Old techniques are still sometimes the best techniques

I needed to know exactly the concentration of a solution I was using. A little internet search and I realized there was only one really good way to figure that out. And as a result,...

I did a titration today! It was so old school that I had to go to the teaching labs to find all the equipment I needed.

Burettes, volumetric pipettes, indicators, the whole bit.

I dripped one solution into the other until I made the purple solution go colourless. It was awesomesauce.

Who knew those high school skills would be useful? A shout out to Mr. McCormick! And Polly! Remember doing these together in OAC chemistry?

Anyone else remember doing these, or still have nightmares about not being able to tell if the yellow solution has turned pink?

Uhhhh Must Drink Coffee....

I am writing you this while clutching on to my instant coffee like a lifeline.

Yesterday started with sprinting to the bus, missing it and having a 40 minute walk with a very grumpy Chicken. Then discovering that the air conditioning in my office is broken. Yesterday's forecast was 35 C with "moderate heat index." Pray tell, what on earth constitutes a "high heat index"?

Then was a super poopy morning at the nanocentre. My experiments and whole grand idea were a bust. I was doing AFM, where a tiny little record needle scans back and forth across a surface and senses the little bumps of my nanoparticles lying on top. Scan back and forth a bunch of times and you should get a nice picture of your nanoparticles. Instead of doing nano-imaging, I ended up doing nano-bulldozing. My record needle just pushed my nanoparticles around like billiard balls.

Then upstairs to the electrochemistry lab, where I was reminded why I hate electrochemistry. It seems I have to get it beaten back into me every few years. Idea number two bombed out and several days of experiments, several more days of data analysis and a few dreams were wasted.

To top it off, I have lost my source of hugs.

James has left for his two week summer vacation to Canada. I must say that I enjoyed being able to starfish in the bed after he caught the sherut at 2 am, but getting up in the morning was hell. I wanted to throw that devil alarm clock across the room. I much prefer it when James slowly teases me awake with nudges, pats on the arm and the occasional wet hair shake in the face. But don't tell him I said that.

For those of you who will see him: take care of him for me, will you. Make sure he eats his vegetables, wears sunscreen at the family BBQ, and buys himself a new belt.

What is wrong with me?

Don't ask me why, because I don't know why, but I was up before dawn and writing study notes on hybridization. Something must be wrong with me.

I don't even like hybridization, but there I was at 5:50 tap tap tapping away at my keyboard.

I can't even use them as is when/if I become a teacher, because I think they might be a touch too irreverent, especially when I say that hybridization is complete bull-hooey.

Back in Alberta, I must have explained the concept a bazillion times to students who didn't get it the first time through in class. With all that practice, I discovered a trick for helping them identify hybridization in molecules. I am sure someone has thought of the trick before, but regardless it seems to work.

Since some of you are chemistry teachers and TA's I thought you might a) laugh and b) find a useful tidbit or two.
Hybridization

I hope at least one of you will enjoy it.

Ashkelon

I came, I saw, I avoided the dead jelly fish.

They were huge and simply everywhere on the beach (but not to be confused with the any litter of plastic bags. Eyal points to the difference). Live ones were laying in wait in the shallows. Yehonadav bravely went for a five minutes swim and got stung three times. As much as I love water, I passed.

Eyal and Ehud went for a run in the morning and spent the whole time dodging the carcasses and got stung anyway from the slime they leave around.

My talk went well I think. People laughed at my dumb jokes and all my labmates told me I look spiffy in my new suit. This was a double compliment since I had taught them all the word "spiffy" a few months ago and it means they were listening.

SNOW!

It is SNOWING big puffy white flakes that are drifting down to the earth. I realize most of you are getting over winter and are happy for spring, but I haven't seen snow in two years, and I love it.

The four Israelis traveling I am with are probably freaking out right now, thinking the world is going to end.

