These flowers were ordered for me before I wrote my post where I mentioned that I hadn’t bought flowers for myself. When Texas Seestor saw my comment, she got a good chuckle out of it, because unbeknownst to me, she had gone in with Mom and Dad to buy me this bouquet!
It was delivered this afternoon, and as you can see, is just gorgeous!
I’ll be taking more photos soon. But for now, this is what I was able to shoot quickly with my normal lens.
It is official! I have been offered and I have accepted a job offer for a tenure-track position in biology at a small liberal arts school in Texas!!!
wooooooooooooooo hooooooooooooooooo
The image above is something I created to make notecards on Snapfish. I am going to send cards to people at my future school who are in my new department, were on the search committee, the provost, the president, and the woman in development (i.e. will be helping me get money for research). The school colors are black and gold, and I thought they might enjoy a card with a flower in the school colors. So I searched my numerous flower photos in my huuuuuuuuuuge iPhoto library (currently 9,800+ photos) for a yellow flower and can you believe that I found this tulip that actually has a black center in it too???!!!
Was this meant to be, or what? I took that photo in April 2007.
I really just thought I’d use a daylily that was yellowish green. But when I saw this and popped it on the design, I realized it was the right one.
Note, I can’t take credit for the idea for the background. Something similar was on Snapfish. I just copied it in the colors of my choice with the sizing of borders and lines of my choice.
Anyway, about the job:
Location: about 45 min (?) from Texas Seestor’s house! Maybe 30 min from where I might live (?). You know what this means? It means that I will get to see her, her hubby, and my two darling nieces on a regular basis!
Also, mom and dad are retiring in the area, so I’ll get to see them too! They haven’t picked a house, so it is still a bit up in the air as to how close I’ll live to them. But I have hopes that they will be close!
School: smaller than my current school. But my current school is the largest liberal arts school in the country, because of the way it is designed. (I can’t really say more without giving everything away about where I am, etc.)
People: This is a BIG draw for me. The search committee was actually made up of people all across the school, which is really unusual. There was someone from chemistry, kinesiology, and hispanic studies on it (along with the bio dept chair and another bio person). They all get along really well. We were actually laughing and joking on my phone interview. My on-campus interview was really great too.
There was this whole school reception after my seminar, where I met people from all over the school and everyone just seemed to get along and emphasized how much of a positive aspect that was for them at the school.
As for the students, the professors all had very positive things to say about them. They were shy at first in my guest lecture, but really warmed up to me pretty quickly. So, I think that we will all get along well. 
Courses: This is the other main draw for me. I’m was hired to teach a course in one of my specialties: molecular biology/molecular genetics. I’ll also teach their intro bio for majors and a non-majors course. And one semester of anatomy and physiology.
Research: This is the one drawback. There are internal grants that I am almost guaranteed of getting for my usual lab consumables ($3600 a year). But to get some of the larger equipment that I have currently, I’ll write small proposals with the people in the development office. Then they will go to donors in the area and try to get them to donate money to the school/my research. This was the most involved part of my negotiations. I tried to get the school to actually give me start up money. In the end, they just don’t have the funds to offer any start-up money. BUT the provost did have an in-depth conversation with development and the woman in development is pretty confident that we can get the money. If not, I’ll just have to change directions in my research to do less expensive stuff. Which I can do. I just hope to continue doing neuro stuff.
Religion: The school is affiliated with the same denomination of which I am currently a member! This is not the denomination that I grew up with, but it is what I found when I went looking for a local church that has contemporary music. Again, could this be a better fit?
I don’t have flowers to celebrate; with it being Valentine’s day weekend and all, the prices are just jacked up too high. BUT HB bought me chocolate truffle cake! We had some last night while we watched the opening ceremonies and just finished it off (I stopped mid-post to have tea and cake).
Note: I had to take this next photo really fast, because HB was ready to eat the cake when I realized I hadn’t taken any pics!
It tasted even better than it looks!
We had passion fruit papaya tea with it.
yummmmmmmmmmmmm
I have had about 5 sick students per week for about 3 weeks who have had to miss class because of H1N1-like symptoms. Which I suppose isn’t many, considering that I teach over 100 students. But the bad thing, of course, is that when these sick students are “better,” we meet one-on-one to go over what they’ve missed.
I had 2 students who thought they were better and then relapsed really badly. So, I suppose it was inevitable that I’d get sick too. Not to mention that HB appeared to get it. The first time, I thought I’d gotten off easy with a mild case of just headache, sneezing, cough, sore throat and no fever. But this second time, I’ve had the fever part too. Yuck, I say.
