A Father Problem

Do any of you listen to Car Talk on NPR? Did any of you hear this weekend's show, specifically the last segment? My college roommate brought it to my attention. And the father mentioned in this segment, could very, very nearly be my father. It's episode #1122, segment 10 - "Book this, Dad!"

You can find the segment here:

http://www.cartalk.com/Radio/WeeklyShow/online.html

My favorite line is when the daughter says, "I have part a car problem, but mostly a father problem..."

It's here.

Our first 100 degree day of the year... I won't complain (yet) though - this seems later than usual...

E's Fashion Advice #2

Fashion Lesson #2

For the gentlemen in the crowd: If it's hot enough to wear sandals, it's hot enough to not need socks. If you want to keep them "business socks" on your feet, put on normal shoes.

Thank you Flight of the Conchords...

Hm. What next? Part IV

I've let this train of thought sit idle far too long, especially since graduation is getting closer rather than further away (I hope). It's been a solid 6 months since I last posted on this topic, though I swear it hasn't been that long since I've thought about it. I've been thinking about it all along, but within the past 6 months I've gone from fairly sure about what I want to um, considerably less sure. What I thought I'd ultimately like to do 6 months ago is still applicable - I still think that sounds like a great job/career. However I'm not as heart-set on doing that and only that now, and what's really unclear is what might be the best professional route to get there (or somewhere) taking all aspects of my life into consideration.

To recap, I've talked about why I don't want to be an academic, what I want in a job, and what some viable options are for me. For the sake of argument, let's talk about doing a post-doc, because that's what I think I'm still fairly likely to do next (ignoring currently unknown other substantial variables). And because my advisor recently sent me a fairly out-of-nowhere email saying that she and one of my collaborators think that Oxford Prof is my best option. (Side comment, I have no idea when or why this conversation took place, or what sort of contribution my collaborator made as he is not a mass spectrometrist.) Also because I've been thinking that this blog hasn't had enough serious science/graduate school/career content lately.

Ok. Confession time. My biggest reason for wanting to do a post-doc is for the opportunity to live somewhere neat and different fairly short-term and travel new places while there. I'll admit that a post-doc is a handy cover story for I-don't-know-what-I-want-to-do, but I'm not necessarily opposed to getting a "real job" after graduation. I figure that while I'm still able (i.e. don't have family obligations to require moving somewhere specific), I want to travel. Until recently, most of my post-doc searching thoughts (granted, still vague at this point) have been focused overseas. Mostly Europe and Australia, since the only languages I speak are English and French.

A friend recently asked me if I didn't like graduate school any more, would I really be any happier in a post-doc? It's true that I'm really quite tired and fed up with research, but I think a post-doc has a few things going for it that could make it better than grad school. I could be wrong, but here's my reasoning. I've been working on my dissertation research for three and a half years now, and in the scheme of things, it's relatively recently that I've lost interest (and partly due to some disagreement with my advisor as to what "sub-projects" I should be working on). Whereas a PhD in chemistry takes 5+ years (4 if you hit the right combination of luck and no social life), a post-doc is generally only about 2 years. It would be a shorter length of time with a new project in (ideally) a different area of research. Aside from a new project, I'd also be in a new geographic location with new people. Perhaps the biggest plus is that I don't have to get a dissertation out of a post-doc. Ideally a couple of papers, but no 300+ page cohesive document.

I will eventually blog about what I think would be a great job/career is (for me), but for now, let's say that a post-doc would be a very smart, if not necessary, step towards that. At least to do it the way I'd like to do it. I'd need to be familiar with as wide a variety as possible of instrumentation and samples, and a post-doc in a mass spec group where I'd work on something besides protein complexes with something besides Q-ToF instruments would be a good way to develop a broader background, with expertise in another area of mass spec.

