Hm. What next? Part VI

In my resolutions post I mentioned some changes underfoot, and one of those changes is my job!  In September a took a job with the same instrument company that I post-doc-ed with.

[Side bar.  I verbally use "post-doc" as a verb all the time, and I know I'm not alone.  My problem is the past tense of post-doc.  Post-doc-ed?  Post-doced?  Post-docked?  Should it even have a hyphen between post and doc?  Everything I come up with looks dumb.]

So as a post-doc I worked for an instrument company in Delaware, but I was primarily based in a lab at BFU (Big Fancy University).  It was definitely a non-traditional post doc, even by industry standards.  This lab is a joint project of sorts between my company and BFU.  While there are faculty chairs technically associated with the lab, I was pretty much the only staff person making things happen on a day to day basis.  Everything from prepping and running samples, caring for the instruments, data analysis, training users on various software programs, tracking down supplies, coming up with content for a lab handbook and website, to communicating guidelines and results with lab users.  I did my best to stay out of BFU administrative and political nonsense.  It was an insane job to say the least.

Since I got hired for real my responsibilities have gradually been transitioning away from this lab at BFU.  Supposedly there's a replacement for me... he's real and I've met him...but I'll believe it all when I see it.  (Let's say BFU has known since August that I was going to step down my time but not a whole lot has happened administratively to hire a replacement.)  In November I dropped to 50% time in Baltimore, with most of the other 50% of my time spent in California at another company location.  Since then I've been working a couple weeks in Baltimore then a couple weeks in California.  After February I'll do a couple months at 25% time in Baltimore, until finally dropping down to just a day or two every now and then.

In California I've been training and working on a new instrument that we've just put out.  I had experience on another instrument with similar technology in grad school, making me a good candidate ti work on this project.  I'll continue to spend lots of time in California for a few more months (hello frequent flyer miles and Marriott points!) before being based primarily in Delaware.  I'm sure I'll still travel quite a bit, though not as often, far, or for so long at once.

I'm pretty excited about the changing job.  There are a lot of less than polite things I could say to explain this, but in this venue it's going to have to rest with this: I'm ready to be done with Baltimore (both in terms of living and working there) and the work in California is pretty fun.  I think in the long term this will be have a lot more of what I want in a job than this post doc has had.  The post doc was in a lot of ways closer to the facility job I thought I wanted than this job will be, but there were a few things that made this not the best match for me that wouldn't necessarily be true everywhere.  If I ever did take a facility type of job (funnily enough I've been hearing rumors that there may be exactly such a job available quite soon), it would definitely have to be in a very different type of academic setting that BFU, where I'm preferably not starting from scratch and not the only person working in the lab.

P.S.  My other/older What Next posts are here, here, and here.

New Year, New Post

So it's been ages since I've blogged, but in the spirit of New Year's and motivated by one of my favorite women-making-it-work-in-science-with-a-family bloggers (seriously adorable little family and frankness that makes me laugh out loud and adore her all the more) I decided to post.

I'll warn you right now that this is a stereotypical post on resolutions and goals for this year.  Let's check up on last year's goals as we go...considering the one I bombed in 2013 is going to make a reappearance in this year's list...

Student loans!  They're paid off!!  I made steady progress on them for the first half of the year until summer when I started saving money for a trip to France.  In September I got promoted/hired as a "real person" with the same company I post-doc-ed (what on earth is the past tense of the verb "to post-doc"???).  Getting a real PhD job came with a substantial promotion, and as soon as I saw my first pay check I promptly paid off the remainder of my student loans.

My other financial goal was to build up a safety cushion of savings.  I actually got pretty darn close to accomplishing this, but then Boyfriend and I decided to buy a house... So there goes that money.  While this wasn't exactly a fail, savings are important to me so it's going on the list for 2014.  I'm aiming again for 6 months of living expenses, as well as some money for a certain pricey occasion.

