Liz's Bloglet - Tuesday 2 February 2010

A snow plow just went by on our street, which melted on its own yesterday afternoon. This is the first snowplow I've seen. One can only hope they are making a big circle and will be back to do our north-south street, which was still an impassible icy mess as of 5:30 this afternoon. _
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07:57:56 PM, Tuesday 2 February 2010

This is good _
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09:23:22 AM, Monday 1 February 2010

I'm not sure how much snow we have. Enough to obliterate the distinction between road and sidewalk. Enough to anger The Cat. It seems to have switched to sleet now. A nice weekend for writing papers and cleaning the house. _
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06:03:30 AM, Saturday 30 January 2010

My excellent officemate for the past year just left to go back to China, where she is on the faculty of the National Botanical Gardens. Things will be pretty lonely in my office without her, since our other 2 officemates are rarely here. The freeway through my office to the offices on either side will continue, of course. _
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05:00:52 PM, Wednesday 27 January 2010

The application score is:
Tenure track applications: 5
Visiting professor applications: 3
Post-doc application: 1
Positive reponses: 1
Panic: high _
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02:21:36 PM, Wednesday 27 January 2010

I'm excited that President Obama proposes following President Franklin Roosevelt's lead by proposing a New Freeze for the 21st century. Like FDR's New Freeze, this program will end many successful current government programs as well as preventing any new ones from starting so that the government does not get in the way of business's rapid progress at fixing unemployment and bringing back the vibrant economic activity of the previous administration. Also following FDR, President Obama proposes providing only minimal assistance for people struggling and dying due to lack of healthcare. And of course, FDR's boldest, most important move, was insuring that our tax system was regressive as possible and that the rich had all the disposable income they needed to insure the trickle-down effect makes our economy as robust as possible. _
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08:23:17 AM, Wednesday 27 January 2010

Has Microsoft had a dumber idea than the XML Office files? I mean, of course, other than the complete incompatibility of documents from any version of Office with any other version of Office, XML or otherwise. _
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03:15:13 PM, Tuesday 26 January 2010

The loss of the universities in Haiti _
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09:07:51 AM, Tuesday 26 January 2010

This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post _
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11:22:59 PM, Monday 25 January 2010

Someone did this _
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08:43:22 PM, Monday 25 January 2010

I am thoroughly disgusted with Congress, the Democratic leadership, and the President.

Lawmakers, Congressional aides and health policy experts said the package might plausibly include these elements:

-Insurers could not deny coverage to children under the age of 19 on account of pre-existing medical conditions.

-Insurers would have to offer policyholders an opportunity to continue coverage for children through age 25 or 26.

-The federal government would offer financial incentives to states to expand Medicaid to cover childless adults and parents.

-The federal government would offer grants to states to establish regulated markets known as insurance exchanges, where consumers and small businesses could buy coverage.

-The federal government would offer tax credits to small businesses to help them defray the cost of providing health benefits to workers.

-If a health plan provided care through a network of doctors and hospitals, it could not charge patients more for going outside the network in an emergency. Co-payments for emergency care would have to be the same, regardless of whether a hospital was in the insurer’s network of preferred providers.

The package could also include changes in Medicare, to reduce the growth in payments to doctors and hospitals while rewarding providers of high-quality, lower-cost care. To help older Americans, it could narrow a gap in Medicare coverage of prescription drugs, sometimes known as a doughnut hole.

Nancy Pelosi is ridiculous if she can't convince the gigantic majority in the House to vote for the (weak and spineless) Senate Bill. The President promised repeatedly that he would eliminate pre-existing condition exclusions for all Americans, not just those under 19, and suggested over and over again that he was going to make healthcare accessible to all Americans. And the Senate Democrats, where for some unknown reason they chose one of their most conservative members to be their majority leader and then are shocked when he gets nothing done, still have a majority in the traditional sense of the world and yet are so terrified of the Republicans that they refuse to act like it.

People are dying. People are in chronic pain. People are scraping by with visits to the emergency room, wasting money and getting inadequate care. People are going without medications they desperately need. People are dying. And all they can do is throw up their hands because one ineffective candidate lost an election in one little tiny state. _
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08:48:41 AM, Sunday 24 January 2010

I hadn't mentioned it before, but this semester I'm TAing my advisor's Aquatic Field Ecology class. Which is basically saying, "Here's the thing you love most in the world, go teach other people how to do it." We're doing inquiry based learning, which means that the whole class is them working through the scientific method to develop and answer questions about different aquatic systems and us facilitating that. It is really really cool.