Unfortunately Oxford Prof - the option that The Queen (and apparently one of my collaborators) thinks is the best option - is in a very, very similar area of mass spectrometry. Last year and this year there are people from her group as well as "alums" from her group presenting in my session as ASMS. While I do think I'd still learn something, I think this professor would be a great advisor, and I could totally live in Oxford, England for a couple years (!), I can't help but think it's far too similar to what I do now to be the best preparation for job-after-post-doc. I've pointed out this problem multiple times to my advisor, and she really insists that this professor is so well respected and her group does such great work that that wouldn't matter and that I couldn't possibly go wrong working for Oxford Prof. Last year she seemed excited that I was interested in working in her lab, and said to let her know when I'm about a year away from graduation so we can talk about fellowships... That's all good and exciting, I just don't know that it would be the best move professionally.

The other European ideas The Queen has had are outside of Paris and Lausanne, Switzerland. Both of these labs do very different work from what I currently do. I'd love to live in France again, and it would be great to be able to see my host family regularly. Lausanne is also close enough to Lyon that I could see my host family often. And Lausanne as well as Paris (obviously) are French-speaking areas, so communication would be ok, though I'm sure it would be a rough few weeks to get back to functioning in French and a rough couple months to get to the point of doing science in French. The professor outside of Paris is somebody other people in my group have collaborated with - I have one labmate who would have absolutely considered post-doc-ing with her if she didn't have a husband and plans for a baby, and one labmate who had an absolutely wretched time doing a semester-long "study abroad" type program there. I think a lot of the wretched-ness wouldn't be a problem because I'd live there long term - get my own flat and such, and I'm much more familiar with living in French, but Parisians really do have a reputation for being much less friendly (to put it mildly) than the Lyonnais. I really don't know anything about Lausanne. Both of these professors are super busy and have administrative positions, so I wouldn't really get any more advising/interaction with them than I currently do with my department-chair-advisor. That would be a bummer (Oxford Prof's lack of administrative/teaching responsibility are a big part of why The Queen thinks she's such a great option), but both professors would appreciate that I can clearly function and carry out research without my guidance or supervision on their part.

There are a couple of professors in Australia that I've thought about too, and Scandinavia and Germany are also places where I could easily get by with English (at least professionally, and I could learn enough of another language to not look like an @$$hole outside of work). There are certainly options domestically as well - research/advisor-personality-wise the most appealing possibility I currently know of is at Purdue...but I really don't know that I want to live in West Lafayette, IN. :/ I'm pretty sure it's nicknamed PurDon't for a reason...

Anyways, there are several viable options without actually researching the post-doc route in earnest. I can certainly find a job, and probably one that I'd like, without a post-doc, but I do think it's probably the best next step.

Being Eaten Alive

Why, oh why can't the uterus monster just play nice??? Am I really asking too much???

XKCD sums it up about right:

I can't make the hover thing work, but it's 413 nanohertz for the record.

Birthday Cake

Last week I was going to make a cake for E's birthday, but she wanted to bake and decorate, too, so we made a cake for her birthday. She decided she wanted citrus and/or berry, so after several days of recipe browsing, we decided on this:

Only about half the eggs that went into this cake...don't even ask about the butter...


Perfect 3 for 3 on the cakes! Nothing broke coming out of the pan! Woohoo!

It was lemon cake, with lemon curd cream filling (literally a mixture of whipped cream and lemon curd, an awesome idea that I will definitely use again), lemon buttercream frosting, and raspberries. After always making cupcakes for a long time, it was fun to actually make a cake cake. :)

Cooking Spree

My friend/labmate had her baby Saturday afternoon (yay!), so E and I spent several hours on Sunday cooking up a storm so our friend and her husband won't have to worry about feeding themselves for their first few days home. The new mama doesn't really care for vegetables (in fact, "voluntarily" increased produce consumption was the tell tale sign that she was pregnant!), so we tried to sneak or mix them in as much as possible. :)

We started with muffins - pumpkin chocolate chip:


Then we made several dinners.

Lasagna:

Chicken pot pie:
Shepherd's pie:

Finally we made the cutest little bitty birthday cake, because I think you should have a birthday cake for your actual birth, not just the anniversary of your birth. We made a classic yellow cake with a chocolate buttercream frosting. In retrospect a chocolate ganache would have been better, but that didn't seem very baby-birthday-cake-ish at the time. Being a dork, I also insisted that we get a 0 numeral candle for it as well. Yeah, yeah, the baby can't eat cake yet, but her mama can, so she'll "eat" it by proxy. :P

Being practical, we made enough so that we could have some of everything for ourselves too. I'm sure I'll appreciate all the ready-made meals when I'm super busy at school all week. And we ate most of the delicious chicken pot pie last night in front of an episode of Eureka. :)

Premature Speculation

I just came across this line in a paper:

While it may be premaure to speculate about applications of _______ given its novelty...

