Category: work

juggling acts

It’s been one of those weeks. Nothing major has happened, just a lot of little things that make me realize I can’t quite keep all of my balls up in the air.

I’ve had a lot of demands from work this week that I wasn’t expecting. There’s another deadline at the end of the month, and seeing as I don’t expect to be terribly available then, I feel particularly compelled to contribute as much as I can now. It turned out that a lot of the new data we were adding to the pool for this particular study needed a lot of cleaning up (as well as some of the old data), and I was the one in the best position to clean it up. So I’ve been putting in a lot of hours, including late night hours, this week. I’ve been quite productive, and yet since it was work I hadn’t anticipated, I don’t get the satisfaction of feeling that I’ve made progress. (Especially since this has left me virtually no time to work on my own research projects, and every time I have a pause in the progress there, it takes me a while to get my momentum back.)

Then Phoebe came down with a stomach bug that had been looming at daycare. I had toyed with the idea of keeping Phoebe home, but for one thing, I needed the work time. And for another, it was probable that Phoebe had already been exposed to the bug by the time we learned of the menace. So keeping her home wouldn’t have likely made much difference.

Phoebe is largely okay, though there have been some rough stretches. (This was actually the first time she’d ever vomited, aside from one flukey time when she was a very young baby. She was pretty freaked out by it. And can I just say that I’m lucky I didn’t lose my laptop to the inaugural event, which happened on the couch?) She was pretty chipper by this evening, so hopefully we can put this behind us. (And can I also say that I really, really don’t want to catch a stomach bug right now?)

I am so, so not ready for the new kid to arrive. The guest room still needs to be readied for my mother’s arrival (or for the contingency plan), the infant carseat installed, and there’s some form I’m supposed to send to the hospital that I haven’t even looked at. I haven’t even visited the hospital to find out where to go, where to park, etc., when the time comes. I’m told I’m supposed to have packed a bag by now, but that feels too much like admitting that I may need to use such a bag soon.

When people ask about “decorating the nursery,” I can only laugh. As far as nesting goes, I’ll be lucky if I can find the time and energy to clear out whatever lifeforms are currently nesting in my fridge.

So if you’ll excuse me, I have a few balls to chase around.

weekend productivity

This has been a pretty crazy weekend. (It’s about 1:30 on Sunday night, or Monday morning. Does that still count as weekend?)

I’ve had this wild fantasy that Phoebe might be out of diapers by the time the new kid arrives. And as is the usual way, time has been running away from me. Less than 7 weeks left till my due date…

I’ve hoped to find some time to really work with her, but John and I have both been so busy with work, and travelling so much, we haven’t seen much of a window in our calendars. But this weekend looked like a window. 3 days in a row with no travel, no outside commitments. And what better way to spend the Fourth of July! So I decided we needed to dive in with the potty training. (Ooh, bad imagery.) Of course, I hadn’t really planned on this also being a weekend of a big work crunch. Let’s just say that after 3 straight days of intensive potty training and 3 straight late nights of document editing and formatting, I’m pretty beat.

But look! We made a chart! And I’ve realized that the stickers don’t just motivate Phoebe, they encourage me. This chart represents a whole lot of work, but also, a whole lot of progress.¹

Also, Phoebe seems to have developed some pretty amazing manual dexterity and fine motor skills. One of her favorite activities now is folding paper. We have a pile of thin strips of paper that came as packaging for something, and I folded a few accordion-style while Phoebe played with toys. (Because I’m fidgety.) She is now able to fold them too, and quite quickly and well. And she loves to. It’s been one of things to keep her occupied while spending time on the potty. (And there has been a lot of time on the potty.) Now, can anyone suggest a market for accordion-folded quarter inch wide paper strips? We could start a one-toddler sweatshop.

———-
¹Maybe this is what I need for my degree requirements. Read an article, and get a smiley face sticker. Design an experiment, and get a puffy Hello Kitty sticker!²

² Funny to find myself using footnotes. Footnotes have been a major pain in the ass for formatting this proposal I’ve been helping with. Also images and their captions. Word really sucks, you know?

happy, sad, happy, sad… (ad nauseam)

It’s a bright, beautiful sunny day here. John, Phoebe and I got to spend some time together this morning hanging out and playing with toys. This had not actually been the plan for the day.

In spite of me joking around yesterday about sleep deprivation from goofing off online, what I’ve actually been busy with is work. I have a conference next week, and there is still lots to be done. (Admittedly, I did also spend some time socializing this weekend, with live-bodied people, a rare treat that perhaps used up more time than I had.)

Yesterday, I had a very productive day while Phoebe was off at daycare. I even managed to do a bit of work after Phoebe got home, while she played, which I don’t often manage. Then once she was in bed, I settled in for a long evening of more work, with big plans of productivity for the evening. I smugly sent off a report to the professors I work with, listing my accomplishments and my goals for the night, and offering to send spreadsheets and poster drafts.

Then some time around 10:00 p.m., my hard drive failed.

