Not a nice night

Every year at this time there is a huge kid’s consignment sale.  It takes place over 2 weeks and has everything you can imagine, including maternity clothes.  I went last weekend and picked up some shirts, but I don’t know what size pants I am going to need.  (You can’t try things on at the consignment sale.)  My pants from last time look way to big, but maybe I can wear them when I get a really big tummy.  I need pants right away though, my work pants are suddenly getting too tight.  So last night I went to Motherhood Maternity in my local mall to try on some of their pants just to get a size so I can go back to the consignment sale today.  I was so irritated though, nothing fit!  First all the pants are way too long.  The capris looked almost like regular pants on me.  I could hem pants, but the problem was also the fit.  On the capris, the crotch was uncomfortably low and the long pants were tight/loose in odd places.  I left irritated.

When we got home, we made a gruesome discovery.  Our dog’s eye was bleeding, it looked like her eyeball was drooping out, and there was blood all over the kitchen floor (in spots, it wasn’t bleeding that heavily).  We have a cat too and even though they have lived together peacefully for 10 years, the cat has recently started taking swipes at the dog.  Apparently, she got her.  Mike cleaned up the eye the best he could and ran her off to the emergency vet.  I had a panic attack while cleaning up the blood from the floor.  Luckily the eye is ok, the cut was on the skin beneath the eye, but it was SO CLOSE.  I don’t know what to do with our cat, she is getting very grumpy in her old age.  We have to take Meadow to the vet in a couple of days to get the eye checked, maybe we will take the cat too and make sure there is nothing wrong with her.

This weekend I am throwing a baby shower for a friend.  I am really excited, but I have so much to do before Saturday!  I may take Friday off.

weigh in and work

Weighed in at 192.5 this morning, the scale is moving in the right direction.  This week we made a small change – we ate in every night.  I am still not logging consistantly.  I worked out twice this week with the personal trainer.

Work started in earnest this week.  I am only teaching one class, then overseeing some research students.  All that stuff is going ok, and if nothing else was going on, it would have been an easy week.  BUT, I also had to finish a paper (one of the co-authers is going out of the country), and I am working on 3 proposals, two due next week.  So crazy stuff is happening and I have to go to work at least one day this week.

I am going to do something fun this weekend too.  Maybe take Iz to this new indoor play area for kids or go to a movie with Mom. 

Hope you feel better soon, Cat!

Oops, my head did explode

<>Cat – what do you mean by poster frame?  This sounds like a great project! I want to make one too!  Post pics!
My first week back at work ended up being a *horrible* week.   For the last year and a half I have been leading an unofficial committee to organize a meeting.  There have been many emails exchanged between roughly 10 people, I was doing a lot of the correspondance, getting people involved, asking for a consensus.  Last summer, we hit a stand still waiting for one of the unofficial committee members to find out more information about the hotel the  meeting was going to occur.  He was supposed to report back to us within the month, but he didn’t.  School started and I was overwhelmed so I asked another member that works with the hotel member to keep up with the progress.  I checked back in with the second member this week and he said the hotel member had taken over, formed an official committee and left me and two other people off it (one of the other people being a woman, the final committee was all men).

I got really upset and offended.  This was something I was part of, if not in charge of, for a long time and to be dropped like that really hurt.  Plus, I felt like it was intentional (though the new leader says it wasn’t).  With all the emails and meetings we had, I dont’ see how it could have been unintentional.  The whole thing just compounded my feelings of being isolated and forgotten down here in AL, as well as made me feel like I was left out of the cool kids club.  I called the main guy and demanded to be put back on, he added the other dropped members as well.  Damage is done though, I have been really down this week.  Crying daily actually.  I have gotten over it though.   I have come to the conclusion that he wanted to be in charge and felt that would be easier without me on the committee.  Now he has a “pissed off”  me, isn’t he lucky?

Eating has been crap as well of course.   Classes start tomorrow.

work

I haven’t been at work for almost a month. I missed the last week of work before the holidays because of my sugery, then we had 3 weeks off. I went back on Monday for a meeting, but the rest of this week, I have been meeting with a visitor (not at work). I will return today.

All this absence is stressing me out. I woke up this morning in a panic. I need to do so many things. Taking this job has been a huge change to my career. Now I am not only responsible for my research, I am responsible for teaching, overseeing students, recruiting, writing grants with the department, and more. I feel like I am getting no where and fast.

Updated:  My head didn’t explode.  I worked all day, mainly catching up on stuff, writing stuff down in my calendar, trying to fix my email.  I am also doing WW again, third day tracking points.  Off to play bridge.

reinvigorated

Something has just clicked on this last week and now I have so much excitement and energy.  Maybe it is the impending holidays or the fact that the semester is almost over (then I get a month with no classes!!!)  or that I won that award last week, I just couldn’t be in a better mood.   Maybe I was more stressed about being able to survive at my new job than I thought.

<>I don’t remember how much I have written about my job before.  I am a scientist.  After I got my phd, I was doing research at national labs, first in Boston, then in DC.  Being a research scientist is a really neat job.  It is almost like you are working for yourself, you set your own schedule, make up your own problems, and write grants to ask for support to work on those problems.  It was a very laid back place, no stress.  But one thing that was hard about it was that it required you to be completely self motivated and creative all the time.  There was no busy work, nothing to fill those days that you didn’t particularly feel like writing a paper or looking at more data.

Last year I decide to make a change.  Even though I loved my job and the people that I worked with, we didn’t like DC and wanted to move our family to a more rural area.  Working at national labs tends to limit you to larger cities, so I started looking for a job at a university.  I had several requirements, the university had to be in the south (close to family) and the city had to have a reasonable cost of living.  The university had to offer a phd program and have thriving research on-going.  And the city had to be somewhere Mike could easily find a job.  Those requirements limited us to just a few cities and universities and none of the universities was currently doing the kind of research I do which would make it a hard sell to get a job there.

Then, a miracle occurred.   A small university in AL started a new program in my field and was hiring two new professors.  It was a perfect match and perfect timing.  We moved last year on halloween and I started teaching in January.

I never thought I wanted to teach, but I have taken to it like a fish to water.  I enjoy interacting with the students and I think they like me.  I had a full class this year and the kids are begging me to teach the second half of the course next semester.  What I really like though, is doing research with the graduate and undergraduate students.  They keep me motivated and excited and working hard just to keep in front of them on their research.

Now I have lots of busy work to fill quiet moments, too much actually.  My research has definitely suffered since starting this job, but at least I am still doing something.  I hope it calms down after this year and I settle into the job more.  I requested I teach two sessions of the same class next semester (a class I have already taught) so that I don’t have to do any more preps and can have extra time for research.

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that turned my frown upside-down

I was really not doing well this morning.  I was trying to pull it together for classes and work, but my insides were just falling apart.  Then around 10, I got a fantastic call.  I have won an award, a really prestigious,  highly competitive, young scientist award.  The man who called and told me was so nice, he told me I should print out my reviews and frame them because they were so good.  Winning the award means I will get funding for the next 5 years, most of the money will go to pay graduate students.  I was just laying in bed fretting about how I was going to pay grad students a couple of weeks ago, now I have some money.  It is friggen awesome.