This sounds like academic code for "we don't have a clue what use it is, but we're going to publish it anyways." No?

E's Fashion Advice

In honor of E's birthday, I'm announcing the start of a new "series" entitled E's fashion advice. It will be mostly based upon her observations of inappropriate attire among the undergraduate population on campus. With that, here is the first fashion lesson for your benefit. Happy birthday Elyssia!

Fashion Lesson #1

If you're not being paid to take your clothes off, make sure that nobody can see the entirety of your bra (including the hooks and eyes) through your white t-shirt.

Sycamore Canyon

Sunday a group of us hiked part of the way down Sycamore Canyon. It's a hike I've been hoping to do for quite a while - it's supposed to be really beautiful (it was), and because the turnaround point is at the Mexican border. There's something fascinating and oddly funny about the turnaround point of a hike being a barbed wire fence that marks an international border.

The window of good opportunity to do this hike is fairly small, because it's pretty much guaranteed to be a wet hike, with high probability of having to swim across pools at some narrow points in the canyon. For that reason, we didn't want to do it over the winter or early spring when it was cool out because we'd be freezing with wet clothes, but it is still at fairly low elevations fairly far south, so it wouldn't be a good idea in the hottest part of the summer either.
The canyon was really pretty, and very green compared to most of southern Arizona, with lots of pretty wild flowers.

Sycamore Canyon is reputed to be one of few places in Arizona with water all year round, and it was certainly true, as evidence by the small fish in several of the pools!


We didn't actually make it all the way to the border, sadly. We didn't get started on the actual hike as early as we would have liked thanks to taking a wrong turn at an unmarked fork in the trail right at the beginning, and progress on a lot of the hike is slow thanks to all the water. Most of the water can be avoided if you're a decent rock climber, agile, and a bit lucky (unlike Slim, below). There are several places where you can climb over rocks or shimmy along a rock face, or you could just jump in the pool and swim across, but with some of us carrying cameras and/or phones, that wasn't going to work. We could have still gotten through the 10 miles (roundtrip) before dark, but a few people had plans back in town that they wanted to get back for, too (lame).

Joel intentionally taking the water route...

Slim unintentionally taking the water route...

We will most definitely try this hike again, without cameras or phones in tow, because it will definitely be a lot faster and easier if we can just jump in and swim. I want to hike to Mexico!

Full Moon

Hear that?

No? That's because there's nothing to hear. Nothing but the sweet, sweet calm and silence of an undergrad-free campus. It's beautiful. :)

Yes, it'll only take one late night on campus to be annoyed that there is no food or caffeine to be found after 7 pm save from a vending machine, or after 3 pm if you want real food rather than something from the UMart, but for now I'm going to enjoy the peace.

Creative Punishment

My labmate's husband teaches math at the middle school of one of the worst districts in town. These kids are pretty much little hellions, steal stuff all the time, get into all sorts of trouble, and couldn't possibly care less about school. Anyways, one of his students was serving an in-school suspension on what happened to be the school-wide field day. Rather than spending it in the library or wherever it was usually held, the students serving in-school suspension that day had to sit in a portable classroom module whose only windows faced all of the field day activities. My other labmate and I found this a hilarious and wonderful punishment, which got us talking about other creative punishments.

This same labmate had 2 older brothers, and when one of them did something, their parents made all three of them kneel on the floor until one of them confessed despite almost always knowing which kid was guilty. They swore that they knelt for hours, but her mom swore that somebody always confessed within 2-3 minutes.

My other labmate had the best punishment story from her roommate. He's one of like 7 or 8 kids, and whenever they fought with each other, their parents made them stand on the front lawn hugging each other for 15 minutes, and all their neighborhood friends would ride their bikes by laughing at them. Growing up in a household where we fought with each other all the time, I can say we would have HATED this, but as an adult, I think it's GENIUS. Absolutely brilliant.