Munich so far has been great wandering around. I must admit, it has been a bit frustrating, slowing down to the pace of my friends. I am the kinda person who grabs sandwiches and eats them walking run so we can see just one more site, so it sometimes has felt like we have wasted hours wandering around deciding not to eat lunch in restaurants.

I loved the palace of the Bavarian Kings called the Reidenz. The gilding just went on and on and on. We spent two hours, barely stopping moving, though one insanely ornate room after another. I don't understand why Ludwig II had to build other castles. Wasn't this one decadent enough?

I also say in another palace, the king's thirty-odd portraits of beautiful women called the Gallery of Beauties. Like 19th century pin-ups. They ranged in rank from princesses down to the daughter of a shoe maker. I could have spent all day sitting there and wondering about each of them, who they really were and what happened to them. Wikipedia supplied a glimpse of one of them, Jane Elizabeth Digby, who loved every cliché of romance novels heros. She married a Count, then and Earl, had an affair with a King, at some point two of her lovers dueled. Then there was a Greek tycoon and last but not least, a twenty eight year marriage to a Sheik in Damascus where she spent the rest of her life.

Yesterday we went to Dachau which is only 20 minutes by train on the public transport from the city. Ehud initially joked that he wasn't sure he wanted to go to Dachau...on a train. All I could do was let out a horrified giggle. In the end all of us went.

My friends warned me that their macabre humor might come out, but no one peeped a joke until we were back on the bus heading back to the city. It was intense and silent. There was even a soccer team of Canadian, grade 9 boys and they were quiet too. Everyone visits the place in shock and horror because the exhibits and movies really don't hold back on the truth. It is funny, I have now been to some of the holiest places on earth, and yet Dachau was the one where people in their entirety behaved the most respectfully.

Middle of the night ramblings

Boker Tov!

It is 3:58 am and I have successfully made it through airport security and am chillin' out at my gate. I keep finding security stickers all over me and my stuff. I must have gotten 10 stickers in the last hour. I think I may have looked at the first security guy strangely or maybe he didn't like my "I am going to a conference but I live here" story, because all of my stuff got X-rayed, pulled apart, fished though and swabbed inside and out before I even checked in.

As the guy was putting on the plastic gloves he rhetorically asked "I can look through this?"

I replied with "As long as those gloves aren't for me, I am happy."

The guy laughed and proceeded to violate my luggage thoroughly with the swabby wand.

And then at the regular security check, my carry-on got swabbed and searched though and swabbed again and swabbed some more and then just for good measure, swabbed again. As a research chemist, the excessive swabbing for chemicals is a little disconcerting. One of these days, they are going to find something and those gloves will be for me.

Speaking of violation, on Good Friday, after over two months, my paper was rejected based on one review 'cause the second reviewer agreed and then didn't bother to do the review. And somehow, one review constitutes thorough peer review. The Boss wasn't very impressed either, but there is no point in appealing since that process will take months and it still might have gotten rejected. I just wish they hadn't sat on our paper for over two months.

Even though Katrine, Simon and James were mulling around the house and I tried to put up a good front, I was hard to hide that I felt pretty down. In the awkward silence I asked "Is everyone's job like this?"

Katrine, a librarian, without hesitation answered "Disappointing and Heartbreaking? Yes, Yes it is."

You know, of all the things people said to cheer me up, that one really worked the best. It turns out, getting stomped on and feeling like poop every once in a while is just part of life and it happens to everybody.

Not to worry, I am laughing about it now, and have since resubmitted the paper- yet again- to a third journal. We are tossing the paper as high as we can and hopefully somewhere it will stick.

Now you may be asking, why is she in the airport at 4 am? Well I am headed to Munich with four colleagues to go to a conference and do a little sight seeing.

One of the undergrads I worked with in Alberta is in Munich, so beers will be had with him. And also, my PhD boss is also going to be at the conference. I asked him to bring me a U of A hoodie, but what I really wish he could bring me is a large double double and a boston cream.