I have very different duties from my previous TA gigs. I'm less of a lecturer and more of a question asker, real-time transcriptionist, bad assumption poker, van driver, and equipment fiddler. Tomorrow, I have to set up aquaria. Because I've never done fish or amphibians for my own research, or any bug stuff that required them actually being alive, I've never set up and maintained an aquarium. We had fishtanks when I was a kid, but my mom did everything for them and I just got to watch the fish.

I bought a used copy of this a few years ago and I think it will come in handy. I already used it to help identify the various odds and ends of different filtration systems that were lying around in the teaching lab. And I of course understand the nitrogen cycle, pH, etc. I think it will be a good learning experience. _
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07:12:42 PM, Wednesday 20 January 2010

The lead author of the mountain top removal/valley fill paper I mentioned last week was on The Colbert Report last night. She did a fabulous job and Colbert covers the preposterousness of this even being an issue quite well. It's the first segment after his opening monologue (the opening is worth watching because it features my feelings about the MA senatorial election and health care for the rest of us "I have mine, jack. You can suck it.") _
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05:59:04 PM, Tuesday 19 January 2010

Jason Street getting smashed to bits still gets me every time. Why do Remi and I love a show about football so much? _
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06:13:13 PM, Monday 18 January 2010

Best Letter to the Editor of the Week _
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08:06:45 AM, Monday 18 January 2010

This _
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07:32:32 PM, Friday 15 January 2010

I may have summer support (if I'm willing to do some work on a cool project that sounds like a neat thing to do anyway) and I had a great conversation with a prospective post-doc mentor to work on a really cool project that would bring my skills to a place they're needed and let me expand my spatial scale and focus (if I can get the funding). It's amazing what a difference the mere possibility of good things happening can make. _
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04:26:55 PM, Thursday 14 January 2010

My body seems to have successfully fought off the multiple series of microbes that have been assaulting it for the past month. Then it was like, "What was I doing when I was interrupted? Oh yeah, waging war on myself. Right! Back to that, then." So I'm awake in the middle of the night for the fun. But I did get a very positive email about a post-doc, and it's a situation that would actually make me not so unhappy about having a post-doc rather than a faculty job. _
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04:56:04 AM, Wednesday 13 January 2010

So, my advisor is not one to sit around in the ivory tower and do nothing. Check out what will hopefully be the deciding factor in ending mountain top removal mining/valley fill once and for all. Science! _
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04:22:04 PM, Monday 11 January 2010

I have good job news. _
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06:33:42 PM, Friday 8 January 2010

At various times various people I know have suddenly found themselves with very little money. Others of us just kind of suck at meal planning and cooking. For all of us Cook for Good looks pretty awesome. I ponied up the 15 whole dollars for her 3 ebooks and they look incredibly useful. I doubt I would ever follow her plans completely (even I don't eat peanut butter toast every day for breakfast) but especially the way she uses basic recipes and adds in seasonally available stuff (and since she's local to me her seasonally available stuff is even the same as mine), and the way most cooking can be done in a few hours on the weekends, really appeals to me. _
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08:52:12 AM, Thursday 7 January 2010

This is good, too. As I just emailed to my fellow mentors, it would be amazing if a program like this could be put together for some of our students to be a Posse attending college together. _
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08:35:15 AM, Thursday 7 January 2010

This is good _
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04:10:54 PM, Wednesday 6 January 2010

I am being struck by that often commented upon fact that academia is the only industry where the required schooling doesn't prepare you for the job responsibilities in any way nor do the application requirements have a whole lot to do with the schooling or the job responsibilities, either. In other words, I don't know what I'm doing and am only partially reassured by the fact that nobody else does either. _
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03:43:24 PM, Wednesday 6 January 2010

I have always noticed that I feel cold when I'm sleep deprived, and it turns out sleep deprivation leads to actual physiological changes, including lowered body temperature. I love science. _
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08:02:39 AM, Wednesday 6 January 2010

I totally missed my birthday wishes from xkcd _
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06:25:06 PM, Monday 4 January 2010

Got a written letter in the mail acknowledging the receipt of one of my applications. Very fancy. _
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02:41:49 PM, Monday 4 January 2010

Since everyone else is doing it...

When 1999 turned into 2000 I was at my parents' house. My Grandma was there and my dad was monitoring power plants for the Y2K bug. I drove back the next day to Annapolis to AmeriCorps and our freezing basement apartment.

After I finished AmeriCorps I spent the year 2000-2001 in Raleigh of all places using my award money taking science classes and working at the movie theater, a few months with Remi, and then he moved to Austin and Deb and Mike moved in with me. And then a few months later, I left them to go to UGA and Remi joined me in Athens.