Unfortunately my parents were never that creative. We nearly always got sent to our rooms. They'd forget they sent us away, and eventually we'd poke a head out and plead to be let out.

The one stroke of punishment genius I remember out of my parents wasn't even really meant to be a punishment. At some point when my little sister was about 2, or maybe not quite 2, she was screaming bloody murder throwing a tantrum over something or other, and my father just picked her up, set her on the back deck, and shut the sliding door behind him. She instantly stopped crying and just stared in total shock. It was super funny.

If I ever have kids, I might just be a terrible parent, because I would have soooooo much fun messing with them! But what's the point of having kids if you can't get some entertainment out of them??

One Day Experiment

So I've mentioned considering switching my schedule to night shift, just for the next few weeks until the conference at the beginning of June. I'd been thinking arrive at work early-mid afternoon, and work til maybe 2 or 3 am, so I'd still have some face-time with people, and be in bed well before sunrise. There would be a lot of benefits and disadvantages, and since I like (ok, love) lists, we'll consider these in list form. :)

Pros to working some form of night shift:

• Pretty much as much instrument time as I want (more than I could actually use due to time necessary for data analysis)
• More uninterrupted work time (i.e. fewer people asking me to fix their problems)

Cons to working night shift:

• I am most definitely not a late-night person.
• I'd pretty much never eat fresh-made dinner.
• Miscellaneous daytime stuff that requires me to be at school early-ish. Starting with group meeting at noon on Wednesdays. Then add in all the random one-time things.
• Half the fun of grad school is the socializing
• Harder to interact with other people that I actually need/want to interact with, especially my collaborator who is now on the east coast.

I decided to give this a try this week and see how it went. So yesterday I slept in a little (til 8), figuring I'd take my time, go for a run, and be at school around noon. Well, Day 1, and I already knew this isn't going to work, at least for the summer.

I didn't think about the fact that by mid-morning, it's already too hot out to run outside. I HATE running indoors/on a treadmill, and I just don't get as good a workout with other (indoor) forms of cardio. By this time of year in Tucson, you really have to run before about 8 or a bit after dark. But if I'm working nights, I'd still be at work at 9 or 10 pm when it's cool enough to run outside again. And I'm not ok with running at 2 am.

Also, when I get up early to run (6 or 7...or sometimes earlier at the absolute hottest part of the year), I'm not hungry yet and can run without eating breakfast no problem. However...by 8 or 9 I'm hungry. And as I found out this morning, I do not have the energy to work out on that empty of a stomach. And eating shortly before running leaves usually makes me feel sick. Especially anything with milk. Ick.

Working out is not something I'm willing to give up, or relegate to once/week. I don't have a body type that allows me to maintain my weight without a fair amount of effort, I love good food too much to "diet," and I aside from appearances/weight, I feel better when I work out fairly regularly. So, since giving up working out is not an option, I'm gonna go head and consider this experiment a FAIL.

Mint Julep

In honor of the Kentucky Derby Saturday I made these Mint Julep Cupcakes.


Man were they GREEN. If I'd been willing to spend more on the liqueur and had more time I would have searched for non-green creme de menthe, because green cupcakes just seem gross to me. At least they stayed green green rather than turning that brown-ish green upon baking.


The only thing I did differently from the recipe was to brush bourbon on top of the cakes after they cooled. Unfortunately, it wasn't actually enough to be able to taste it. I really don't care for bourbon, but I did want them to taste like they weren't straight up mint cupcakes.

Update - I brushed the spares that I didn't take to the Derby Party with a second coat of bourbon, and now you can taste the bourbon, and most definitely smell the bourbon. Unfortunately this means that I now think they're gross, but I don't like bourbon. They were well received at the party Saturday, and my labmate still thinks they're good with the extra bourbon. The extra brushing if booze did eventually make them a little soggy, so if I make these again I'd probably add just a little bit of bourbon to the frosting rather than the second brushing on the cake.