Decision on your Manuscript

One of my goals for this blog is to give my non scientific friends and family a realistic and fair view into the life of academia: all the glory, the gory, and the God-awful.

As you know, I have had a paper out to review for over a month now. The anticipation has been killer.

This afternoon while I was on a scientific safari, hunting down references, I heard my trusty laptop give out a little boop to let me know I got an email. Instead of one of the many of repeated seminar announcements or annoying pointless announcements in Hebrew I seem to get every day, this one was from the boss with the subject line:

"FWD: Decision on your Manuscript"

My heart skipped a beat. I clicked on it, scrolled down to the body of the email and read:

"We apologise for the delay in reaching a decision on your manuscript entitled "Best Nano-Chemistry Ever". We hope to hear from the referees in the near future, and we will inform you of our decision as soon as possible."

JUST TELL ME ALREADY! ARRRRGH!

If you hear on the news tonight about a Canadian researcher in Israel who spontaneously combusted from overwhelming anticipation, you will know what happened.

Refugee

Yesterday I was a refugee from my own lab. I spent the day moving from office to office seeking out free desk space, warmth, quiet and the illusive wireless internet.

My office and the lab was shut down because they needed to change the catalyst on the old glove box. Because the catalyst is a whole lotta fine powder, my labmates, Itzik (the bunny guy on the right), Itai (bunny on the left) and Gabi (holding the camera), had to suit up in bunny suits and face masks. Itai said it reminded him of his childhood and the first gulf war- but without the scuds.

Changing the catalyst only took them a few hours. Every time I peeked in the window it looked like something out of a B-grade end-of-world movie but with a bright yellow vacuum cleaner purchased the day before for -well I am not sure exactly what the vacuum was for, but I could hear it working so they must have needed it. After wards we could go back in the lab but then they had to regenerate the new catalyst right away which is an extraordinarily stinky process. So after three minutes in my office I was kicked out again.

But it was all worth it because now the glove box is sitting at a wonderful 1 ppm of oxygen, the blower softly whirring away, keeping my nanoparticles happy and oxygen fee.

Tossing and Turning

This weekend is an an ark weekend. Two days where it almost nonstop downpours and wave after wave of thunderstorms come through. It rains for so long and for so much that we are thankful we live on the fourth floor and start looking around for wood in the house to build an ark.

James is softly snoring in the next room since he was up at 2:30 to watch the men's hockey.

It took me a long time to get to sleep last night. For the last month, I have been working on a research proposal to send in my job application package. Two applications need to get sent out this spring. Resume, two page teaching philosophy, four reference letters and then the research proposal. At this point the proposal is eleven pages, three research projects, eight figures, fifty references, and many many holes.

Yesterday I had lunch with the Boss and a high powered speaker they had come in for a lecture series: a very big cheese from Cal Tech. He gave two talks this week, one on some pretty hard core nano-physics and the another on protein assays for cancer research. As well, he runs an additional lab in Singapore, is a single father of two, has more Science papers than I have fingers and toes, is on the board of a gazillian institutes, and has three companies. Very nice guy, very interesting guy, and surprisingly easy to talk to.

But I have to say, my little research, Hebrew lessons and my little blog seem woefully inadequate, not to mention my bite-sized research proposals. The funny thing is, after talking to the boss alone after lunch, I get the impression he felt woefully inadequate too.

At lunch, I point blank asked the big cheese for sage advice on job applications, and I got a lot of advice, right after he said that last year was the worst hiring year he had ever seen. One of the pieces of solid advice I got for these tough economic times was to explicitly list the existing facilities in each school I can use. That way, they don't have to worry about my research needing a huge start up grant. And furthermore, I need to subtly suggest in my cover letter what times I will be back in North America, i.e. I will pay to get my own butt over for an interview.