  • Happily, I live with an expert on disaster recovery, who knows his way around a Mac.
  • Sadly, the diagnosis was the dreaded Click of Death. (I’ll let you guess the prognosis.)
  • Happily, I had backed up only yesterday morning.
  • Sadly, I had largely lost my whole day of work, with less than a week before we’ll need to print a poster.
  • Happily, John was able to set aside his own work to try to recover and restore my data.
  • Sadly, John got no sleep, after only getting 4 hours the night before.
  • Happily, I did get some sleep, if fitful and haunted by dreams of lost data.
  • Sadly, Phoebe had a fever when she woke up, so couldn’t go to daycare, and leading to me cancelling my meeting with my advisor.
  • Happily, Phoebe seems generally okay, if a bit listless.
  • Sadly, it may turn out to be a stomach bug that was going around daycare.
  • Happily, John is also an expert at functioning without sleep, and could stay with Phoebe while I went out to get a new hard drive.
  • Sadly, the people at Best Buy were incompetent (not to mention rude), and gave me the wrong drive when I went to pick up what we’d ordered online for in-store pick-up.
  • Happily, after John made another trip, we now have the right drive, and the restore process is going on now.
  • Sadly, I still have a lot of work to do once I can get back to it. I not only lost most of yesterday’s progress, but today’s work time. And what feels worse, I’ve lost my momentum.

Hopefully, in the next hour or so, I’ll have enough of the data and software at my fingertips to get back to work. And hopefully, John will be able to get some good sleep, as he’s now been up for 32 hours. And hopefully this queasiness I’m feeling is just due to stress, tiredness and pregnancy…

What’s on the menu?

I ate a bunch of peeps this morning. It was not my intention. But the onslaught of references to peeps I have seen in the past few days has pushed me over the edge. I bought a single package of the things last week, intending to put them in Phoebe’s Easter basket, as her one candy item. (She gets really wired from chocolate, so we tend to avoid it.) But then I didn’t actually manage to get a basket together, barely managed to even dye some eggs, and so I still had this package of peeps sitting around. I don’t often eat marshmallows, due to the gelatin. But I do love their squishiness. But after the 10 seconds that it took me to shovel half a package of them into my mouth, I am left with an extended feeling of ickiness.

Aside from that, I’m feeling a bit queasy from the many other things going on in my life. John has been uber-busy with his work. And I’m feeling the pressure of work, too. I mentioned that various subsets of my research group have been accepted for 3 conference presentations. Well, two of these will be at the same conference, which is now just over 2 weeks away.

The third presentation will be in early May at a conference in Brazil. Currently I’m in the process of getting my visa application together. (Because they don’t take American Express.) The process makes me a bit nervous, as I fear that if I don’t get the application right, things will be delayed excessivley, and I won’t get to go. I’m also both very excited and somewhat nervous about the trip.

Phoebe has also been serving up some challenges lately. She has been crying and whining a lot more than is her custom. She has now started crying when I drop her off at daycare. Last week, things were apparently not the greatest at daycare. I thought it was because she was a bit sick. But she’s back in good health now, from all other indications. Even at home, she will sometimes cry, for example, when I say I have to go to the bathroom. As you might imagine, this is a fairly frequent occurrence. And it doesn’t even matter if I say she can come with me. I think this may be contributing to my overall level of tiredness, which leads to me sometimes falling asleep while telling Phoebe her usual post-bath, post-book, in-crib bedtime “stories.” I say “stories” because often she just wants me to tell her about dogs, her playgroup, Grammy’s house, or (and thankfully this is losing favor) the radiator at daycare.

Another thing on my mind is the appointment I have tomorrow for my big 18-week ultrasound. While I am, of course, concerned with the health and well-being of the creature within, and will be glad to have reassurance that it is not some sort of tentacled alien spawn, I am also terribly curious about the other information that they will be able to determine. In a recent comment, Mme. M asked whether I would “…be finding out if the little peanut has a cheeseburger or a hot dog?” That is certainly my general intention. But rather than go for the meat (bi-)product metaphors, I’ll go for some fruit imagery instead.

So, which will it be?

papaya_no_border.jpg       banana.jpg

no damn cat, no damn hat

So I sat on my ass
All this cold dreary day
And I said “How I wish
I had more time to play.”

No time to write posts
That are well thought-out rants,
No time to write lists
about movies with pants.

So I all I can do is to
Bitch,
        whine
                and moan
And each time the phone rings
Shout “leave me alone!”

No damn cat came in wanting
To show me his “things”
But the living room’s trashed
And the bathtub’s got rings

Glued to the keyboard
With deadlines a-loomy
The house is a mess
And my mood is all gloomy.

I should do my work now
While the clocks say it’s lating
But this is a fun way
Of procrastinating.

——
I couldn’t resist this week’s Monday Mission, which asked for a post in the style of a children’s book or poem.

give up the funk

I’ve been feeling a bit funky lately. No, not that kind of funk. I seem to have been in a bit of a funk. And I want to give up the funk.

You may or may not have noticed that I haven’t been writing so often. I’ve been really tired, and pulled in lots of directions. The result is that I’ve felt a bit like hiding away in a cave.

