Isn't that most, to say the least?

I'll be hosting the November Scientiae Carnival, and it's high time I announce a theme. 

Day after day on our blogs, we all write about the trials and triumphs of life in science. The guilt, the frustrations, the jackasses.  And the gratification, sense of importance, the pride.  But when you boil it all down, I wonder,

What is the best part of your job/life as a scientist, and what is the worst part?

How do these things motivate you?  Do the good parts function as a carrot and the bad parts a stick?  Or are the bad parts simply something you endure knowing that no job is perfect? 

As always, women and men both are encouraged to post for the carnival.  And if you have something you'd like to share but you don't have a blog, I'll consider guest posts here.  Get your posts in by midnight (American Samoa time) on October 31.

Flood

Not the They Might Be Giants Flood, but our apartment filled with water flood.

We went out for dinner tonight.  After eating, we contemplated a second beer but decided to go home instead.  Good thing we did!  When we got to our floor of our building, there was all this water in the hallway.  We stood there, dumbfounded, until the elevator doors closed.  When we got our wits back, we entered the hallway to find that a utility closet next to our unit was spewing water into the hallway.  Our neighbors next door were running around trying to figure out what to do.  Our unit was rapidly flooding. 

For some reason, no one could get in touch with anyone who had a key to the utility room responsible for the deluge, so the neighbors called the fire department.  In the meantime, we started sweeping water into the stairwell.  The firemen came pretty quickly, broke into the utility room, and shut off the water.  Then they busted out these huge squeegees and quickly pushed most of the remaining water into the stairs.  We took care of the rest of it with mops.  At the peak, I think we had about 4 in of water in our apartment. 

Fortunately, the bedroom stayed completely dry and it doesn't look like there's any real damage to our furniture.  The wood floors are totally fucked, but that will be the unit owner's responsibility.  We had a large rug that is totally soaked, but it's currently on the very windy balcony so it might dry out fine.  The only real thing of value of ours that might be damaged is EGM's aging laptop, but our renter's insurance should cover that and it was on it's way out anyway.  There are a few other odds and ends that will might try to get replaced via the insurance, but nothing too huge.  Several of our neighbors weren't home tonight, and I don't envy the mess their going to find when they come home to standing water.

I'm just so grateful that it wasn't something that we caused.  I remember ScienceMama's awful experience after her laundry exploded; I think we'll be able to avoid that drama, at least.

I'm back, and France was great!  Getting to the conference venue was a bitch, but once we were there is was completely awesome.  It was one of those smaller (<200 people), highly focused meetings where they have you at an isolated place so you stay together a lot.  We had all our meals together instead of breaking off into groups going to different restaurants, so there was tons of opportunity to interact with all different people.  The pacing of the program was really good too, with tons of time for poster viewing and discussion.  That worked because the posters were super good.  Surprisingly, I had lots of traffic at my poster which I hadn't expected given its topic.

I made kind of a personal breakthrough at this meeting as well.  I recently read the book Who Moved My Cheese? and the line from it, "what would I do if I weren't afraid?" really stuck with me.  I kept that in mind as I reminded myself not to be Advisor Junior.  In other words, when I go to meetings with Research Advisor, I tend to stay by her side a lot.  She's great and all, but this means that I don't carry on my own conversations with people and they probably remember me as someone from her lab rather than as someone who is interesting in her own right.  So this time, I made a concerted effort to gracefully walk away to start my own conversations or sit with other people during meals.  It worked really well and I felt like my networking was really effective.

After the conference, I made my way to EGM's sister's place and had a fantastic weekend visit with her and her family.  I'm grateful that we get on so well given that I've only met a few times.  And I'm happy that I made the effort to see his family since we have so little opportunity to visit them.

Now, I hope that the meeting we're hosting next week will be anywhere near as successful!

Prepping

This fall has brought me way more travel than I'm used to.  I went to a meeting a several weeks ago, then there was a departmental retreat, and now I'm getting ready to go to France on Friday!  This is my first international travel for work and I'm super nervous about it.  At least Research Advisor is going too.  I'm happy about that because it will make the travel easier and because it will be nice to have some quality time to catch up.  Like about how we're both so sad about Awesome Technician leaving (I cried at her good-bye lunch, which is the first time I've ever cried at work about anything).  After the conference, I'm going to travel to another French city to visit Ecogeoman's sister.  That should be great fun as well.

All this has been happening in the midst of intense planning the conference we're hosting, working out the kinks in a lab experiment, and planning a major field experiment.  That is to say, I'm juggling way more balls than I have before.  That's cool because this kind of multi-tasking is what I'm supposed to be learning as my career progresses.  On the other hand, the stress makes me wonder if I would be happy with a job like PI's with this kind of stress day in and day out except times ten. 

Currently watching

Stomp the Yard.  This movie totally satisfies my desire to watch people doing things in unison. I love having cable. 

Stomp the Yard is right up there on my guilty pleasures list with Mean Girls and Stick It (although there isn't much moving in unison in those movies). 

Did I mention I'm super excited for the new cheer leading show on the WB this fall?

The Question

The most important component of any research project is The Question.  The Question is the little aspect of Nature that the project aims to understand.  It informs the development of testable hypotheses that, in turn, influence the experiments to be run.

The Question is always a challenge to define for any new project.  I've noticed that it is particularly difficult in very interdisciplinary research because the questions that each person thinks are important differ widely.  I want to tackle issues central to ecogeoscience, whereas my collaborators would like to go after statistical/computational problems using the same data.  Other collaborators have yet more ideas about what the primary purpose of the project should be.  Working out how to expand and divide up the project so that everyone gets piece (i.e., a paper) is a real challenge.

Jumping ship

Everybody is leaving.

The wonderful technician in my postdoc lab left a few weeks ago to start grad school.  I'm happy for him to start the new phase in his life, and I think he will be a very successful student.  At the same time, I was so sorry to see him go.  He was my scientific buddy in the lab, as our interests were more similar than to the other lab members.  We also got along very well personally.  Fortunately, I think we'll stay in touch, and might even have opportunities to collaborate while he's in school.

The other postdoc in my postdoc lab is also about to leave.  She found a full time position in industry after just short of a year in her postdoc.  I think the new job will be a great match for her, but we'll be fucked without her skill set around (PI will replace her, but he has made no moves to do so yet).  In addition, she breathes life into the social atmosphere of the lab, so things will be a lot more dry after she's gone.  On the other hand, she tends to be a bit of a drama queen and I don't think I'll miss that component of her personality so much.

Lastly and most disappointing, Awesome Technician is leaving.  I'm devastated and so is Research Advisor.  I'll be lucky if I ever work with someone as competent, nice, consistent, positive, and non-judgmental as her again.  It's going to have a huge impact on the productivity of RA's lab.  She is leaving for a better compensated position in an area she has wanted to get into for a long time so I am happy for her even if I'm super sad to see her go.

Time marches on.