Needless to say, my night was spent worrying about my ideas, not thinking they are good enough or big enough, and then stopping those thoughts and thinking they are really strong and appropriate for starting out.

Should I take out the one idea that requires a lot of access to extra equipment? Nah, it is at the end, no one will read it anyway. There are lots of solid ideas before that in the proposal that don't require that extra equipment. That little thing won't kill me.

Then I was thinking well heck, there are no jobs anyway.

But then remembered there are two positions in nano open in Canada right now.

And the boss seems to have confidence in my future.

Then I was thinking they must be getting a heap of applications, I had better make sure my package is good.

It would make things better if my paper got published in a high power journal.

I wonder if my paper will get accepted.
God, I hope it gets accepted.
No, don't get your hopes up. You know it isn't good enough.
Why haven't we heard yet?

But it did get past the editor.

But a high power paper isn't the only thing, I have to have a good research proposal.

My proposals are really good.

My proposals suck.

I am never going to get a job.

I am never going to be able to afford children.

But then I hear my mom's voice reminding me it will all work out, it always does.

Purim 2010: One for the Lab Mice

On Sunday night and Monday is Purim, the Jewish holiday where you are supposed to get dressed up in a costume head out to one of the many parties. And if you are a religious guy, it is a Mitzvah (good deed) to go get sloshed on the bad Israeli kosher plonk. Actually, if you live outside of Jerusalem, purim starts Saturday night and goes though Sunday. It is a long confusing story as to why the dates are different, but trust me, a few folks won't be coming to work on either day. Even if they are from outside the city, they will be nursing hangovers on Monday.
Just like Halowee'en, the festivities are starting a few days early, so people got dressed up today for work. James' labmate, Sigi, had a small idea a few weeks back to dress up like a lab mouse for Purim. Then she suggested it to someone else, and then the whole thing got completely out of control. Over forty people from the chemistry department were dressed up like lab mice, including some distinguished professors.


My lab was not so cool as to all dress up like lab mice. I gave group meeting this morning and presented my research from the last year and a half. After it was done, instead of putting up the traditional acknowledgements page with the way-out-of-date group photo, I popped up a slide with the word "smile" and took their photo.

See? Don't they look happy that my boring chemistry talk is finally over?

Because it was only to my labmates, I did not mince words in my talk about the six months of straight failure I had over last summer. I tried to do it with levity, but with some thoroughness since there truly is a lot to be learned from failure and these things almost never end up in papers. After the talk was over, the boss used me as an example saying something about perseverance, yada yada yada. "And she always kept her spirits up!" he said.

I just smiled on the outside, but inside my head, I thought about the hugs of encouragement I got from James thrice daily: before work, at lunch and after work. And I thought about the chocolate bars and icecream that David and Costi have fed me when they noticed I was about to explode. They only way I "kept my spirits up" was because I had friends and family to keep them up.
But what the boss doesn't know, won't hurt him.

Sorry about the delay folks

It has been a bit of a crazy week.

I spent most of it at a conference, conveniently located a five minute walk from my apartment. It was all about quantum dot sensitized soar cells, and after listening to three days on the state of the art, I have decided this field is a complete mess. Asaf wisely reminded me that this only means there are great opportunities. I hope he is right since I am getting a nudged in that direction.

Every night I was out till late, either schmoozing with the scientists or at Ulpan. As a result, my pants fit a little tighter and I gained the cold that James had last weekend.

Today's goal is to drink copious amounts of apple juice mixed in with the odd neocitron, sleep as much as possible and get this cold over with. As long as I don't have a fever, we are planning a wee hiking and hummus tasting excursion to Abu Gosh tomorrow with Max, the ulpan attending Welshman, and his girlfriend Noa, Israeli and survivor of crazy articling placement.

The Game Goes On!

I got an email forwarded to me from the Boss this morning starting with his comment "The game goes on!"
Below was notice that, miracle of miracles, my paper has made it past the Editor and has been sent out for peer review!

