Scientiae: Call For Posts

I'm hosting Scientiae for March. First of all, I'm really pleased that Scientiae is continuing. The carnival is what got me into blogging in the first place.

Now the difficult part: trying to figure out a theme for this month. I've never hosted Scientiae before and I didn't realize how tricky this could be! At last I've settled on a very broad topic: Continuity. The word applies not only to Scientiae (we're on year 3!), but Science, too. To start you all thinking about this topic I looked it up in the OED.

Continuity
|ˌkäntnˈ(y)oōətē|
noun ( pl. -ties)
1. the unbroken and consistent existence or operation of something over a period of time
• a state of stability and the absence of disruption
• (often continuity between/with) a connection or line of development with no sharp breaks
2. the maintenance of continuous action and self-consistent detail in the various scenes of a movie or broadcast : [as adj. ]

Of course, if you would like to write about something not on this topic, that's perfectly fine, too. Please email a permalink to your post to scientiaecarnival [a] gmail [dt] com by 11:59pm on February 27th. (Don't worry I'll send an email to the Scientiae Google Group to remind you!) I'll post the carnival by 11:59pm on March 1st. I'm looking forward to everyone's submissions!

Quick! Before I lose the posting momentum!

I've been writing posts in my head, but by the time I get home I'm too exhausted to write. Today is no exception, but I don't want to lose my posting momentum. So, in classic style, I present to you: RBOC

• I'm making progress with my experiments! I'm afraid of jinxing myself by being too pleased about it.


• My parents want to know when I'm graduating. At least it's better than them asking if I'm going to graduate.


• I want to make New Year Resolutions. But I'm awful at keeping them and it always makes me sad when I don't. So, I'm holding off this year. Still, it's hard to resist the temptation. I love the idea of it being a shiny, new year with all sorts of opportunities to improve (be faster, stronger, smarter) upon myself.


• I got a really flattering, but unbloggable, offer (career-wise). It really is pretty nifty-- if I can toot my own horn for a minute.


• I'm going to host Scientiae for March. Stay tuned for more on that.


• The Wii Fit is keeping me more active than I would be otherwise. I think it's only really good for strength training/yoga/balance type things. I'm not a fan of a lot of the cardio stuff. Although, Dr. Man gets a kick out of the hula hoop stuff.

And those are the highlights (or lowlights). I'm cutting back on my working hours this week, so you may get an actual post out of me yet!

Adventures in Exercising

I've started exercising using the Wii Fit Plus (I'm not sure where the plus comes from). So far, so good. It's interesting to use and the activities are short enough to where I don't get bored. The last bit is very important because (for me) exercising indoors gets pretty boring and I get tired of doing the same thing over and over again. (Running outdoors is not the same because at least then the scenery changes and the Dixie Dog is an interesting running partner.) However, there are two things that I dislike (1) based on your weight it generates what it (the wii) thinks your body type must be and (2) when I don't do well at some activity it shows my Mii (it's an avatar you create) weeping. Trust me, while I may dislike being hit with a wrecking ball and thrown off the floating raft, I'm not spilling any tears here. I save those for crappy experiments.

(That's not me in the picture. And this person is doing much better than I was earlier today!)

My Homework Assignment

I've been given a homework assignment by Contemporary Troubadour , so I'm going to try to get right to it! The assignment is to write about 7 things that I've never talked about in my blog. This may be a bit difficult for me because I've written about a lot of things. :)

1. Taking Contemporary Troubadour's cue, I'm going to talk about my hair. I have horribly curly hair. Now, I don't mean that it's very curly (which it sort of is), but that it's unruly. It has a mind of its own and will frizz at the slightest hint of humidity. In my circle of friends in Grad School (and now that I think of it In General-- with one exception), I am the only person who has curly hair. Despite this everyone has a theory as to how to style my hair to make it behave. They all suggest this, that, or the other thing- and it drives me nuts! As a kid I used to wish for straight hair. Now, I just wear it in a ponytail.

2. I've been told that I have a mild form of synesthesia. I associate letters and numbers with being either male or female, personalities, and, in some cases, colors (but I don't see them in color; it's more of a feeling). Like the number 2 is female, nice, and usually blue. The number 8 is male, slightly juvenile, and green. The letter L is female, a proper lady, and yellow-orange. I thought that all people did this until my first year of graduate school. I had a course that talked about actual synesthetes and this was mentioned as a subset group. And that's when I learned that not everyone associates gender/color/personalities with letters and numbers. Funny what one thinks is normal, huh?

3. I'm very bad about not thinking before speaking and I tend to be very emotional. It's one of the things about myself that I dislike. I'm especially prone to saying things that I don't mean when I'm angry. It's led to some funny situations, though. Like my first Journal Club. I was explaining a study about drosophila and, fortunately later (not during my presentation and thereby not in front of the entire department), someone asked me why they should care about fruit flies. All I could think of was, "Well, you see, it's a vast conspiracy between the left wing and the right wing." Or during my last committee meeting one of my committee members asked me what my next step was if my last-ditch-effort didn't pan out and I responded with "I've seen these ads for alpaca farming on late night TV..."

