Can I just prepare an awesome talk?

If things go to plan, tomorrow I will have the last of the data I need for my talk at Big Meeting in two weeks. Having two weeks to work with the data is actually pretty good for me. As much as I swear I won't do it again, for whatever reason I always end up scrambling to get the last results with just a few days to spare. This time, I have worked with the preliminary data pretty extensively (I gave a poster on it last year) so I at least have some idea what to expect.

Despite that, my anxiety about preparing for conference presentations seems to increase as I gain experience. I have been to pretty many conferences (1 to 3 each year since 2001) and I have grown less anxious about the meeting itself since I am familiar with the routine and I now know enough people that I can usually find someone to have lunch with even when none of my labmates are there. But the stakes feel higher for my presentations. I used to feel like I was just a young student, so people would know not to expect too much from me. On top of that, I could relax with the idea that they wouldn't remember me anyway, so if I said something stupid, it would vanish into the black hole of the unremembered and I would start with a clean slate next year. But now people do remember me (for which I am grateful, of course!). And I want to impress them. I want them to have in mind that I gave a nice talk when I let them know I'll be graduating and looking for post docs soon.

While diligently working in the lab to get the last of my data, I've been carrying around 8-10 papers that are highly relevant to the talk I plan to give. Yet I haven't read them. Since I only have two weeks to do all the data analysis, interpret the results, make pretty graphs, and write the talk, you'd think I would try to be efficient by doing any necessary literature review before I get the data. But no. Instead I'm all paralyzed by worry about the scientific quality of my presentation. Can I just get over it?

I like to think of myself as a junior colleague. The scientists at these meetings are not the "grown-ups", they are my more senior colleagues (by now, some of them are even junior colleagues to me!). I want them to respect me and my work as I come up the ranks. So can I please not make a boring talk during which I say something ridiculous?

Kittehs!

We are cat sitting for a friend for the next month. Having been debating getting our own cats for many months, I'm excited to have an opportunity to test drive these ones to learn more about my suspected allergies and low tolerance for hair on the furniture.

Our friend dropped them off on Friday night. They didn't leave the room where he released them, the office (except when he had them in the bathroom to clean off the poo and pee they made and then wallowed in while in the carrier), mostly hiding under the futon. Our friend spent the night on Friday, so they were with him on the futon that night. All day Saturday, they continued to hide in the office. They eventually started to venture out into the rest of our apartment, but if they saw me they'd dart back to safety under the futon.

Until last night.

They decided to come out in the middle of the night. I mandated that they should not be allowed in our bedroom. I figure any allergy problems I might have will only be worse if they sleep on my face and I really don't want all my clean clothes covered in cat hair. But, they were scratching at the door and meowing like crazy. Eventually, EGM went out to sleep on the futon with them (isn't he a peach?). They still meowed like crazy, so he gave up and came back to bed with the door open. They came in and out, roving all around but sill making lots of noise. At one point they even pulled down the curtain (on a tension rod, so not that difficult). So we locked them out again. I'm not sure if they were looking for our friend or were freaked out by bad weather outside. The noise eventually stopped, but it kept us up for much of the night. Today they are resting quietly under the futon. In summary, they keep us up all night and are no fun during the day. Little shits. Still, I'm hoping they'll come around because they are awfully cute.

So I ask: who on earth had the brilliant idea of domesticating a nocturnal animal?


I promise that academic/science posting will resume soon.

Yes, EGM is home.

We had a nice evening together. We went for a walk, then got groceries to make a nice dinner which we ate on the deck with some wine. After the dishes were done, I retired to the living room to blog and watch tv, while he went to the office to do EGM things.

But then later, he came to me and told me there's something he hasn't been telling me. He got all serious and made me come sit next to him. "You know I love you, right?" he asked. I got tense. After a pregnant pause, he said, "Lately I've been pooping with the bathroom door open."

We always said we would never do that. But it is hot, I guess.

My humble pizza oven

It is 88 F (31.1 C) in my third-floor, brick-building, apartment. Just saying.