Along with saving, I want to figure out how to improve my retirement savings plan.  I only acquired retirement benefits when I got hired in September, so all I've done so far is contribute the maximum that my company will match.  But this year it's time to study up on 401ks and Roth IRAs and HSAs and who knows what else to understand what all this stuff is and figure out how to do the most I can for our little family (Boyfriend is in on this goal, too.).

Now here's where I bombed big last year.  The self-loathing weight loss goal that 99% of way too many women (myself included) make every year.  I'll use Academomia's terminology here - last year I was about N+7 at this time last year, with N being my goal weight.  Frankly, right now I'm not brave enough to step on the scale to see how far I am from N.  I'd guess I'm at least N+7, and it's entirely probable that I'm as much as N+10.  Let's not think about the possibly of  >N+10.  I think after a week or so of normal eating rather than holiday and travel eating I'll be brave enough to see where I am.

One corollary that I had to that was to complain less about my weight.  I think I've been pretty terrible about this one the last month or two.  And in all fairness, I've been travelling at least 50% of the time since the beginning of November, and then you throw in the holidays and it's just incredibly difficult to eat anything besides junk.  I asked Boyfriend, and maybe he's trying not to get himself into trouble, but he thinks I've been pretty good about not complaining.  I'm going to declare a verdict of decent success except for the last couple of months.  Since I still want to lose weight I'm keeping this corollary on the list so I don't tick off all my friends and Boyfriend.

The hobby goals I made last year were to make another photo-a-day album and to go on at least one hike every month.  The album has been made, with a handful of cell phone photo cheaters in place of photos taken with my big girl camera.  I think I may shelve this project until I have kids.  Or at the very least a bigger social circle.  Between living alone, having a much smaller social circle in Baltimore than in Tucson, and living in a city where it frequently feels like a really bad idea to walk around with my camera this project wasn't nearly as fun as it was in 2011.  I did get some fun pictures out of it that I'm happy to have, but it felt like a chore a lot more than it should have.  As for hiking, we did great through at least July.  Maybe we went on a hike in August.  Sadly I can't remember.  Maybe we didn't go for a hike in August after how miserably humid and nausea-filled July's hike was.  In September we biked at least 20 miles in the Camargue and walked all over several other cities.  Once we got back from France we spent almost every weekend looking at houses...so hiking fell by the wayside.

The only other specific goal I'm going to make this year is to keep in better touch with friends.  There are a handful of friends who have the same gchat habits I do, so I talk to them pretty regularly, but there are a handful of other still very dear friends who don't leave gchat open all the time.  My goal this year is to call those people more than twice per year!

I've got a lot of big changes on my plate for this year - buying a house, moving in with Boyfriend, a transitioning job with lots of travel - so I think that's plenty for official resolutions.  I don't know that I'll begin posting any more frequently, but I'm not ready to close the door on this blog, so I guess I'll just have to leave you in suspense on that front.

Happy New Year! It's going to be a big one!

Not cool.

Hey, guys - can we talk about something?  Namely, how NOT cool it is to lose your cool at work.  I don't mind swearing in some circumstances, and I certainly understand that you're frustrated that things aren't working, but really, it's not cool to throw a hissy fit at work.  It is so incredibly uncomfortable to sit there awkwardly while a grown man loses it in the lab.  There's a second coworker who swears like a sailor under his breath at the other end of the lab on a regular basis.  This happens so often I have to wonder if he has Tourette's or thinks I'm deaf and can't hear him.  Other, more level-headed coworkers have assured me neither is the case.  Anyways, just a friendly word of advice, if you can't keep your cool at work, step out until you've pulled it together.  Your coworkers will be so very grateful.