I definitely feel more run down this round too. I pretty much slept for most of the day Saturday and Sunday.
I know no one really wants to hear the complaints of someone who is ill, so let me see what else I can tell you….
1) I’ve rediscovered my cache of herbal teas. They aren’t something that I drink much until it gets to be winter. So, it has been nice to delve into them again.
2) I just barely started Dan Brown’s book on HB’s Kindle last night. He had it with him for the weekend, and he had to do some work stuff over the weekend.
The Kindle is interesting. I really like that it is lightweight and I don’t have to use 2 hands to “hold it open.” This is a big advantage when reading while I eat. Usually I have to find something heavy (I use a stapler) to hold open my paperbacks when I eat. I used to have this multi-tool, which HB jokingly referred to as the “book tool”. When I would misplace it, I would utter something along the lines of “Have you seen my book tool?”
It is nice on my lap too. I haven’t quite figured out what happens if the computer chip goes wonky. I think that the books for an account are stored on Amazon…
…. but that always makes me a hint nervous.
I really like that HB isn’t collecting more and more paperback and hardback books that need physical space in our home. We are out of bookshelves. We already have whole containers of his books in our basement storage area. I think we need a library.
Anyway, I’m not very far into the book, so no news on that front. I’ll give you my general opinion without giving anything away once I’ve read it.
3) I have Thursday and Friday off! These are our “free days” which I suppose is like the equivalent of fall break. I will be spending it making sure my job application for the permanent position at school is up to par. oooooooooooo.
Now I just have to get healthy.
And stay healthy!
Hey there!
I had wanted to post small updates more regularly this summer. But what I’m finding is that during breakfast I’m doing curricular editing. I’ve been doing some editing of the Intro Bio lab manual to incorporate some of what I learned in my upper division molecular bio course this past spring.
I’m super behind on my lab notebook and it is driving me nuts not being able to jot things down in it continuously in lab. I don’t like having it out of date order, so until I get the old things put in, I can’t put new stuff in. That will be a task for this weekend.
I’ve also been spending most of my work-day trying to set up the cell culture side of my lab. For this week, I’ve been dealing with the quality of the water. It is getting really frustrating, because we thought we had it all figured out a few weeks ago. But one of the chemists in the chemistry department introduced a new concern. ugh. I hope to make a final decision today about what we should do. *sigh*
This means that part of my goals for this summer are getting delayed and delayed and probably won’t be met.
However, my students are thinking about doing research during the school year. So, even if they don’t get it done by August 7th (rapidly approaching), we can pick it up again when we are all back for classes around the 20-somethingth. I guess I should figure that date out too.
But in other news, as I type this, I notice that my fingernails are a beautiful purply-pink. I painted them red for the church variety show and have been painting them since with some special nail polish that is devoid of endocrine disruptors (i.e. bad things for your health).
Speaking of endocrine disruptors, this week, we also figured out that you should avoid all odd numbered plastics when microwaving your food and/or storing food and liquids for extended periods of time.
#7, PC (polycarbonate) is the worst. But the other odd-numbered ones have issues too – although the research is in its infancy.
This means that I’m going to try popping my frozen meals (lean cuisine/smart ones) out of their plastic containers and putting them into pyrex to microwave. Not ideal that they’ve been stored in an odd-numbered plastic at all, but what’s a girl to do? There is only so much that can be done until the plastics industry gets on board and changes their composition.
So that is my public safety message for the day. I hope all is going well with you! More from me later.
This week it really hit me, this is the way to do research. I love having my research be about teaching people – in this case, really bright undergrads – how do do research.
I think that the biggest part of it is the teaching and training side of it. I’ve always loved teaching others how to do a particular technique in the lab. But this time, I’m also teaching them the theory behind it And I’m explaining how to decide which parts to change when optimizing an experiment. And we are discussing experimental design. And they are learning even simple things like how to keep a notebook that is actually useful to yourself and to others.
All in all, it is a LOT of fun.
I also think that some of it too, is not having the pressure to produce a certain amount of results in a certain amount of time. Sure, we have a goal to get a certain amount of answers by the end of their 10 weeks. But hey, if we don’t make it, there will be more time to keep working on it.
I wonder how much of it too is that I came up with the research path/topic of research myself. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I think that our work will have a bigger impact on science than some of the other projects I’ve done. Or maybe it is that I had such high hopes for those other projects, and now, I realize that they didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped.
