whining
sciencewoman | September 14, 2009It has recently been brought to my attention that a subset of my department's graduate student population is unhappy with our course scheduling. Some of our part-time graduate students feel that we are not doing a sufficient job of offering evening courses to meet the needs of people who work full-time during the day and complete their graduate degree one course at a time. I imagine the disgruntlement has been brewing for a while, but I suspect things are likely to come to a head soon, so I thought it might be worthwhile to spend some time laying my thoughts out here before it comes up in…
sciencewoman | July 16, 2009Don't worry I'll be back to the course design series soon, but I spent yesterday focused on other things (paper revisions, grant proposals) and I haven't completed the necessary work to get the next post up. And it's Friday, so let's divert to lighter equally serious but different topics.
As the mother of a toddler daughter I've been struggling with the overt patriarchy of the classic Disneyfied fairy tales, in which a stereotypically beautiful damsel in distress is helpless until rescued by a prince. I'd been trying to avoid exposing my daughter to the princess stories (Cinderella, Sleeping…
skookumchick | February 4, 2009... is to avoid vampire meetings. Which are any meetings which suck out your soul. And perhaps damn it to eternity. Post your horror stories here if you think it will help exorcise the effects.
Hat tip to 43folders.com.
skookumchick | November 11, 2008You know, maybe it's just because it is 11:30 at night and I have another hour to wait to pick up my husband from the airport shuttle place, but...
... there are some days I wish I was still pseudonymous.
'Cause then I could tell you just how tired I am, how even though I had a lot of good meetings today, I am feeling SO COMPLETELY over my head. How much I worry about failure. How much I feel like I have to squish aside and hide the crazy-cool me in order to be Dr. Me at work who is supposed to know everything already, how much I feel I'm being sucked into being in crisis-busy mode all…
sciencewoman | September 18, 2008 Money is on my mind a lot this semester. First, there's the grant writing marathon. And then there's the personal budgetary shortfall. Without a second income, we run a several hundred dollar per month shortfall. I've trimmed the fat from the budget and we're eating through the small amount of savings we had squirreled away. Soon it will be time to think about more drastic measures. And there's one big item looming large in my nightmares of financial ruin - the almost $1200 per month that I am paying for Minnow's truly excellent daycare where she is very happy and well cared for.
Why is…
skookumchick | August 29, 2008... now that I live on the western edge of a time zone, I regularly have to get up before the sun rises. These days that are approaching the equinox, when the sine function of daylight hours has a steep slope, the time of sunrise seems to really change a lot from day to day. Today's the first time I had to have breakfast with the light on.
While I love fall, this makes me feel winter isn't far behind. Sunny breakfasts will be relegated to the weekends, and my sleep will be bracketed by darkness, which makes me feel I'm not sleeping enough. (Which maybe I'm not anyway.)
*Sigh.*
skookumchick | June 11, 2008I had a meeting yesterday at 4, but was stood up (by a colleague who is now completely apologetic). I had another meeting today I thought at 1:30, but no one appeared. I went back to my office, saw I had got the time wrong and it was at 2:30. The meeting had been scheduled for 2, and I had misread the change of time email. In addition, I scheduled another meeting at 3 so I would have ended up talking to the 2:30 person for only 30 minutes. So I swapped my 3:00 meeting with the 3:00 person's 3:30 meeting, which worked out well for the 3:30 meeting person as she had the meeting on her…
sciencewoman | May 23, 2008On a day when I am feeling increasingly dismal about the publication prospects of my current project, my mood was not lightened with the arrival of the table of contents for the current issue of a very high impact journal (say, cell/nature/science). One of the papers was right up my research alley and the lead author is someone junior to me. Why is it that the other guy is getting a very high profile paper and I'm struggling to get results that will merit publication at all? I've got some suspicions, and I'm going to attempt to rank them from most charitable to least charitable.
He's…
skookumchick | April 23, 2008I am tired. Dog tired. We're nearing the end of the semester, but not so near that I can see the light at the end of my tunnel of meetings. I've been traveling every weekend for the last month, the house needs to be cleaned, the laundry done, the fridge stocked, and the email responded to. And instead I have nothing but meetings all day. Job candidates, seminar candidates, prospective student meetings, end of year committee meetings, advisory board meetings and dinners, graduate recruiting meetings, task force meetings...
I also have two papers that I need to get out. How to schedule in…
sciencewoman | March 31, 2008First, note the time stamp on this post. I have just now succeeded in getting Minnow to sleep and have sat down with a cup of tea and tomorrow's lecture to prepare. It's going to be a long short night. And I'm already tired.
I'm tired because for some inexplicable reason, Minnow couldn't sleep last night between 3:15 am and >5 am. And when Minnow can't sleep, neither do I. This afternoon as I tried to start writing tomorrow's lecture and preparing this week's lab, I was overcome by exhaustion and I broke down and bought a bottle of Coke. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but in…
skookumchick | March 26, 2008I've noticed my posts seem to kill the comments and conversation. Sorry about that. I realize this is really part of the gig of the bigger megaphone, and maybe blogging about stuff people don't want to comment on. Or that they find boring. Or that are too long. Or that are posted on days when people don't want to read. Or something... Hmmm...
I'm not complaining per se, except I find myself surprised a little at missing the community I had on my pseudonymous blog. I felt supported there. Not so much here yet. I thought about what I would risk in my career by blogging as me -- I hadn't…
skookumchick | March 26, 2008I've survived my spring break; now I have my first week back, while my husband tries to survive his.
Week of March 17-23
Monday we moved the appliances and all the kitchen stuff back into the kitchen, packed up all my stuff from the previous week, all my husband's stuff for the forthcoming week (his spring break), all my parents' stuff for their trip to visit my sister, and a bunch of extra boxes to move to our other house. We packed up the fridge so we'd have something to eat when we got back to Indiana, and put it all into 3 cars. We put one more poly coat on the floor, cleaned, and made…
skookumchick | March 26, 2008*Whew.* I have been slammed down by work and life, absolutely no room for blogging. Today I get a breather, and so you get an update.
Week of March 10-19
My spring break started out pretty well. Monday I had a phone conference with people I am co-authoring a paper with for the Frontiers in Education conference - the paper was due on March 24. I had lunch with my husband. I caught up on email and, because it was spring break and other people were actually taking time off (a good thing) most of the email questions didn't come back. I bought my plane ticket to the Engineering, Social…
sciencewoman | November 16, 2007I'm this close to crying in my office. I just got out of a candid chat with a visiting speaker and another young female faculty member about work-life and workload issues. And bringing up so many stressful things at once was just too much. I'm starting to have nightmares about next semester. I have two new upper level preps - one on a subject I'm barely familiar with (don't ask why) and one with a lab. That's 9 hours of class time per week. I'm barely hanging on this semester, how can I possibly manage that sort of load? I'm counting the classes until the end of this term and realizing that I…