But they sure are pretty. :)

Flour

I am documenting the fact that after today's grocery store outing, I currently have 25 lbs of flour in my kitchen. Much of it is being stored in the freezer. I'm quite curious to see how long it lasts.

Anticlimactic

So I managed to get the talk done, and it went fairly well. When I finished it felt like it had been only about 10 minutes, when in reality it had been at least 20.

While all the talks were really good (there's usually at least 1 obvious "dud") - the deciding committee copped out big time, deciding that my classmate who won last year and I would be "co-winners," while my two labmates who also presented would be "co-runners up." What nonsense. At least I got some money out of it I guess - although I'm pretty sure we're going to have to split the prize. It's hard to imagine there being any extra money around now. It's still enough money to buy my sister a plane ticket out here. Since Dad has yet to send her out here, even though the she's-not-old-enough-to-fly-by-herself excuse is long gone, I'm thinking I'm just going to buy the ticket and tell Dad she needs a ride to/from the airport whichever days it is.

The other upside is I'm in great shape for my talk at the conference in June. There's always more work to be done, and I'm sure I'll be working hard up until my flight leaves Tucson, but at least I don't have to worry about it. Don't tell my advisor, but I'm pretty sure I'd be just fine giving my talk over the data I have now. There's certainly more information to pull out of the data I collected in the past week than what made it into my talk.

The Queen said she mentioned to another faculty member that all my data was from the past week and s/he replied that s/he couldn't tell at all, so that's good. While I'm glad it wasn't obvious, I really, really wish The Queen wouldn't tell people stuff like that. I feel like it doesn't look good. She's got a really big mouth.

After a couple beers with some friends, I had a glass of wine and spent some quality time with my couch. It's been sorely neglected lately. And now, I'm off to bed - I'm sure my bed has missed me as much as I've missed it.

IT WORKED

It actually worked. Those experiments that I've been killing myself over for that talk? They actually worked, and produced results that are coming together to be a really cool story.

Experiments had been going really quite well all along - I'd say a far higher success rate than the average set of experiments, but based on one passing comment I'd seen in a paper I had reason to thing that something was majorly wrong with the numbers I was getting, and that based on that my spectra would be meaningless. Yesterday my labmate helped me submit a calculation that would either support my measurements or send me further into clueless oblivion. I got an email last night saying the calculation was done, but we'd used my labmate's computing account since I haven't used mine in so long that I have no idea how to get into it, so I had to wait til this morning for him to fish the results out for me.

And holy crap. The computational result actually matched incredibly well with my measurements. Meaning I didn't royally muck up my experiments or kill myself all week for naught (well, in a no-good-data sort of way anyways), and all my data makes beauuuutiful sense given the context provided that by that calculation. Hooray!!!

There's one spectrum that I'd reeeeeeally still like to have, but I can live without it for tomorrow at least. Now I just have to get all these spectra into my half made (well, as of this morning, currently it's not missing much besides spectra) talk, and get it to flow right, and figure out what points I need to make on each slide.

So one huge hurdle down. I have data, and data that will make a good story. That in and of itself is a huge accomplishment. Now to finish assembling my presentation, get some sleep, practice it some more, and cross my fingers that I win. It's probably incredibly shallow and arrogant of me to say, but I'm going to be really disappointed, and maybe even a bit angry if/when I don't win. All the ridiculousness leading up to this would just make it all the more frustrating. And knowing that I have AWESOME data would make it even harder to swallow.

Ok, back to powerpoint-ing. I WILL be in bed by midnight.

Uncomfortable.

So the news outlets (understandably so) aren't talking about anything except the death of Osama bin Laden. It's huge that he's dead, and while it's impossible to know what will happen now, hopefully it'll be a huge blow to al Qaeda and a step towards a less violent world.

I understand that he was a horrible, horrible man. Really. I get it. It really isn't possible to comprehend fully the suffering that he has directly or indirectly caused countless people. But at the same time, the rejoicing at his death bothers me. I wouldn't say I'm sorry that he's dead, but it makes me really, really uncomfortable that the collective reaction to a man's death is joy.

