Science (non) Fiction

I gotta have your stamp of approval on my life

OK, so a lot has been going on lately, which is why this has been so woefully un-updated in recent weeks. After my crazy whirlwind summer, including all health crises that have been mostly resolved, I though moving into the fall would slow things down a bit – ha! (though, in other news, did I mention that I splashed a half-liter of boiling water all down my front-side a couple weeks ago in lab? cause I did – apparently I’m becoming accident-prone in my old age – so maybe I can’t blame my knee injury on Peter and the dancing completely )

However, things are moving forward finally – and, in the biggest news of the past few months, my first first-author paper was accepted last week into a very well-respected peer-reviewed science journal, and it will be published hopefully around the end of the year!!!! The feeling of relief was almost like a physical sensation of something being lifted off my shoulders, especially given how long this thing has felt to be dragging on and on. I’ve already started working on what will hopefully be formed into the basis for my next paper, which needs to be a lot more self-directed, so you could pray about that if you’d like – that I will take the initiative to try things, to suggest things before asking for advice, to brainstorm hypotheses before talking with my boss. That’s kinda the main thrust of a PhD program (becoming an independent researcher), but it’s a kinda slow lesson for me to be learning apparently.

And I’m having to start thinking about what’s really going to happen when I finish my thesis, cause when people ask when I’ll finish, and I say ‘hopefully sometime next year’, well, that’s coming up really fast! And while I feel like I’m ready to be finished with school, I also don’t know that I really feel ready to face the ‘real world’ (I know, I know, suck it up). I’m trying to figure out what my options are for getting some teaching experience while still in school (prayer for that would also be appreciated), or if I need to just wait til I graduate and then stick around and teach for a semester or two before I apply for a full-time teaching position somewhere. And the somewhere is kind of a sticking point as well – I’ve thought about going back to the mountains, or staying around the triad, or maybe heading over towards the triangle (I just spent several days there over the past few weeks, and other than the traffic, it’s really quite nice over there). I don’t know… but I’m going to have to be making some of those decisions soon, and it’s a bit overwhelming…

So there – that’s what’s swimming around in my head right now. We’re working through some really good stuff on prayer in Bible study, maybe I’ll sort through some of that here next time.

Martha Stewart, look out!

I’ve been feeling very domestic lately – who knows why… I was reading Martha Stewart Living while working out in the fitness center this week (yes, I know, but they didn’t have anything else that I hadn’t already read earlier), and they had ‘ligher’ version of comfort foods as a special section, and I got a major hankering for macaroni and cheese – so I made the version from the magazine this night, and it was awesome, if I do say so myself! I can’t recall ever having made macaroni and cheese before – and it made tons, so I’ve had homemade lunch and some dinners for the whole week! And now tonight, I made a chocolate cake from scratch, with homemade chocolate frosting, for a housewarming party tomorrow – and though it’s a bit overcooked (hate my oven ), I think it’ll still be tasty enough – I also can’t remember the last time I made a cake from scratch – that’s kinda sad from someone who used to love to cook and bake… good news is, it wasn’t really all that much harder to make this one than it was to make the last cake I made from a mix, so maybe it’ll happen more often

In other news, the paper is almost ready – we finally got the updated version from our collaborators, and have made all the changes/additions we need to (I think) – it was a long day Friday with Dan coming to me every few minutes with something else that needed to be added, or that I’d forgotten about – and I’m soooooooo glad that this headaches is almost over! And, when I talked to Dan earlier, he asked about how I felt about authorship of the paper, which had been something I’ve been worrying about – and when I said that I felt like, given the representation of the data in the paper, that even though it pains me, Laurie (grad student up north) should be first author – but then he said, given how much of our work was necessary to get the rest of the figures (ie, we made the mutants and strains used throughout the paper), that we had more work, that the figures weren’t really representative of the amount of work – so I sai, well, ideally, if we could both be listed as co-authors (noted as ‘these authors contributed equally to this work’), that would be best – and he agreed (and said it’s what he wanted to suggest)! Yay! So I feel a lot better about it now, since most of my usable data is going into this paper – and I was worried I wouldn’t get enough credit out of it… so yay!