Anyway, life is good right now. Still crazy busy. But in a good way.
Yesterday, all of the finals were handed in around 10:30 and I got to breathe one big sigh of relief.
I had a chunk of time to figure out where all of the materials are that I’m going to borrow to do Westerns at the beginning of this summer. The one thing is that this is an older set up where you have to pour your own gels. Not that pouring is so hard, I used to do it when I was an undergrad and they pretty much always solidified, but some of the chemicals themselves are kind of nasty and hazardous until the gel solidifies. So, we might go with pre-cast gels. The only problem with that method is that the rig that holds the pre-cast gels is handled by the guy that wasn’t around yesterday. So, I’ll have to work on meeting with him – which gets tricky, since I’m going to try to limit how much I drive up to school in the next week or two.
The best part of my day was that I had set up a last-minute lunch with my friend – another “young female” faculty member. We’ve really hit it off. Last semester we started a standing schedule of having lunch on a particular class day every other week. This semester, our schedules didn’t mesh and we just did lunch a couple of times. But yesterday! Ahhhhhhhhh, just thinking about it makes me smile, we basically left for lunch around 11:45 and didn’t go back to work until about 3:00. It was awesome.
We hung out in the lunch room/cafeteria for a while, and then decided to wise up and hang out outside in the sun (out of the wind). We ended up on this curb in front of our building, which I’m sure appeared kind of funny to the students passing us by, but it was a nice spot.
I think I should keep some of those fold-up camp chairs in my trunk for these kinds of situations.
It also made me think of something else, wouldn’t it be nice to have meetings in the summertime outside instead of in stuffy conference rooms? Of course, it gets harder to keep track of papers….
… but one can dream.
The rest of the day was getting some lab details figured out – freezer and fridge space, lab bench space, checking out the incubator – which appears to need to be repaired. There is an odd noise that sounds like a fan issue. That part is scary. I’m worried about the cost of that repair. The department has pretty much spent our budget for the year and we don’t get our new round of money until July 1. I really don’t want to pay for the repair out of my own grant money, but I’m wondering if it is going to come down to that. *sigh*
This would be the difficulty of doing research at a small school.
But hey, we just got a nanodrop spectrophotometer. That should come in handy. I’ve never gotten to use one before.
And now, I’m off to see if I can schedule a lunch/afternoon with my friend from my post-doc lab for tomorrow. yay!
Well, I give one final today at 3:30-5:30 and the 2nd one tomorrow at 8:00-10:00. Yes, 8:00 am. I think that means that I have to leave the house around 6:15. Which is do-able without too much rearrangment of my schedule – but will still suck.
THENNNNNNNN – yes, then. Ah, the weight that will be off of my shoulders.
I already have dreams of playing Wii, reading the first book in the series by Margaret Lawrence, going for walks outside, watching the new Star Trek movie in the theater. Watching Wolverine in the theater.
And of course, lots of grading. But grades aren’t due until the 18th. So, it isn’t like I have to kill myself to get them done.
I’m still planning on getting them all done in 4 days (3, if the students answer the questions concisely). But I’m not going to work on the weekend to do them.
*happiness*
I also attend graduation with gowns, hood and all on Sunday (Mother’s day). It will be the first time I’m on the “other side” of graduation. Should be interesting. I hear, rather boring too. But well, novelty usually helps keep at least some of the boredom at bay.
Well, time to go work on writing that final for tomorrow. *sigh* Going to be a long day today getting that one done.
I have little bits and pieces from this week to share with you.
**updated below**
1. I received my internal grant for summer research supply money! I am now in good shape to do the kinds of experiments I have hoped to be able to do with my 2 summer students. I spoke briefly with the person on the committee who is in the Bio department and he said that my proposal was well received. So, hopefully, if/when I go back to them for money to attend conferences to present this work (that I hope to accomplish), that will also be well received.
2. My Wii fit age was 29 on Monday!! Since I’m 35, this is quite exciting. Also, I’ve lost a wee bit of weight (a few pounds), but nothing extraordinary. I’m more excited that I’m beating myself at some of the games, whether they be balance (my favorites), yoga, strength, or aerobics. I’m improving in all of them. AND I’m getting to the point where I can do super hula-hoop without making my heart rate get too high.
3. I used a new lecture system this week by using a document camera. It is basically a live image camera that points down at the table. I can have my lecture slides on paper instead of transparencies and write all over those now. Now, I just have to wait on the tablet PC that Information Technologies has ordered for me…
… when I can use THAT for my lectures, it will be really seamless (and a better quality). Right now, I fight a little bit with focus and white balance.