The good news is that several of the big deadlines are now behind me, and that most of them involved getting the planned tasks done. Data was collected, annotated, and analyzed. Abstracts were submitted for one conference. An accepted paper was revised and re-submitted for another conference. The class I’m teaching is rolling along, for better or worse. (Some days are better, some days are worse.) There are some more big work deadlines approaching, but they are not as oppressively immediately pressing, so I feel like I can relax a bit for a few days.

I ended up largely (or perhaps completely) flaking on the computational linguistics chapter presentation I had said I’d do. I don’t like flaking, and I felt pretty crappy about it. But by the time the abstracts were done Friday night, I had very little left in me. I still had hopes of throwing together a handout Saturday morning, but Phoebe would have none of it. She made herself quite needy that morning, and didn’t allow me to take my attention from her. So we (John, Phoebe and I) went to the group without a presentation. People had read the chapter anyhow, and of the other 6 people there, 5 of them knew more about the topic than I did. So as John points out, any sort of formal presentation would have been largely wasted. We all worked on the exercises from the chapter, which I think worked out better. But I still feel unhappy about the whole thing. I’m usually someone who somehow manages to do everything I commit to, even if I wear myself out in the process. I just have to realize that I’m not always in control of my time anymore, and I can’t go volunteering to do extra things. Or at least so many extra things.

I did end up getting some time to be a vegetable. By the time Phoebe was in bed Saturday night, I was too tired to focus on the paper revisions. So, I got to watch the two first episodes of the new Terminator TV show (“The Sarah Connor Chronicles”), which John had downloaded. I enjoyed the episodes, and now have another show to add to my kick-ass women list. (Last night we watched the third episode, too.)

Anyhow, I’m hoping to come crawling out of my cave now.

——-

(Oh, and by the way. I did update the Phoebe blog a bit. I decided to just publish the whole thing, even though it included unfinished drafts.)

a few categories of people

Tonight I am feeling envious and/or jealous of the following categories of people:

  1. Those people who ever get to sleep past 7 a.m.
  2. Those who have time to watch TV, watch movies, or read books, especially on weekends.
  3. Those who haven’t committed to revising and submitting conference abstracts due on a Friday night.
  4. Those who don’t have another conference paper revision due the following Monday.
  5. Any individuals who have not insanely committed to presenting a computational linguistics textbook chapter to a group on the Saturday morning of the same weekend as those other deadlines.

Really, it’s all good. But I find myself with strong cravings for mindless entertainment and near-vegetative activites. I thought a little bit of whine might help. Ooo, and maybe some cheese.

catching up (or a cream cheese update)

I’ve wanted to avoid the sort of post that says “sorry I haven’t been posting lately,” but well, um…It would appear that I haven’t been posting much lately. So, um…Sorry?

Things have been busy, and I find myself too tired to write the posts I’ve been meaning/wanting to write. (It has not escaped my attention that I haven’t even posted a “Themed Things” list in 3 weeks.) I mentioned a few months ago that I would be spreading myself a bit thin over the next few months, much like too little cream cheese for too big a bagel.

Well, as often happens, I enthusiastically used a lot of cream cheese up in those early weeks. But the truth is, there is still a lot of bagel to cover. I’ll be co-teaching an 4-week course starting this Tuesday, which will need a healthy amount of cream cheese. Then my group at work is planning to submit at least one abstract (hopefully two) to a conference with a deadline of January 18th, for which we have a lot of work to do, and for which I have committed quite a bit of cream cheese. There are other school- and work-related odds and ends I’ve committed to, which will require dabs and dollops here and there. Holiday travels and activities, while good, ended up taking up more cream cheese than I’d anticipated. Phoebe requires quite a lot of my available cream cheese, as always. So it would appear that blogging is the part of the bagel that has had to go with the thinnest coating of cream cheese, and at times must make do with no cream cheese at all. I’m not yet ready to give up that part of the bagel, but realistically, it may not get a decent layer of cream cheese for a few weeks yet.

There are lots of things I’d like to share, like photos from our trip and other stuff that’s been going on. I also have a few posts I’ve been planning, both of a serious and a frivolous nature.

(Speaking of things of a frivolous nature, I noticed a couple of weeks ago that due to some sort of WordPress change, suddenly a whole list of pages I’d carefully hidden away were exposed right there on my front page index, including a page that consists entirely of the word pants repeated 100 times. My stats indicated that this page was viewed 8 times before I hid the pages away again, and that other related pages were also viewed. If you are among those people who stumbled across those pages, I can only wonder what you thought of them. I mean, beyond the usual, “damn, alejna’s weird.” Or “wow, she really does love pants.”)

Dude? Dude!

Wanna know something kinda funny? I had occasion to mention a beer commercial during a work/research meeting this afternoon.

We were talking about an experiment we will be running, which will involve getting people to judge whether two similar-sounding spoken utterances of the same text are being produced with the same intonation contour (or the same meaningful “tune”). Because, as you probably realize, you can say the same words a whole bunch of different ways. Or the same single word, even.

(Thanks to tabba for sharing the video, which I hadn’t seen before. Dude.)