Spring Cleaning

I thought I would be much less busy when I got back from a week long conference.*

I thought horribly wrong.

I am now Filled! With! Ideas!  in addition to having to finish up long-planned experiments and write my manuscript.  Oh and put together a journal club presentation, help plan and implement a career development series for the fellow's association, spend a day escorting around an invited speaker, and other various seminars.  April has been a bitch and May doesn't look much better.  I might not get any relief until my fucking cherished civil service of jury duty in July (apparently "I'm writing a goddamn dissertation and trying to find a job you fuckwits" is not a valid excuse for getting out of jury duty).

I'm also trying to fill out all the forms to transfer labs - my mentor is changing institutions and the plan is for me to go to a similar lab here to finish up the last few months of my training - and making sure supplies & such are in order for me to do so without too much disruption to my research.

To give you an idea of how busy I am, witness the current shameful, shameful state of my lab desk, which is the worst it has been....ever in my life:

The computer area with recyclables which I have no time to walk all the way across the building to the lunchroom to recycle, pens, lip gloss, paper napkins, schedules, and pathway idea sketches.

Papers, books, journals to read in addition to data sheets and forms to fill/file.

 

Miscellaneous, including lunch, conference materials, old copies of Science that haven't been filed, and a computer that hasn't worked properly in the better part of a year.

Those recyclables, again, because the utter mess needs to be fully appreciated (gold star goes to the person who first correctly enumerates the empty vessels).

I keep intending to clean my desk, but somehow other things keep taking precedence.  At any rate, it will have to be cleaned out in a month when I move to my new digs in a super new building.

In less depressing and more getting-things-doneidness news, I started this year's garden, which will expand upon last year's timid experimental foray into gardening by quite a bit.  This first required clearing a 9-foot patch of weed-encrusted planter as well as maintenance weeding of the puny 3 foot patch I cleared last year.  This involved removing several oak saplings -seriously, who the hell puts oak saplings between a house and a sidewalk?  This past weekend I bought several little starter herb plants & transferred them to the planter.  The thyme plant stayed - I espied it green popping out of the snow during our thaw, and it's going well.  I had to replant a basil bush.  In addition, I added chives, rosemary, marjoram and mint for LB.  They're doing much better post-transplant than last year's batch.  Next week at the farmer's market I'll pick up oregano, which I forgot last week.  I have a lot more room, too, but I don't know what I'll get.  I want italian peppers and chilli peppers.  What else is easy to grow and doesn't attract rabbits? 

*For inquiring minds, the talk went pretty well - I looked fabulous of course, and my nerves didn't show too badly.  I also seemed to impress my session chair, who is a former Editor-in-Chief for the journal in which I want to publish.  Fuck yeah.