hire me long-term."  Not just no but hell no, dear.
  • He also runs his job applications by me.  This always involves a bottle of wine and funny-looking diagrams, and my contribution is always "Blah blah blah, RNA, DNA, who cares?  Why do we care about this?  Where are the LASERS AND ROBOTS?"
  • I'm never sure how good my advice is, but it always amounts to 'you need to sell this better'.
  • I keep thinking about friendships with my mother's friends/old family friends in Next Town Over and negotiating boundaries and being mis-calibrated for Southerners, anymore.
  • Speaking of which, I visited my old friend of the late-evening wedding, found to my surprise that I really like his new spouse a great deal, and therefore am willing to chalk it up to WeddingZilla Moments rather than a general loss of their wits.  It happens to the best of us.

6 comments:

  1. LASERS AND ROBOTS! That is awesome. Also, you sound like Patrick. Theoretical physical chemist + Biochemist = No talking about work! Yes, Dr. S. totally needs to sell his work, good thing he has you around. Take a bored, tired hiring committee and Make them care!

    I'm glad you like his new spouse. You never know how much of the WeddingZilla is attributable to her mother. Our good friend married a nice woman, and her mother made so much drama and silly requirements and choices regarding the wedding. But, everything turned out fine in the end. Some people lose their heads around weddings.

    Man, I miss the child swap, too. I was tired and crabby and just wanted to do something fun, so I bought 30 lbs of peaches yesterday and made a bunch of jam. (30 lbs was excessive, I ran out of pectin AND sugar and need to finish the last batch today.) C1 ran the cooked peaches through the food mill while C2 napped, then I fed them as much fresh jam on toast as they liked. I felt better.

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    1. I've been doing all the canning after the kids go to bed, which means Dr. S gets to help me process vegetables. (Hence the photo I sent you.) I bet C1 and C2 were ecstatic about Jam On Toast For Dinner.

      I'm willing to blame most of WeddingZilla on M's mother, who I have never met and never intend to. Blame the absent!

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  2. Sorry about the rain and the lack of focus and the post-doc follow-up issues. But some things seem to be getting better!

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    1. Some things ARE getting better! For example, it didn't rain for a whole 20 hours!

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  3. Plus there's that Midwestern use of "anymore" you seem to have picked up during your time away. Is there an antibiotic for that? I'd like to see that on a job application, or better, a vaccine against this ridiculous waiting "on line" that New Yorkers say they do.

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    1. Oh, dear. I didn't even notice - a prime symptom of the disease, of course. I'll add that to Dr. S's next research proposal: 1) Develop antibiotic to regional offenses against grammar; 2) Develop vaccine or other treatment for severe city-based offenses against Bionic, including but not limited to "on line" and "stay by so-and-so".

      Delete

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