4. Also, like Contemporary Troubadour, I seem to do my best thinking in the shower. These leads to a lot of conversations with the words, "And then in the shower it hit me..." I need to remember to strike that phrase from my vocabulary. I don't have those insights while washing the dishes, though. So, I don't know if it's any mundane activity or just the shower.

5. I had a male "Honor Attendant" in my wedding. One of my closest friends is male and it felt strange to have him stand on Dr. Man's side when he was my friend. This bothered my mother and grandmother to no end. However, this did not bother Dr. Man's family (or at least they didn't mention it to either me or Dr. Man). He-- the Honor Attendant-- was a good sport about things because he put up with a lot of teasing about being on the girl's side. He also came to my bachelorette party.

6. I hate movies like Saw. Even the previews make me tear up. I feel so bad for the victims in the movies because it has to be terrifying to be in such a helpless situation. It makes me sad and just a tad bit scared. In fact the scariest part of the Scream movies for me was the opening scene of the first one. (It's the one with Drew Barrymore and she can see her parents coming home.) Anyhow, it's the one genre of movie that I refuse to see. That's saying a lot because I like almost all sorts of movies (I love action movies, adventure, video game based movies, etc.).

7. I took ballet for about 8 years (ages 4-13-- except for when I was 7). I'm still not all that graceful, though. I started taking ballet on the advice of my pediatrician. I was "pigeon-toed" and the pediatrician said that ballet would help that. So, I started taking lessons. My parents still have all the VHS tapes of my recitals-- even though I was never very good. However, I was never much of a girly-girl. And I hated wearing the required make up for dance recitals.

I don't know who to tag, so I'll pull a Cath. I'm tagging anyone who has ever taken dance lessons or who has curly hair.

It worked

Self-explanatory title there. A crucial experiment seems to have worked. So: Yay.

But I am Le Tired

I still enjoy blogging (and here's the...) but I don't have many exciting things to post about. However, it seems that everyone else is in the same boat and I figure no one is forced to read my blog. So, the worst that happens is that no one reads. And, hey, that's not all that bad of a consequence.

This got me to thinking about consequences in the lab and, then, about roller coasters. Ok, this isn't as tortured as one might think-- so stay with me if you can. Now, I spend a lot of time in the lab. Too much time in the lab some might say (I'm looking at you, Dr. Man). But I'm trying to graduate-- not any time too soon, but before December-- and lots of time here tends to be a consequence of that. However, now that graduation is on my mind every experiment that doesn't help me get there (failed or just not the expected result) I get very upset about. Conversely, every positive result makes me elated. (And now you can see where the roller coaster bit comes in.) I feel like I'm on an emotional roller coaster. Up one day and down the next.

Ok, it's not that far apart. I get something that indicates a good result and a few hours later I start panicking over all the ways that it could just be a false positive. So, it's more like up for a few hours down for a day. I'm trying to temper that attitude a bit. (I do tend to be an all-or-nothing kind of person.) This is a four-pronged process. (1) I allow myself a bit of excitement. (2) Remind myself of the caveats and that I still have confirming experiments to do. (3) Imagine the worst thing: It is a false positive and that I'm going to be here until December. (4) Remind myself that I have a back up plan (not raising alpacas, I mean, experiment-wise). And it's Not. The. End. Of. The. World.

Let's Try This Again

Whenever I think about coming back I think of this xkcd comic: The Least Interesting Man Woman In the World

But, alas, I'm not going to close up shop here; it's just that some unbloggable things have been going on around here.

I've been dealing with the usual graduate student frustrations. My protein keeps degrading on me before I can run any experiments on it. The project I was counting on to work out is not working out. (Well, the data is what it is. It's more of a matter of getting something that will help me out on the post-doc/job market, which is one factor in my ability to graduate.)

I've also been having the usual problems for me. Another bout of melancholy-- not full-blown depression, but definite melancholy. So, working around that has been a trip. I've been employing the usual coping skills and those seem to be working. And Advisor hasn't said anything to me about being unproductive (and he would); so, I think that I'm doing ok with that respect.

However, I don't want to give anyone the impression that it's all doom-and-gloom around casa de Lady Scientist. Our holidays were rather lovely. I took an entire 10 days off and didn't read a single article over that time. I also met my brother's Lovely New Girlfriend. She is a lot of fun and she makes my brother happy. Also, BIL-3 is getting married this summer to a wonderful girl. Also there are two and a half weddings going on in our lab (the half is from someone who is in our collaborator's lab). And that's a lot of fun. I'm finding that it's much more fun to be outside-looking-in as far as wedding planning is concerned!

The Dixie Dog is doing well. She's enjoying the backyard a lot. And sleeping on the couch. Ok, right now, she's more interested in sleeping on the couch. Dr. Man is done with call (for the most part) and I'm liking having him around more. He's on a pretty good rotation right now. It's good hours and he's learning a lot.

Well, I think that's about it. Let's see if I can post more than once every two months.