4. I only have 2 weeks left of lecturing! Then review sessions, finals, grading finals….
… getting closer.
I have one lab to go, but a LOT of grading to get done. (I just sighed while thinking about it, and HB heard me and asked what is wrong.) It is weighing on me, but right now I’m just barely able to get my lectures done in time. So, grading labs, which aren’t as pressing, is hard to get done.
5. The weather has improved here dramatically. I went for 2 outside walks last weekend. Also, the greenery for the tulips is probably up 5 inches or so. The rest of the perennials are starting to show green sprouts too.
*** update ***
6. This morning there were two ducks in our back yard! Two mallards. One male and one female. I can only assume they were looking for a place to build a nest…
… alas, I was going to go discreetly out on the deck to take their picture and just opening the door scared them off. No ducklings for us (probably). Probably for the best, since the neighbor kids extend their play area into our yard all the time, and if the adults didn’t like me opening the door, then a game of football nearby would definitely not suit their need for peace and quiet.
Another week has passed. This one, work-wise, was much better than the last.
I only had one night where I stayed up until midnight doing something that I thought was going to take a couple of hours – that turned into 4. It was preparing the lab manual for the week, again, that took so much time. So, relatively enjoyable work, but work, nonetheless.
We had a snow day on Tuesday. Of course, the sucky part is that they didn’t cancel classes until I’d driven all the way up to school through the really dangerous part. My drive is usually 1.5 h, so snow really tacks on another chunk. And this time, I saw a car UPSIDE DOWN on the side of the road. That is the first time I’ve seen one upside down due to sliding off of the road. Pretty scary shit.
I was told by some faculty that I could’ve canceled my class on my own and not wait for the official school closing. But, of course, I didn’t know that until after the fact. I figured that would be frowned upon. And being an adjunct, I feel I have to be particularly careful of holding classes at all times.
Anyway, the timing was such that we didn’t have molecular biology lab this week, which was somewhat of a blessing.
AND next week, we don’t have classes on Thursday and Friday, or the Monday after Easter – have I mentioned this already? I think I might have. It shows you just how much I’m looking forward to this break! God bless religious schools that value the religious holidays. I’m looking forward to attending Good Friday service at my church. Last year, it was really moving.
In other news, I did a playdough modeling exercise of the lac operon with my molecular biology students this week. I think they learned from it. I realized that a bunch of them missed a critical question on a quiz related to the lac operon, and I needed to do SOMEthing to cement it in their heads. On my drive in, I was dwelling on this, and came up with the modeling exercise.
This is part of the reason I don’t mind my commute. People keep asking me how I’m handling it. I suppose I am one of those strange people that needs a LOT of time to process my day and brainstorm upcoming ideas. Without that time, my teaching and exam designs would be a lot different.
More importantly though, it is 3 hours a day where I listen to music. People also think that I’d need to spend my commute listening to books on tape to keep from getting bored. But what they don’t realize, and what is so hard to put into words, is just how critical music is to my life and happiness. I’ll admit, this is something that drew me to lab work. I love that I can do work and listen to music while doing it. It really changes my perspective and my satisfaction with my day. Every now and then, I can grade papers while listening to music. But it is hard, because I have to block out the words to the songs. And I haven’t found (although I haven’t searched too hard) for instrumental music that works for me. Techno is too repetitious and almost anxiety-inducing. And symphonic/orchestral music doesn’t really do it for me most of the time. I kinda like Enya/new age…. maybe I should look into that more seriously.
The one other thing that was nice this week, was that I got together with the 2 other “young” female faculty in my department to celebrate my b-day. We went out for drinks/supper/snacks after our departmental meeting. It has been a good bonding and venting time. I would like to do it more, but one of them has kids that she has to pick up from daycare and school. So, it is trickier for her. But the same woman is the model that the department is using to revise 3rd year review and tenure requirements, so it is good to hear her perspective about how she handles things related to teaching and research. I try to absorb as much experience as I can from my colleagues.
Well, I guess that is all for this week.
Keep happy thoughts up for SeaQueen. She is in the final weeks of finishing the writing of her thesis for her PhD. She has a really tough time right now. And she is under the gun to make an April deadline so that she can get her hood at commencement this Spring.