By 2002, I was sciencing it up and quite happy. I went to my first scientific conference. In 2003, we moved to an actual house, which was really nice after student apartment hell. In 2004 we adopted a sad, injured cat that the Humane Society thought was better off put down and proceeded to turn him into a sweet, spoiled, gigantic Tuxedo. I finished my MS and found myself continuing to do the exact same thing for a year, but at an increased rate of pay and then moving to Durham after a few months (where the pay was even better and I got actual benefits).

In 2005, I got accepted to the doctoral program at Pseudo Ivy (that I had been rejected from the previous year because of departmental politics--of the 4 people who were admitted in my place 3 have since dropped out and one finished. I've been totally vindicated.) I helped my boss soon to be advisor write a paper that got published in Science. I found out that being in grad school all over again was not nearly as much fun as the first time around. My nephew was born in Belgium. I wandered into First Pres one Sunday and 2 weeks later I was in the choir.

In 2006, I got my master's thesis published. I spent an amazing week doing research in a remote place in Alaska. Our neighbors across the street brought us a cute kitten they had found under a house in the neighborhood but couldn't keep. I got a lap cat and a nemesis all in one spotty package. By some weirdness, I became a Deacon.

In 2007, I got another paper published from all the stuff I had been doing and was co-author on another. I started feeling run down a lot of the time and had several rounds of tendinitis.

In 2008, I got really really sick. Nobody knew what was wrong. I lost all faith in doctors and myself. 9 months later, I finally met a doctor who didn't think I was crazy or stupid and finally found out what was wrong with me and started getting treated. Remi got really really sick and ended up having emergency surgery. We threw ourselves at the mercy of Pseudo Ivy hospital. Somewhere in there Remi started school and I started teaching for a living and it turned out we were both really good at it.

In 2009, I started taking Enbrel and got my life back. I TAd a couple more classes and with friends designed and taught a class at a liberal arts college (and still have the Faculty ID to prove it). My 2nd nephew was born right here in town. After talking with my advisor and doctor, I decided to take a 6th year to finish my degree. I got my act together and got a chapter of my dissertation submitted to be published. I found out I probably didn't have funding for a 6th year. I got busy applying for fellowships that might help with that as well as whatever jobs were still available (having missed 3 months of job ads when I thought I wasn't on the market).

As 2010 started, I was in bed on codeine. I found out today I don't have a fellowship for next year. So the story continues. _
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09:30:05 PM, Friday 1 January 2009

I'm trying out Chrome for the new year. So far, it really is a lot faster than Firefox or Safari, and it transferred over all of my history from Firefox really impressively. I'm not too happy with it aesthetically, though. It's not as ugly as IE, but it's a little hard to look at. We'll see. _
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10:47:27 AM, Friday 1 January 2009

I do not have pneumonia, yet. I have amoxicillin and codeine. And still not much voice. And plans to do very little. _
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01:13:50 PM, Wednesday 30 December 2009

_
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01:12:12 PM, Wednesday 30 December 2009

Feeling like I ought to apply for a job in San Luis Obispo, just for climate's sake. Does perfect weather year round get old? _
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07:40:26 AM, Tuesday 22 December 2009

By the very nature of abortion, nobody intends to have one. Nobody intends to get pregnant by mistake, nobody intends to be raped, nobody intends to be [a victim of incest], and no one intends, in the course of a wanted pregnancy, to have a catastrophic event that requires an abortion.

Cynthia Nixon of all people, explaining in language so simple even a legislator could understand, why the idea of an "abortion rider" to insurance makes no sense.

I, like many folks on the internet, desperately want this bill to be passed so that more people can have access to health insurance. I want to eliminate the "pre-existing conditions" thing (more than that it would of course be nice if insurance companies couldn't just price us out of insurance rather than simply turning us down, but it seems unlikely that will be included in this bill).

But I hate the dishonesty surrounding abortion that has gotten involved in this. If these people really cared about "life" then most of this bill would be have been a given decades ago and they wouldn't be griping about providing annual Pap smears and pre-natal care and care for infants and care for children and care for grownups, even grownups who have the audacity to have something wrong with them. They really care about nothing except scoring points with their narrow-minded constituency, who can't really be bothered to look at the bill as a whole, but can totally understand "no tax money pays for (insurance which) pays for abortions" with no consideration of what that actually means practically. _
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01:10:18 PM, Monday 21 December 2009

So apparently we're going to get a couple of inches of snow tomorrow. Who are you and what have you done with December in NC? _
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07:37:03 AM, Thursday 17 December 2009

I applied for 2 more jobs. They both have downsides from a location standpoint (one is in a very cold city and one is in the burbs) but have rather substantial upsides on the institutional front. And they are jobs, which I am currently lacking in. _
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12:15:14 PM, Tuesday 15 December 2009

I have a pile on my desk of transcripts from all of my undergrad and grad schools. It is a lot. _
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09:53:40 AM, Monday 14 December 2009

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