Seven

Make that seven jury duty summons in 10 years.  I got another jury duty summons in the mail yesterday, for the same week as Friday's summons!  This one was for federal court in Tucson.  (Friday's was for Baltimore City County court.)  Obviously I'll be excused from the latest summons as I've moved out of state, but what I don't understand, is how they mailed the summons directly to my Baltimore address, but still think I'm a resident of Pima County in Arizona.  We're not talking mail forwarding by the postal service, this was actually directly addressed to me in Baltimore.  The logic amazes me.  What also amazes (and irritates) me is that even after filling out the juror questionnaire online and responding in about 4 places that I've moved out of state, the system still told me to call in on my assigned date to see if I'm needed.  Totally absurd.

Random my ass.

I got summoned for jury duty.  AGAIN.  For the 6th time in the 10 years I've been registered to vote, when I know many people my age who have never been summoned.  That statement on every summons claiming that potential jurors are selected at random ("from a fair cross section of citizens" according to Maryland) is a load of bullshit.  I first got summoned 4 months after I registered to vote after my 18th birthday in Massachusetts.  Despite being summoned a second time in Massachusetts, thanks to a combination of being in college out-of-state, studying abroad, and luck, I never actually had to show up.  I was summoned three times while I lived in Arizona, once each for state, federal, and county jury duty.  I had to actually go twice, and the last time I was actually put on the jury (a poor decision on the DUI defense attorney's part).  I registered in Maryland 4 1/2 months ago and I've already been summoned.  Of course I was summoned for a date when I'll be traveling for work.  Let the postponement/reassignment/will-I-or-won't-I-have-to-go games begin.

We'll see if this spurs me back into blogging.

Days like today I really need a couch.  It's been rainy, windy, and gray all day, and the chairs at my kitchen table (currently the only seating besides my bed) just don't cut it.  However I still find rain fascinating and wonderful a month and a half after leaving Tucson.

This morning I booked a campsite for Assateague Island for this weekend!  Woohoo!

Statistics are unbelievably, painfully boring.  It's taken an extraordinary amount of Cherry Coke Zero (like pre-oral studying quantities) for me to make my way through it.

If you had been walking down my street at approximately 5:00 this morning you would have seen me (though only barely, it was dark still), in a raincoat, hanging out my bedroom window (on the 3rd floor of my building) trying to figure out what was making the murderous-rage-inducing clacking sound.  The culprit was a loose slat of siding/roofing flapping in the wind, that I yanked off the house until a sufficiently large nail to hold it in place can be obtained.  I bought some big nails (I only had little ones for hanging things.) this afternoon and hung out my window some more this evening hopefully fixing the problem.  I couldn't hammer through whatever is behind the slat underneath the problem slat.  There was wood behind the problem slat but further up, but the pre-existing hole in the slat (I have no idea what this thing is made of, it's not wood, not slate, it's easy to put a nail through though.) was bigger than my nails, so I dug out some washers leftover from assembling my Ikea furniture and used those to hold the nail head in front of the slat.  Fingers crossed it doesn't clack on the house whenever it's windy anymore!!

My car payment booklet showed up today.  Sad.  Driving a shiny new car is much more fun than paying for it.

Some idiot managed to hit and knock down a light post down the street.  It's a street with enough traffic that you really can't go very fast.  No clue how they managed to pull it off...

I bought a basket of jalapenos to make green sauce a couple of weeks ago, but well, I only used two in the sauce... So I've been making things with jalapeno... Over the weekend Boyfriend and I made this pizza, and later this week I'm planning to make this pasta and these biscuits.

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The three of you who read this regularly may be wondering why I apparently fell off the face of the planet.  When I last wrote I had just sent my completed dissertation (aside from final revisions) to my committee prior to my defense.  Since then I defended, left Tucson, and slowly worked my way across the country as I moved to Baltimore for a post doc in industry.  It's not that I don't have plenty of material that I could blog about - heck, I took notes throughout the entire drive thinking it could contribute to a fun blog post.  But frankly, I just haven't felt like writing.  I've had plenty of time if I chose to do it.  Maybe getting this post out will motivate me to keep writing, though maybe it won't.  In some ways I miss it, but it's not one of those things that's worth making myself do.  So maybe I'll be back, maybe not, but hopefully.