Per my usual Saturday routine over breakfast, I was just getting ready to check some blogs of yours. But then it hit me that I haven’t updated my own blog since my b-day on the 12th. *bad blogger! shame on me!*
I could use being busy as my excuse, which is completely true. But the other part of it is that A) I didn’t feel like whining and B) nothing totally major has happened that ‘warrants’ blogging.
However, maybe some medium (but not minor and major) things have happened that are worth sharing.
1) Being busy.
Things are crazy this semester and they are just going to stay crazy as I give exams and have to grade these big lab research papers that my first year students wrote for Intro Bio. Most nights I have to do prep for lectures for the next day. Usually, I spend Saturday prepping for Monday. Sunday prepping for Tuesday. IF I have time during the workday, I prep for Wed. But let me tell you, by Wed night I’m staying up until 10, 11, midnight, doing the prep for Thursday. Then Thursday is just like Wed night.
Hard stuff.
By Saturday, I’m so exhausted that my prep for Monday is too slow, which is why I only get the prep for Monday done and not, for example, all of Monday and then half of Tuesday or something like that.
I’m really looking forward to Easter Break. (Thurs, Fri and Monday off) Yay for working at a religious school!
2) Maybe this is major. Job security.
I asked my chair to write the high-up people to find out my status for next year. In other words, am I being rehired, as expected, or did the letter telling me I wouldn’t be rehired fall through the cracks? For some stupid reason, they send a letter if you won’t be rehired. But just don’t send anything if you will be. How dumb is that? What if the letter gets lost in the system?
Anyway, the end result is that I’m still expecting to be issued a contract next year when they do the contracts for everyone else. So, that is a relief. The very last thing I’d have time for right now is a job hunt.
3) Summer research
I have 2 super students lined up to do summer research with me. This research is strictly to get things going. It wouldn’t help my tenure process in the future – presuming I get a tenure-track position. BUT it will A) allow me to apply for outside funding, if the results are decent and B) potentially get hired for that tenure-track position that they should have this fall.
4) The lab for my molecular biology class.
First, I LOVE the lab. It is a bit hectic, because the students take about twice as long to get stuff done as I do (if not more). So, I think that things are going to fit in the amount of time alotted to lab, and then they end up staying late. *sigh*
Second, I am replacing an outdated set of labs (Southerns) with an updated set of labs (sequencing). This seemed like it would be simple, because the labs were done in the Intro Bio class last semester. But, of course, in actuality it has been really hard. This is because A) when I ran through the labs to optimize them and check that everything is working, I got DISMAL results. Pretty much 3 reactions out of 6 worked. And there was no pattern to what worked.
BUT B) I just got the data yesterday from a second attempt that 7 out of 8 reactions worked! And the one that didn’t work was the one with the max amount of DNA in it. This is something that the company actually warns against, so it fits with their recommendations. Yay! Something that makes sense!
C) I got this working barely in time, since I have to give the students the next part of the manual on Thursday.
D) The manual.
It took me all of last Saturday, and part of Sunday to write the dang manual that I gave them on Wednesday! It was an incredible time sink. (look back at number 1 for how this was a major problem for lecture prep too)
E) Part of why I thought the expts were screwed up, was because the freezer holding the enzyme for the sequencing wasn’t hooked up to a generator when the power was out for 24 h. But that appears to not be an issue. Thank goodness. A missing extension cord could’ve been the reason for a loss of a $200 loss of enzyme. And how stupid is it that if you are the person responsible for the hook-up that you wouldn’t just go to a store and buy more extension cords???? I mean, come on, $20 extension cord vs $200 enzyme? Isn’t that a no brainer?
5) Singing for volunteer service
My church organized a day where they tried to get everyone at the church to volunteer for a couple of hours (or for 2 blocks of time, if possible). As it turned out, one of them was a recital for an assisted living complex. So, I prepped a couple of songs (acapella, because there was no time to get accompaniment lined up), and sang. I sang “Everlasting Arms” and “I’ll Fly Away,” 2 lively gospel songs.
I also led the whole group of church people in a song that we often sing at church to close the service. Probably not one you’ve heard of, because it is contemporary, but it was “Reign in Me.”
It was a good service opportunity. I’m glad I squeezed the time into my schedule to do it and didn’t just use the excuse of “I’m too busy.” Of course, I did it by skipping the church service that morning, but hey, you have to prioritize.
Okay, that was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay longer than I thought it would be. I guess this shows me that I need to update more frequently even when I only have “minor to medium” things going on.
One final note: Even though teaching is really crazy this semester it is still FAR better for me than research everyday. And next year will be easier, because it will be some of the things I taught this year.