rivka

It's time for my first ever performance review as a faculty member. (I was promoted to the faculty in July, as you may or may not recall.) I just filled out the self-review questionnaire, which happily skips over all the things I got evaluated for as a staff member, like "work habits," and cuts to the chase: publications, grant funding, teaching, mentoring, service.

At the end, there's a section titled "Summary of major accomplishments during the current academic year," followed by a section where you list your goals for the upcoming year. And hey, when I write my accomplishments out? I look like I had a damn good year. It's kind of funny, because I don't feel as professionally successful as the summary makes me look... and yet, there isn't anything there that isn't true.

( blatant self-promotion under the cut )

In conclusion: Damn. *I'd* hire me.

One dose of Augmentin, and I feel approximately one thousand times better.

(My viral ick turned into bacterial ick. I saw that coming, but unfortunately all you can really do is watch and wait.)

Yay, they posted the SUUSI catalog!

They've made some good general changes to the schedule this year. Instead of scheduling adult-focused musicians to play at 5pm and calling that a "family concert hour," they've moved concert hour back to the 8-9pm slot and kept every late afternoon open for chaotic community play time. Evening concerts push worship earlier, which works better for us with Alex's bedtime. And this year they're offering the opportunity to be in Covenant Groups - small groups which meet daily during SUUSI for spiritual conversations, and which can continue throughout the year by e-mail. I think that's a great innovation.

SUUSI is moving from the Virginia Tech campus to the campus of Radford University, about twenty miles down the road. On balance, I think it will be great. Radford is much smaller, and we'll have it to ourselves. VA Tech was always jammed full of sports-camp kids and freshman orientation students - mealtimes especially were a nightmare, with huge crowds and a stressful, rushed atmosphere. SUUSI will still bring a thousand people to the dining hall, but I think the atmosphere will be much more relaxed with everyone from the same program, sharing the same living-in-community expectations.

Dorm rooms will be smaller, and instead of three-bedroom suites with living rooms we'll have two-bedroom suites with no living rooms. I know that the SUUSI Board thinks of this as a feature, not a bug; it will force people to congregate and socialize in open communal spaces rather than private gatherings in living rooms. It remains to be seen how well that will work. The one thing I wonder about is what parents will do between bedtime and the start of childcare co-op. Hang out in the halls, I guess.

I am in the happy position of finding waaay too many things in the catalog that I want to do. Although there is a distressing preponderance of woo-woo workshops, which I think says less about the interests of the average SUUSI attendee than it does about the enthusiasm of woo-woo people to give workshops. (Next year I really need to think about offering the kind of workshops I would want to take.) I have some hopes for "Science, Religion, and the Universe" ("What’s new in physics and how does this relate to our beliefs. The beginning and end of the universe (mostly dark matter and energy) and what happened in between. Also some fun experiments done by participants.") being relatively woo-woo free because it is being offered by a physicist. Although one never knows.

I always think about branching out and trying something completely different at SUUSI, like (particularly) "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain," or singing with the SUUSI Cantatori. But it would take up so much of my schedule. I'd have to commit to showing up to something every morning all week long. I don't necessarily want to nail myself down like that.

There are a lot of nature trips this year that are rated for ages 0+, which is nice. I want to do a couple of those with Alex, and a couple of good challenging hikes for myself. I am intrigued by the dawn canoe trip, but probably not enough to miss the chocolate-making workshop it's scheduled against. (The same one I tried to take last year, which was foiled by intense humidity. I see that this year it's been moved to the morning, which should help.)

Yay! SUUSI! I am so excited.

( possible schedule )

I interrupted my first day at SBM for a three-hour jaunt to an urgent care clinic.

iamjw gets a gold star. My eye symptom turned out to be more or less unrelated to my cold - I have conjunctivitis. I was fooled because the decongestants I was taking for my cold were drying up the eye discharge, too - and because the pain and constant redness didn't kick in until quite late. A thousand apologies to anyone I have touched in the past few days. I hope you don't get it too. I am now washing my hands obsessively in hopes of not infecting the entire Behavioral Medicine scientific community.

I also have a viral ear infection. It sucks to be me, because this means that descents and landings on the flight home will probably hurt just as much as descents and landings on the flight out did. I resisted the urge to beg for antibiotics, given that I have just been funded to study irrational health behaviors.

Also? The telephone rep for Blue Cross/Blue Shield told me that California doesn't have any urgent care clinics. She wanted to send me to a "multispecialty medical clinic" in the suburbs somewhere. My panic induced by this conversation only lasted as long as it took me to reach the concierge desk, but still. Sheesh.