Woo Hooo!

Second Chances

Well, the paper just went out to the next wish-on-a-star journal. But this time, when it gets rejected, my paper will almost certainly be directly sent to one of the offshoot journals by the same publisher- which are also very good. Wishing on a star and getting a meteorite instead isn't so bad.

I rewarded myself this afternoon by doing lab work- I did a simple distillation of chloroform over P2O5: kickin' it old school. Why did I have to do this? Because I put dry chloroform on the "TO ORDER" list two weeks ago and found out today that it hasn't yet been ordered.

The Chicken too is getting a second chance. He made a call and the Hebrew folks are letting him take another exam next week so he has to study study study.

Double Whammy

My paper bounced. Which means it didn't even go out for peer review. The editor looked at it and said "Nope" and sent it back to us with the classic form email of rejection. I received the email on Friday morning and had an hour long chat with the boss instead of working on job applications. The conversation ended with the instructions that I should have all the introduction rewritten, the formatting changed (including switching from American to British spelling) and have it ready to send out by Monday.

After moping all of Saturday, and then working like a busy bee, I had it ready in the allotted time. But then I found a mistake. Not a type-o but a hmmm-I-had-better-do-that-experiment-again mistake. So paper is on hold. And I continue to have a merely average publication record.

But I am not the only one who got a kick in the pants this week. Over the last few months, The Chicken decided to eschew the collective experiences of one hundred years and thousands of other Hebrew language students and teachers, and "learn his own way." This equates to "I don't do homework." He is now paying for his folly, because we got our marks back and he didn't pass the course. He is too stubborn to take the course over again, so this is the end of the Hebrew Highway for James.

He vows that he will continue to study "in his own way." But after seeing his learning method in action, I have my doubts.

The Sorrows of a Slave Master

I have a new slave. Well, not a slave per se but rather a new PhD student to mentor and help me on my project. I have trained new grad students before, and I must admit, I feel I am not very good at it. I am not very good at inspiring others to work hard, and furthermore, I perhaps don't give them enough of my attention and get frustrated sometimes by the constant interruptions. Where is this? How do you do that? What is the molecular weight of these nanoparticles? Something went wrong! The glove box is smoking!

The new PhD student already has a masters degree from one of the applied chemistry labs which is a mixed blessing. It is great because she is already somewhat competent and confidant in the lab. I only need to show her new techniques once and she has it.

The down side of it is, I have to be a bit of an ass and break her out of bad habits, or habits that don't work well in this type of chemistry. Like how she organizes her lab book, how she labels vials in our shared fume hood, even how she cleans glassware.

At the time, waaaaaay back in the day when I was just a mere seed of the synthetic chemistry "sage" I am now, I secretly, or maybe not so secretly, resented the unfortunate post doc who had to train my stubborn ass. But I must admit, on everything he taught me, he was right (Thanks Bryan for putting up with me!) and I, of course, must continue the tradition.

The last PhD student I started training back at U of A, I could tell always felt stupid when I constantly corrected her, even though I frequently reminded Melanie that the only reason I know not to do something is because I had made the mistake myself. Coming in straight from your undergrad, you know you are lab-stupid. But after a masters? I imagine it is a little more pride-ripping and insulting to have the post doc harp on you.

I hate being a jerk, but I guess I can take some advice from the King James the Chicken version of the bible: "She that spareth her rod hateth her new grad student: but she that loveth her chasteneth her bad lab technique."

Paper in

My stomach just flipped over.

After weeks of sitting at my computer, eyes bugging out, nerves frazzled, butt flattened, today my friends, merely moments ago, I pressed the big "Submit" button and sent my paper off. This time I am first author and all of the work inside is mine.

I feel a bit ill.

After one week I will know if it made it through the first round of the editor and got sent off for review. If it makes it that far, it will be a couple of months before it gets rejected. Sorry. I should be less pessimistic. A couple of months before we know.

