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2016
The new year is here. I am rather ambivalent about it. The most significant thing that has happened so far is that our new boss has arrived. Considering the administration’s schedule for her, I won’t see her until later this week. As it is the beginning of the semester, I have a dozen pressing things to complete over the next few weeks. Most of it is instruction preparation. Others are committee work and general librarianship. The usual trifecta. I still seek to discover the pattern in the chaos and be able to develop a structure that keeps the chaos manageable. There’s not much more to say about 2016 yet. I…
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Christmas Eve Eve Eve
The year is coming to a close. There are two more workdays left, including today. The students are gone for the most part. I know of a few that are trying to get some bulk work done on their research, but other than that, it’s been quiet. A surprising number of us are still in the office. Perhaps because of the mild winter, no one is leaving early to travel. We are all in the office wrapping up the year. Today I have a backlog of stats to get done, a project to install for one of my committees, and the last of the communications for the year. Next year…
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Personal Organization
What it takes to get my job done is a recurrent theme here. We are ending the semester, which marks my time here at a year and a half. This year has been dramatically different than my first. The first year was a collection of building things: relationships, instruction materials, community. There was no where to go but up and to the right with things to do. This year has been characterized as more. More work, more commitments, more meetings, more opportunities. The volume has been alarming. And I found very quickly that the methods I was using to keep track of my work wasn’t working. I needed to be…
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Death part 2
We are in the intermission. The death has happened. It was not drawn out or painful. I watched and comforted as the waves of emotion passed through us, first in tidal waves, eventually down to crests, and now to undulating swells. We hold here. We wait in the swells. Tomorrow is the formal closing of life. The expected schedule of events are planned: service, grave, luncheon. Beyond that there is nothing. This is the eve and we sit here as if we are holding out breath. We know what is coming. We know what we are supposed to do. It’s simply not time to do them yet. We began this intermission…
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Death part 1
I don’t write about death often enough. There is an eminent death coming in the family, which is why I think of it today. The event that started it was inoccuous enough, a blow to the head. I’m not sure if it was a stumble or the push from an over enthusiastic dog. But the end result is intracranial bleeding, the ICU, rapid decline, and a DNR order. I am removed from this person but my husband is not. This circumstance makes my job easier–I become the facilitator. I can get things done to allow him to have space. I spent the day clearing our schedule for the weekend, and…
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ELNs, LIMs, and project management
I finally have to jump into a different part of the data management pool–project management. For the past year I have been intermittently asked about electronic lab notebooks and options for them in basic science research. Over the past month I have had office hours flyers up in my basic science building and it caught the eye of a core resource department. They are a fee for service core that needs some help in project management and called me. My experience with electronic lab notebooks has been minimal. What I have seen so far is that the are too inflexible for practical use, or too expensive for implementation on a…
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Personal data and health decisions
A few weeks ago I went to the doctor. Nothing urgent. It had been five years since I had a physical and one year since I came in for headaches and shoulder pain. I started in at the chiropractor in winter and that resolved the shoulder issue. However, as the new year started, the headaches were persistent and that’s not normal for me. I know all the usual triggers for headaches, but couldn’t tell by passive observation whether or not I was experiencing them. I also couldn’t tell if my treatment was working. So I did what any normal scientist would do, I starrted tracking it. The parameters I was…
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NNWM 2015 Day 4
So I said that I would participate in NNWM this year and I am — sort of. I always like the idea of this project. This year I have a story line even. But I can;t seem to get any momentum behind it. I open a file and I sit there. I know the point is to just write, but nothing happens. I feel dried up. This feeling is interesting because I know my past hasn’t been that way. I was able to write with various degrees of ease. Right now, writing is the hardest it’s ever been for me. I know what it feels like to just have the…
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Health
I just took off several days from work. I spent part of it going in for a medical procedure (elective and outpatient) and then spend some recovering. I also had a regular physical to get that up do date and discuss tweaking treatment for my headaches. We reclassified them as migranes and are working with different medication. I brought the data that I had tracked. It helped define things and make decisions. I was glad I tracked it and I seemed to cover the right things. One of the interesting things uncovered was that I don’t take the medication as often as I probably should. If I am only experiencing…
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Joy and Peace
This is the non-fiction I have been reading for months. Rising Strong by Brené Brown The Sound of Paper by Julia Cameron Cold Tangerines by Shauna Niequist Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert Get Some Headspace by Andy Puddicombe Savor by Shauna Niequist The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Mari Kondo Meditation is boring? Putting Life Into Your Spiritual Practice by Linda Johnsen Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor by Lynda Barry How to Be Happy, Dammit: A Cynic’s Guide to Spiritual Happiness by Karen Salmansohn The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere by Pico Iyer (recently gifted) Ashtanga Yoga: the Practice Manual by David Swenson (recently gifted) The…