Quote of the Day

"A gypsy told me I was gonna marry a guy at least 8 years older than me." ~ Little Sister (duh), in justifying her admiration of Prince Harry

Why Graduate School Was the Worst Decision Ever

I've worked 56 hours in the past 4 days alone (Weds-Sat...well, now Sun am). Probably for nothing.

That ridiculous talk situation? It got even more ridiculous, but I'll spare you the details and just say that I finally got "official" notice Friday that I am indeed presenting. I'd been thinking all along that this presentation is next Friday afternoon. Wrong. I realized Friday evening that it's actually Thursday.

The whole "go for broke" idea and lack of currently working instruments means I've been running mostly overnight to get as much instrument time as possible. This wouldn't be so bad if I didn't also have stuff to do during the day. I'd actually been considering trying to switch over "night shift," in order to get as much instrument time as I wanted, but hadn't due to all the daytime meetings and such, ignoring the fact that I'm so not a night owl, and think 10 pm is a perfectly reasonable time to go to bed on a regular basis.

I went into lab when it was dark out, came out to discover it was light out.

I ate breakfast in my office (well, in the lab...shhh). From stuff I had in my office. We're not talking about a day where I had to be at school early, and grabbed breakfast on my way in. We're talking worked all night, was hungry at 5:30 am, went into office, found oatmeal and tea in a drawer and called it breakfast.

Unfortunately a lot more has to go into this than collecting an enormous amount of data for one week. The data has to be analyzed, literature searched, figures made, calculations done, presentation assembled. I can do stuff like lit searches and outline/gather/make the trivial stuff for the actual presentation while collecting data. Between the nature of the data, what I need to do with it, and the way my brain processes this data, I can't really get much analysis done while collecting more data. The best I can really do is quick checks here and there to try to catch problems and decide the next best step on the fly.

I have a bad habit of blogging (and pursuing other internet-driven-time-sucks) more just when I have less time to do so. We're going to call it mental health preservation. If it makes it sound like a slightly less terrible waste of my time, I have had a spectrum acquiring the entire time I've been writing this.

The better experiments are going, the harder it is to leave. Which is the trap I'm currently stuck in. I'm really hoping that my labmate who signed up for the instrument today shows up a whole lot earlier than I think he's likely to.

At this point you must think I've completely lost my mind, and maybe I have. Any normal person probably would have said f@&# that days ago. (Normal people are smarter than people who go to graduate school.) The seminar announcement has already gone out to the entire department, so there's definitely no backing out of presenting. I'd really like to win this stupid thing, especially because part of me feels like I got jipped last year. And I'd really, really like that prize money. There are plane tickets to be bought and student loans to pay down. Even though at this point I'm not remotely sure that it's even possible to get this done for Thursday, I'm too stubborn to give up and tell my advisor I just can't do this. It would be so humiliating.

Whatever happens it'll be over in 5 days, then I can sleep for a couple of days before getting back to the (less crazy) grind for ASMS. Maybe if I get lucky the data I'm killing myself for this week will be useful for that talk... Pretty sure a PhD isn't worth it.

Mini Me

Apparently Facebook thinks my sister and I are the same person. Facebook has this relatively new tool that tries to identify faces automatically when you upload pictures. When I upload photos, it'll usually pick out almost all of the faces as faces, and correctly identify maybe half of them. For me at least, it's never misidentified somebody, but rather didn't propose any ID at all.

When my sister uploaded pictures from prom this morning, Facebook went through it's little face-recognition program, and tagged the people in the photos. However, it did not recognize my sister as my sister, but as me!

Little Sister: guess what the computer just did

that makes us

officially related

and alike in appearance

Me: facebook just tagged you as me!!

Little Sister: yeah

when you like

upload pics

and its like who is this

it was like anne
already decided

Considering my sister is way cooler and way less awkward than I was in high school, I'm sort of jealous of how awesome she looks in her prom pictures. Maybe I could convince her to go along with Facebook's identification. I mean, it wouldn't be weird to be showing up in prom pictures at age 26 right?

Anyways, apparently we look alike. I mean, Facebook thinks we're indistinguishable. It's like I have a twin - one who's ten years younger, skinny with blue eyes, and hates chemistry.


Nah, Facebook is on crack, there's no resemblance at all.