It was a real hassle this time picking some of the references in the introduction and choosing who our suggested peer reviewers could be. Although there were important key references that had to go in, there are always some choices to be made, especially in the introduction, about which references to put in and which ones to leave out. It can be a game of politics which the boss plays well, but I am still a novice. Basically, while making your point and setting precedent for your experiment and findings, you have to subtly cite all the people you suspect might be chosen as reviewers so you pump up their egos if it ends up on their desk.

But also, the editor looks at the reference list to come up with reviewers, so you have to avoid citing people whom you think are hard-asses and won't like your paper. In fact, in the very last version, only this morning, one reference got the boot (well, more like a swift kick to the delete button) because the boss thinks the first author is a "loose cannon" and perhaps he might have even used the word "jerk".

But the biggest battle is always perfecting the text so that it reads just-so. You might have noticed that I like metaphors. My PhD boss and I would always fight over my uses of metaphor and figurative meaning. In a talk abstract I once wrote "the field has recently been resurrected to the forefront of research" and he said "what did you do, crucify it?" and made me take out resurrected.

The new boss is no different. The lovely and colorful "marriage of two concepts" got changed to the dull and lifeless "combination of two concepts. " Equally, "girth" got switched to "circumference."

The funniest one came when I described something as worm-like. The Boss didn't like that but I recalled that the name wasn't mine. I pulled out the paper from where I got this worm idea, and sure enough the boss was right. They didn't use the word "worm". They used "vermicular." After I explained what that meant to the boss, "vermicular" got the veto too.

Oh well, at least I can use as may metaphors as I want here. My blog editor, the Chicken, isn't that picky.

The Godfather

I got to meet a big fish today. In the name of internet anonymity, let is just say his name sounds like Brewy Loose and he is The Godfather of many of the other greats in the field. This is the guy that figured out that band gaps of semiconductor nanoparticles were size dependent in 1983 and furthermore, was the guy to figure out why. Quantum confinement? He's the man. Nobel Prize? Only a matter of time.

I realized that this may sound like bragging about reflected glory, but I am well aware of the fact that I just made about, oh, a whole whopping three readers of this blog green with envy. The rest of you wouldn't know the guy from a hole in the ground. Such is the small pond life of academia. I am merely a minnow excited to have met a trout.

Since my work is closest to publication, the boss singled me out of the group to have a short coffee meeting with The Godfather and discuss my results. The boss introduced me as "doing an excellent potdoc" and used his favorite descriptor for me: "and is learning Hebrew!"

I feel a little bit like a border collie. It is somewhat pathetic how hard I will work jut to get a little pat on the head from the master.

Anyhow, The Godfather asked good questions, had some neat thoughts on possible experiments that neither of us had thought about and generally seemed to like my research. YEA! Makes me want to stop writing this paper and get back in the lab.

Again. A little scratch behind the ears and I am ready jump off the back of the truck and herd sheep till I drop. Case in point, I just booked TEM time for 8-9 pm on New Years Eve. Sad and pathetic, I know.

These days I am mostly stuck behind the computer working on a paper which means writing and rewriting and making figures and fixing figures and more fiddling with figures. Last night after I thought everything was almost perfect, I realized that I had done all of my figures in Ariel and they have to be in Helvetica. More fiddling with figures. If you have ever written a scientific paper, you will know that everything has to be PERFECT and just so. It drives me bonkers. I am a scientist not a graphic designer.

Which brings me back to The Godfather. He gave a talk today and although he used powerpoint, many of his slides were scans of old overhead transparencies from the late 1980s or were powerpoint slides commandeered from his former students who now have big research groups of their own. This is a guy who invented some of the most powerful nanoparticle imaging systems out there, and he hasn't mastered powerpoint. Hilarious.

Now in Circus Ring Number Three...

