Another ho-hum post.

Today went by in a blur. Let's put it this way: the first thing I did this morning was knock over my cup of coffee.

Yup. That was great.

The silver lining? My kitchen table is MUCH cleaner than it was before...

The full moon has coincided with some weird catastrophes that I can't blog about, and since there have been 2 so far I am sort of walking around with the feeling of "third shoe about to drop." I am trying to ignore it.

Then I spent the morning working on my computer, which I don't usually do in the morning unless I'm working on a big project (like my thesis, a first draft of a new paper, or a grant), so that made me feel upside-down.

I spent the afternoon doing Big Science, which was a tiny step in the right direction. Now I have to psych myself up to do Big Science 2.0 next week (since version 1.0 was not quite the whole way there).

Sadly, I suspect that the part where I'm supposed to, as a control experiment, reproduce a published result from Big Journal? I'm not convinced that what they published was, um, real.

I'd really really like to think that it was. I am still kind of in the mode of hoping that I'm doing something wrong and it will all make sense soon.

I don't really think I'm doing anything wrong. At all.

Spent some time wrestling with various stupidities of administrivia and IT suckiness.

And then I was suddenly very, very tired. Like I had all the air sucked out of me. So I came home.

Partly because I'm home earlier than usual, I have the house to myself for a few hours, and it's oddly quiet. It's kind of nice.

My intuition is telling me that the best case scenario potentially within my reach would be to apply for, and in this fantasy scenario, get, a relatively big grant that would pay me, supplies, and a student/technician at least part-time.

If that happened, I guess I could see staying where I am... maybe. But since I can't find anything like that I'm actually ALLOWED to apply for, I'm going to put off the "how" part for now and just kind of muse about the "what" a little more. I guess I am hoping some of my networkees can help me leverage the "how" if I find something attainable.

Reminds me of that Buffy episode where she says "I'm an attain-a-thon!" And then proceeds to compare herself to cookie dough.

Speaking of, I need to get to the gym...

Had a little moment of ick today when I overheard a hint that one of my nemeses may have gotten a job. I was still kind of reveling in having heard how bad the market was this year, that I might not have to hear until 2009 about my "peer" group succeeding while I'm, you know, rotting.

To be fair, this person looks AMAZING on paper and we're not really comparable that way at all. This person has a project to be passionate about, and I respect that a lot. But I also know this person has been a total me-too scientist so far, and has had to get a lot of help doing some really basic things (as a senior postdoc). The thought of people like that becoming professors scares me more than I want to think about. However, I can see why hiring someone who is totally non-threatening in their complete lack of creativity... would be comforting. No competition there.

But other than that, I don't really have anything awful to report today.

I am working on my affirmations. Ho-hum. And now, hi-ho, it's back to work I go.