Crestfallen

I thought EcoGeoMan was supposed to get home today, but he didn't give me his flight information so I wasn't exactly sure when. I wasn't too concerned since he typically arrives late evening when he travels to here from Far Off Land -- I figured I had a pretty good guess of his arrival time. I really miss him when he's away, plus I'm excited to see him because I'm so bored all by myself despite having just spent a week in FL with my BFF.

So yesterday, when I had to leave early with my carpool buddy because someone ran her car through his garage door and he decided to take today off, I figure working a long day today would be perfect: no carpool buddy, need to make up for yesterday's ditch-out, access to bench space after everyone else gone for the day, and good timing for going straight to the airport from work to retrieve EGM. I had a ton of work planned for my extended day.

Then EGM called me around 8:15 am to tell me he would be leaving home soon and to give me the details for the last leg of his trip. Although one of the flights is very long and he mentioned a couple of layovers, he said he would be arriving here at 7:05 pm. We discussed how I might be late to pick him up since I had all this work lined up for the day, but I said I'd do my best to get there. Several hours later, I got to thinking about his itinerary. There simply was not enough time for him to get here by 7:05 pm. There is a very confusing time change, so I can understand why he thought he'd be arriving today, but it just couldn't be. So I called the airline. Sure enough, he's on a flight that arrives tomorrow at 7:05. How pissed will he be when he realizes he's getting home on Wednesday, not Tuesday? And how bummed was I that I have to wait another day to see him?

The good news is that he does have a seat on tomorrow's flight. He had booked the different legs of the trip separately, so I started to get worried that he had f'd it up and would have to pay for new ticket or something, but I think it's all okay.

meet-up

I'll be going to the big conference convening in the Midwest in August that puts the eco in ecogeofemme. I've got a pretty busy schedule building so probably not much free time, but it would be cool to meet some bloggers. Anybody else going and want to meet up?

Refreshed and sorta tan

I had a great vacation! We were in northwest Florida, halfway between Panama City and Destin. I was sad to leave the beach, but I'm happy to be home and ready to get back to work.

Every day we'd get up, have breakfast, strap on bathing suits and lube up with sunscreen (SPF 15 for my friend, 55 for me) and lounge on the beach till lunch. After lunch we'd go back out till around 5, then come in for showers, snacks and drinks. Most nights we went out to dinner around 8 pm, then came home and went to bed. That's basically my ideal beach vacation. To top it off, I didn't pay for anything other than my plane ticket and part of a fishing trip. Sweeeeet.

I got only a light tan, due in part to liberal application of SPF 55 and to spending time in the shade to avoid an unpleasant rash I get with too much intense sun exposure, but I got it on much more of my skin than I had intended. I had this great bathing suit from a couple of years ago. It was a relatively modest "tankini" that covered my whole midriff. At the last minute when I was packing, I tossed in an old string bikini just in case. Good thing I did, because the first day as I was putting on the good suit, I heard a ripping sound. The elastic was totally shot through the whole thing. I was really not thrilled about wearing the skimpy backup bathing suit in front on my friend's family, but her suit was even skimpier than mine, so I'm sure they didn't care. Actually, that’s the thing with the beach. Everyone is so self-conscious, yet nobody really cares what anybody else looks like. We all need to just get over it.

The swimming wasn’t too great owing to lots of yucky seagrass/algae stuff and an unappealing density of jellyfish, so we mostly sat under umbrellas reading books. I read Lonesome Dove, which is one of the best books I’ve ever read. At nearly 1000 pages, it took me almost the whole week to finish it. Spending that much time in a book that is that well written gets you really attached to the characters; it was really sad at some parts, so the last day on the beach I was trying to stifle sobs as I read. I almost never cry, but this book just got to me. Sigh… In contrast, I read most of a Janet Evanovich mystery (Lean Mean Thirteen) that BFF loaned me for my long waits for flights home. It sucks (although I guess it could turn around at the end). I’ve been hearing people go on and on about how great these Evanovich books are, but I certainly won’t read another.

Well, I’m going to start reading the 213 blog posts that accumulated in my reader last week and take a look at my email. Hopefully they’ll be better than Lean Mean Thirteen and less sad than Lonesome Dove.