We arrived at the hotel late last night to discover that they had given away all their regular rooms and wanted to put us in a "parlor" - the living-room (only) portion of a suite. A murphy bed would pull down from the wall, and they'd bring in a cot for the other bed. They earnestly presented this to us as an "upgrade," because they rent the parlors for some ludicrous amount of money, like $600 a night. We explained that it might be an upgrade in terms of space and lavish appointments, but it was a major downgrade in terms of the only thing we cared about: comfortable beds to sleep in. After a long argument they comped us for their ludicrously expensive $30 breakfast buffet and promised a real room for tonight. This morning Steve told his wife, who is a vice president of a major bank, and within moments she had the hotel manager heaping apologies on Steve and promising to comp last night's room and send a bottle of wine up to tonight's room. Heh.

My SBM hasn't been that much fun yet, to be honest with you. But! I discovered that next year's will be in Montreal, so I have high hopes for that.

I miss you all.

Yesterday morning before church, my throat felt a little scratchy.

By the time we got home and I put Alex down for a nap, things had progressed to the point where all I could do was lie in bed, shivering weakly.

Sore throat, body aches, alternating chills and sweats, stuffy nose, and this thing where I literally had to open my left eye this morning with my fingers because it was too gunky to open by itself. Yuck.

In two days, I have to get on a plane and fly to San Diego to deliver a paper at a scientific meeting.

Dooooooom.

I have stayed home from work today. I am going to drink tea, sleep, and read Georgette Heyer all day. Woe is me.

I have never really been into YouTube. I don't usually click on links that people put in their LJ posts, and I was never very interested in sitting around browsing through videos. I'm not patient enough. But I'm really starting to realize what a fantastic tool YouTube is for the parent of a curious preschooler. Because they have videos of everything on there.

I first got the idea from bosssio, whose young son has a whole collection of garbage truck videos favorited on YouTube. That stuck in my mind, and when Alex expressed some interest in hammerhead sharks I dug around and came up with a bunch of short videos for her to watch. (Our favorites: this and this. Fascinating for adults but not for impressionable two-year-olds: this video in which a guy fishing for tarpon gets his catch stolen by a hammerhead.)

Tonight I showed Alex some more photos of the baby elephant at the Maryland Zoo. She wanted to see more, so I offered to look for YouTube videos of baby elephants.

Then she joined the topic of elephants to her current favorite fantasy-play subject, and asked me to find a video of an elephant going to the veterinarian. With the beauty of YouTube, it took me about five seconds to find a fascinating, non-gory, six-minute video of a bull elephant undergoing a tusk-ectomy at the Oregon Zoo. We went on to watch a video of elephants swimming in a river at an animal sanctuary, and then branched out to other animals visiting the vet. (I've just bookmarked this video of a random litter of Norwegian kittens at their first vet visit, amd this one of a litter of Rottweiler puppies, to show her tomorrow.)

I know that nothing beats giving a preschooler real experiences in the real world, and that YouTube isn't a substitute for that. And I know that for real information, books are a much better bet. But damn - if I can find a video of an elephant going to the vet? That means that I can find a video of anything. It's so cool to have a means of instantly satisfying her curiosity.

OMG we finally have DSL at home!!!

So... how are all of you?

...although the lying bastards sent a robocall on Saturday that claimed the service was up and running. Making Michael waste another hour fiddling with it and waiting on hold for tech support. Now they swear we'll have DSL by tonight. I am not holding my breath.

Other than that it was a good, busy, fun weekend.

Friday night Michael's new company treated us (and all their other employees) to a night at the Baltimore Symphony for an event called "Pops Goes Vegas." We weren't really sure what to expect, but it turned out to be awesome. The company event started two hours before the symphony center was open to the general public. When we came in, someone snapped our picture in front of a glitzy Vegas backdrop. We were given flashy (literally: little racing colored lights) pins shaped like a pair of dice which identified us as private party attendees, a deck of company-logo playing cards, and a ticket we could exchange for casino chips. There were gaming tables set up in the main lobby: blackjack, poker, roulette, and craps. On the mezzanine level were a couple of open bars and a sumptuous buffet featuring things like crab claws, pate, sushi, and beef tenderloin. Circulating waiters brought by hot hors d'oeuvres. They also had a magician, an Elvis impersonator, and some feathered-and-sequined showgirls strolling around.

We ate, drank some wine, and played a little poker. I busted out three times in quick succession (it was not particularly difficult to come by additional chip vouchers), mostly I think from bad luck - neither Michael nor I could pinpoint any stupid decisions. He made out like a bandit. Each chip could be exchanged at the end of the evening for a ticket to enter the door prize drawing, which I thought was a nice touch. Michael didn't win anything, though.

I didn't really know what to expect from the music. It turned out to be a glitzy, rather silly Vegas-style spectacular, with a Liberace impersonator, a Frank Sinatra impersonator, a couple of other singers, and dancing showgirls. Lots of costume changes. The orchestra had been forced into white dinner jackets. The singers were good, but I kept thinking that the whole thing was a waste of a very good orchestra.

Afterwards there was a dessert buffet, and then we walked home.

