a little burnt out

Hi. It’s me again. You may or may not have noticed that I haven’t been posting a whole lot this month. It would seem that I’m feeling rather burnt out.

It’s been a rough stretch, for a variety of reasons. I’ve been feeling frustrated at my slow progress with my research. I’ve been trying to catch up with things that I’d let slide in November while pushing to get my work done. I’ve been feeling pretty run down, and caught a new cold complete with annoying cough. There has been not quite enough sleep, and quite a lot of worrying.

For those of you who haven’t been following my sister’s updates about my nephew, the last few weeks were pretty harrowing. Diego did end up needing surgery for the bowel obstruction, which was his fourth major abdominal surgery this year. Even scarier, he ended up in the PICU a couple of days after surgery due to a major infection. I’m happy to say that he responded well to the antibiotics, and things have turned around. They are even expecting to go home very soon, which is a huge relief.

It’s been very hard for me not to be out there with my family (hard, of course, being a relative term, seeing as I get to sleep in the comfort of my bed for a start, and am not going through all of the daily trials that my nephew, my sister, my mother and my brother-in-law have been going through). I have really wanted to drop everything and fly out there, but that hasn’t been feasible. John’s work schedule has been intense, and he’s had important meetings he couldn’t reschedule and that conflict with picking up the kids from daycare and preschool. We don’t have friends or family around who can step in to help out while I’m away. And I can’t bring the kids out with me to California and still be able to really help out. (Plus the idea of travelling by myself with both small kiddos is frightening.)

Anyhow, I feel like I’m starting to come out of my funk again. My cold is clearing up. I’m working out a plan to visit my family soon. I have a few days coming up which aren’t heavily scheduled, during which I hope to make progress on a number of things (including things related to some holiday that’s coming up soon).

I will hopefully be feeling feel less stuck, and might even get my bulb replaced.

I’ve missed blogging.

I don’t mean that I was sad to have missed putting up a post yesterday. I mean that even though I posted something every day in November, it really didn’t feel like blogging to me.

While I managed to carve out a few minutes to post something (and to take a few photos for Project 365), I was spending about every available hour working on projects and commitments for work and school for the last month. While I gave up on tracking the time it took me to post, with the exception of a handful of posts, I did really limit myself, and probably didn’t spend too much more than my goal of 10 hours for the month. The trouble is, I didn’t find time to reply to comments, or properly visit other people’s blogs. I ended up with a couple hundred unread posts in my reader, and I skimmed many of the posts I did read. I think I left 5 or 6 comments all month. I missed things going on in other people’s lives.

I’m not sorry I did NaBloPoMo again this year, as I know it would have irked me to have missed it, but it was hardly a satisfying experience. I didn’t get to all the drafts I’d wanted to revisit, didn’t find time to do write some of the things that have been rattling around in my head. I didn’t even manage to share much of my digital photo hoard.

I would have to describe the results as spectacularly lackluster.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who still came by to read, and even leave comments. I really, truly appreciated it. You are wonderful.

—

In other news, I didn’t make that December 1st deadline. I came to my senses on Friday, in the midst of that exhausting visit to my in-laws’. I realized that there was too much to do in the few days I had left, that I didn’t have the energy left to push myself even harder in the following days, and most importantly, I realized that there were some kinks I needed to work out in my study. It was disappointing, as I really felt that given another week or two, I could have had my project at a point where I could submit a solid abstract. But another week or two I didn’t have. And yes, I also thought about all the “what ifs.” What if I hadn’t gotten sick? What if Theo hadn’t gotten sick earlier in the month? What if I hadn’t spent time with friends who were in town for the conference? What if I hadn’t spent all those hours making Halloween costumes? Well, maybe I could have had enough time. But I’m not sorry to have spent time with friends, especially since I see some of them so rarely. The costumes? Well, who’s to say I would have invested that time in my project. And it’s highly doubtful that those hours would have been enough. There were other work deadlines, too, and other obligations.

I am really glad that I did push hard to work towards that deadline, though. I made real strides in my own research, which had been largely stagnating since that conference in Barcelona last year. Hmmm…my mixture of metaphors makes it sound as if I just walked through a puddle. The puddle of research has definitely been splashed in. I jumped up and down in it, and got myself soggy.

I’ve been taking a few days to dry off, and stand back from the puddle. I got caught up on a few things I’d left hanging while I was playing in the puddle, and I’ve started some holiday shopping.

I just need to make sure I jump back into the puddle soon. There are other conferences coming up, and I’m really optimistic that I can have something more substantial together for those deadlines.


A puddle.

office balls and other fine treats

There’s this great bakery in Brookline (a town right next to Boston) that has an interesting fusion of French and Japanese treats. When we have lab meetings on the Boston side of the river, one of us will sometimes stop there to pick up things for lunch. One of my favorite things to get is Onigiri, a little blob of rice wrapped with sushi nori, and filled with vegetables or seaweed or plum. These are commonly called “rice balls.” (Even though the ones we usually get are triangular.)

A couple of months ago, in answering an email about what I’d like from the bakery, I requested a couple of rice balls. Or thought that’s what I’d requested. Instead I aked for “a couple office balls.” And office balls they will now always be.

I was a little embarrassed about this, but I hadn’t realized how easily I’d gotten off.¹ Apparently 98% of the planet has already seen it, but if you haven’t seen Damn You, Auto Correct, you must go there now. (Unless you are eating, drinking, or sitting someplace where you need to be quiet and/or solemn.) I laughed so hard I cried.⁴

It’s almost as if those developing predictive text took this video to heart, and then some:

So, what about you? Have you ever been embarrassed by autocorrect/autofill/spellcheck? If so, I want details.

