See Jane Compute

Where is my summer?? I thought once July hit and the busyness of June subsided that I'd actually have time to, you know, maybe, relax a bit. Ha! This has been a particularly busy week. The good news is that after today, things do get easier and calmer.

(Of course, playing Guitar Hero for 3 hours last night certainly didn't help matters much either. Good for the soul, yes. Good for the work and sleep schedules, not so much.)

So what have I been up to this week that's keeping me so busy?

• After a few weeks of not being able to get to the unreviewed article (ok, so maybe, just maybe, I was ignoring it a bit, too), I finally have the time and energy to tackle it. It will be sent out later today. (I even have the cover letter written already!) Let's hope I have better luck with this next journal.
• My undergrads are a flurry of activity, finishing up a bunch of things all at once. Which means a lot of my attention is spent making sure they pay attention to the right details, spot-checking their work, cheerleading/giving pep talks, and reading reading reading drafts of their writeups. And making sure (a) I get all of the data and (b) everything is well-documented and labeled.
• Dealing with computer issues. This seems to be the theme of my summer. If we're not finding weird bugs in the research software, some machine or server is crapping out, or some process is failing to generate the expected results that it was generating just fine a week ago. Sometimes I think our IT department should have me on their payroll for the amount of troubleshooting I do. And, of course, everything takes about three times longer than it should.
• Dealing with textbooks. Yeah, I'm way far behind on this. And the worst part is that after I went through the trouble of reviewing new books, I realized that it probably was not a good idea to change texts the year I'm being observed for tenure.* On the bright side, I've been able to do some really productive thinking about my teaching for the fall, and I'm feeling pretty excited about my fall courses.
• Thinking Deep Thoughts about the future of my research program. Late last week, I realized that several branches of my research are converging, and that I may be able to wrap these branches up fairly soon. Which means I have to start thinking of what the Next Step will be. This is both fun and scary.

So it's been a busy week, but very productive. At this point, though, I am willing to trade off some productivity for some relaxation time!!

What have you been mired in this week?

* Changing texts in and of itself is not necessarily an issue. The issue in this particular case is that changing texts would necessarily change how I structure the course, and I decided that I'd rather work within the structure I currently use to teach the course rather than coming up with a new structure at this point. Maybe after I get tenure, I'll feel differently.