Saturday we had tickets to the National Aquarium, also a benefit from Michael's company. (They have corporate passes to a variety of Baltimore institutions, and anyone is allowed to check them out - it's not used as a merit incentive, or anything. Which is cool.) Alex went crazy over the dolphin show, and was also particularly taken by the rays. (The National Aquarium has a huge ray pool that you can view from both above and below the water.) She was scared of the sharks and some of the bigger fish, which is a new thing.

Afterwards we went to Barnes & Noble, because I had a Christmas gift card burning a hole in my pocket. I got Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, which is a compendium of food-themed articles and cartoons from the full course of the magazine's history. It is wonderful. And I got the DK First Atlas for Alex.

Sunday: church, and then a chilly and windy picnic at the St. Patrick's Day parade. (Alex: "Are there going to be any beanbags at this parade?" Me: "... ... ...Bagpipes? Yes, there will probably be bagpipes.") A little monotonous (pipe-and-drum band, high school marching band, local Hibernian chapter, lather, rinse, and repeat for two hours) but still fun. My favorites: the Mid-Atlantic Irish Wolfhound club, the very very tiny step-dancing girls, the fife and drum corps dressed up in colonial-era costumes, and a group of poignant, battered-looking Civil War reenactors (in blue) with a torn American flag. I'm not sure what connection the last two groups had with St. Patrick's Day - or the Buffalo Soldiers reenactors, come to that, or the fire engines - but I suppose that they were just there to be suitably parade-like.

We also turned over the key to the old house this weekend. Now we're really and finally moved. Yay.

Still drowning in a thousand little problems and inconveniences associated with the move. I think that eventually this will be a wonderful house to live in, and we'll be very happy there. Right now? Things are pretty frustrating.

More entries for the Big Bulleted List Of Frustration:( Read more... )

All of these things are surmountable. In fact, many of them have already been surmounted. It's just that cumulatively they are discouraging and exhausting. On top of all of the work trying to get settled into the new house, we're trying to clean the old house and move the last five percent of our stuff. At least the new house is close enough to the old house that the baby monitor works across both places, so we can go over late at night to clean. Except for the part where, late at night, we would really rather be in bed.

Alex initially took the move very well - she was excited and happy to come home to the new house and discover all our things there. In recent days, it has finally sunk in that we won't ever be going back to live in our old house again, and she's having some trouble with that. She doesn't really understand why. I think, in her mind, the move was just like when we go to visit someone else's house and bring some of our own things - except on a larger scale. So it's like going on vacation and then never coming back home. We totally forgot to include the permanency factor when we were explaining things to her in advance.

Also, she is not happy that (until late last night) we didn't have the TV/VCR/DVD/TiVO equipment hooked up yet. She's never been allowed to watch much TV (one video a day unless she's sick, and often no TV at all on school days), but apparently not having the option to watch anything is the everything-is-different straw that broke the camel's back.

Her stress is manifesting as (a) excessive sleepiness, and (b) whining and tantrums. Which might be related to the excessive sleepiness. She melts down all evening until we can get her into bed, and then she sleeps so late in the morning that I have to wake her for nursery school, to which we are thus inevitably late. This is not a particularly fun parenting cycle. It took us until late last night to realize that, duh, this is probably moving stress and not just Alex suddenly becoming an awful person. Hopefully that realization will make us more tolerant... except that, you know, we're pretty stressed out too.

Someday soon we will have gotten enough of the extra moving work done that I will be able to take a long hot bath in my new clawfoot bathtub. And then everything will be okay. Right?

Fun things that happened today:

1. I ran into another faculty member outside the grants administrator's office. This guy's known me since I was a predoctoral intern. I told him I had just gotten a grant.

"That's great," he said, smiling. "What kind?"

"An R21," I said.

"That's great!" he said, in a different voice. I saw respect in his eyes as he held out his hand to shake mine.

2. Lydia suggested that I submit an announcement about my grant to the Institute's Director of Marketing/PR Officer. By quick turnaround, he wrote back: "I'm submitting the item to SOM [School of Medicine] News, but I really need a photo of Rebecca ASAP ASAP. Please advise. If necessary, I can arrange for Rebecca to go to the SOM photographic services office, where a good head-and-shoulders photo can be made..."

So I went dashing across campus to sit for my official photo "ASAP ASAP." And you know what? It's kind of awesome. I'm so used to looking awful in pictures that this was a nice surprise. I mean, it's not gorgeous or glamorous, but it's a nice shot that looks like me and isn't all... red and toothy and weird. That's a rare experience. And it'll be so nice to have a good formal shot that I can use for official things like the faculty webpage I'm supposed to create.

3. I went to the supplies cupboard and got a nice new 2" 3-ring binder. Then I printed a label for it: "Antiretroviral Decision Making. R21 NR010687-01A1. Rebecca Wald, P.I." I am now engaged in the happy pursuit of deciding what I want my eight tabbed dividers to represent. Let's see... Correspondence with NIH, Correspondence with IRB, Certificate of Confidentiality, Budget & Purchasing, Subject Payments, Data Analysis Log, Abstracts and Publications, Incident Log...

This is so much fun.

( picture under cut )