Yet again, I got to be the performing animal in ring number three- oh, I am sorry, the hard working post doc who just happens to be working on the HR-TEM at 6pm on a Thursday night as an important group gets a tour of the nanocentre.

I know that this time was especially important because the boss wore a suit jacket and actually made myself and Elaina practice our talks.

This time it was the Board of the University. 18 prominent members of Israeli society came to visit me in my natural habitat, the electron microscope room. Included in the audience was the University President, University Rector, a head of one of the big Israeli Banks, a few extraordinarily successful business people, former Members of Knesset (parliament), and a former Chief Justice.

I didn't know any of them from a hole in the ground. Except for the Rector. I met her once before. She is really nice.

I did my little thing, showed pictures of my little nanoparticles, explained what I did and gave an example of how I used and needed the electron microscope in my own research. After I was through, there was a moment of silence and the little old lady who had been standing two feet in front of me and still squinting to see me said "You love what you do, don't you? I can tell." I guess it really doesn't matter if this crowd of big cheeses understood the science of everything that I said. I can be contented with conveying passion and excitement.

I also got asked my favorite question that gets asked in many ways but this time came as "Why are you here? How does being here advance your career?" I have answered this question in some very poetic round-about ways before but this time I went for the direct hit. I replied "to get a big fat resume," and promptly got a chorus of laughs. Sometimes the dead honest answer is the best one.

I had fun doing this, and I had almost forgotten how much I like pulling out my Park Ranger skills and talking to the public. Silly as it sounds, showing people the park for those summers was some of the best training for being an academic scientist I ever had.

A tough decision

During the big holiday months of April and October, it seems impossible to get things done around here. The nanocentre is closed down so I can't use the microscope, labmates drift in and out of the lab like feathers on the breeze and it is dangerous to work alone. So while the place is working and everyone is here, I want to get as much done as possible.

As you all know, my project has been a big pain in the butt for the last few months. I only have two years here, and I want to get out as many research papers as possible as it is my publication list that will get me a real job. My PhD was merely average on that account, so this is my time to work hard and get 'er done.

Back in September when it was time to book flights for Christmas I had a project on the rocks, the useless month of October was looming ahead, and I couldn't justify making most of December a right-off too. I made a tough decision. I decided not to come home with The Chicken for the holidays.

I cried. And even now, I am dreading my two weeks alone while everyone is together at home.

What will I do? I will work like a dog so I can't get lonely, and on Christmas day I will lure my labmates over to my house with a little dose of pity and the promise of turkey with stuffing.

When one friend found out about my yuletide situation, he suggested The Chicken deserved a kick in the nads for leaving me alone over the holidays. First of all, I will be needing those nads in the future, so there will be no kicks. Secondly, The Chicken desperately misses his family, and hasn't seen much of them in the last two years. And after a MIT post doc and a Science paper, his future doesn't depend on his performance in his job the same way mine does. So he is going home. Why should I guilt and manipulate him into staying? I have already asked so much of him to put his career on hold and move across the world.

So don't feel sorry for me too much. I made this decision.

Blow out

I lost my temper today for the first time since I started this job.

I really had had enough of someone else not doing their job with anything resembling competence and it adversely affecting me. And nice words had not worked in the past- trust me this was a long time coming. So after I had wasted yet another two hours of my time because of their incompetence and they finally showed up to work at ten, I let them know exactly what I was thinking.

I am happy to say that this occurred in a closed room and not out in public, there was no personal name calling, no tears (which usually happens when I am really angry) but there was a fair amount of embarrassing finger pointing ("this is not MY job, it is YOUR job."and "I always seem to be left solving YOUR problems")

At lunch, I had to tell The Chicken I had royally screwed up and lost my temper at work. I was expecting a sigh of disappointed resignation,a bit of a reprimand and then a frank discussion of what I needed to do next which I figured would be the dreaded apology.

The Chicken's response:
"Good. About time."

Did I ever tell you The Chicken is awesome?