—–

¹ Some of you may remember that I have had a run-in with autofill in the past.²

² Okay, more than one.³

³ And remember that entertaining spell check error that was printed on the events calendar at the bookstore where I was working? I’m happy that I was not responsible for that one.

⁴ Thank you Kyla for sharing this, and your own near-miss story.

blah blah blah

Yup, once again it’s a few minutes before midnight, and I have yet to fulfill my NaBloPoMo duties. It’s the 29th, so it would be a shame to give up now.

I really don’t have a lot to say now, or at least not a lot that I can say in 7 minutes or less. It’s been a really long day. There was no daycare today, and John and I both had meetings. In the end, I had my meeting by phone from the conference room at John’s work, while John wrangled the kids into his office. They even sat quietly in there for a bit by themselves while John and I were both tied up. (No, not tied up in any interesting sort of way…)

After my meeting was done, and I’d eaten some lunch, I took the kids back home. Theo thankfully fell asleep, so Phoebe and I played Candyland and bingo. Then the three of us went to karate, then we came home and had dinner, then John got the kids to bed, then I went out grocery shopping. I did not buy carrots or peas.

I’d say more, but I have less than a minute before midnight now…

return trips

We got home late last night from a trip down my in-laws. It was a pleasant visit, but ultimately very tiring, as all trips away from home with the kids are. No matter what we do, the sleep schedules get disrupted.

This trip, the sleep issue was compounded by some sort of bug Theo had, which gave him a runny nose and completely took away any impulse to sleep. We drove down Wednesday night, leaving after 8 in order to avoid the worst of the holiday traffic. The plan worked well, as far as traffic went. And Phoebe fell asleep within about half an hour of leaving home. Theo, on the other hand, did not fall asleep in half an hour. Or an hour. Or two. He did eventually fall asleep, but once we arrived, he was wide awake. Phoebe also woke up upon arrival, which was around midnight, but was willing to consent to go to bed after an hour or so of visiting with Grammy and Grampa. Theo, on the other hand, continued to be wide WIDE awake, and none of our usual efforts to settle him down had any noticeable effect. Even taking him to bed with me, rocking him, singing to him, sitting with John as he worked. Theo was just awake. The funny thing was that he seemed perfectly cheerful, except for those times when we suggested that it was time to think about sleep. At those points, he was decidedly, and vocally, unhappy.

In the end, Theo finally crashed some time after 5 in the morning. I was asleep then, after hours of passing Theo off between me and John, with me periodically falling asleep for too-short stretches. At 7:30, a moderately well-rested Phoebe came in to wake me up. I pulled her into bed with me, hoping to get a few minutes more rest. Theo was asleep in a portable crib at the foot of the bed, and while he didn’t wake immediately, it wasn’t long before Phoebe started to meow. (She is often a kitten these days.)

Thanksgiving day was a blur of trying to prevent tantrums, and I mostly didn’t have any. Theo, on the other hand, demonstrated that two-year-olds really do need more than 2 hours of sleep a night, and would cry at the drop of a hat. Well, we didn’t drop any hats to test that, but he certainly cried about a large number of other things. Like being offered breakfast. Or not being given breakfast fast enough. Or not being given the right cup. You should have heard the shrieks of outrage when his banana broke. And that was just the first 15 minutes of being up.


Theo on Thursday, coping with the ordeal of having been given a cracker.

Thursday night also didn’t give me enough sleep, though part of that wasn’t Theo’s fault. (I ended up staying up till 3:30 working, after finally getting Theo to sleep at 11:00.) Most of Friday was a blur, too. Remarkably, Theo was a completely different child by Friday night, and went to sleep without effort. He was utterly charming on Saturday. This was apparently a cue to Phoebe to act out, lest we thought we could get away with a tantrum-free day.

We headed home late Saturday, and happily both kids slept the whole way home. They unfortunately both woke up upon arrival home at 1:30 or so, but we managed to get everyone settled again moderately quickly. (Though I did have to take Theo to bed with me again–he had a cough that kept waking Phoebe.) Miraculously, Theo and I slept till 9:30, and Phoebe slept past 10:00. There weren’t even any tantrums at breakfast.

Anyhow, I’m not really sure what my point was. But it feels good to be back home.

—

In other news, I was thrilled to learn yesterday that my nephew, Diego, after things had been steadily improving without surgery, got to go home from the hospital. Unfortunately, he had a setback again in his recovery, and he has had to go back to the hospital today. I am still hopeful that he can avoid another surgery, as things are not as bad as they were a week ago, but it is still very worrisome. It is all so hard a little person, not to mention on the bigger people who take care of him. Once again, I’ve been trying to figure how and when I can make it out there to see my family again.

Life is butter

Life is butter, life is butter
Melancholy flower, melancholy flower
Life is but a melon, life is but a melon
Cauliflower, cauliflower.

        (source unknown)1

1Well, the source where I first saw this was on a whiteboard on a dorm room door when I was a freshman in college. It tickled my fancy then, and it stuck with me since. I seem to recall googling the origins at some point, but wasn’t excited about what I found.

an ambiguous array of vegetables

Tonight we had dinner with my in-laws, and we had a lot of vegetable options: green beans or peas and carrots and rutabagas and potatoes or butternut squash. As you can imagine, it was difficult to keep track of them for serving, not to mention difficult to determine their syntactic bracketing, due to the combination of the coordinating conjunctions and and or. In the end, one person had green beans and potatoes only, one had green beans, potatoes, butternut squash and peas, one had peas and rutabagas and carrots and potatoes, and three of us had peas and carrots and rutabagas and potatoes and butternut squash. (Though one of those three did not actually eat any of the butternut squash, though it was on his plate. And one of us got a fair amount of butternut squash on her face. One of us attempted to feed a carrot to his pants. One of us enjoyed saying the word rutabaga.) It is important to mention that the peas and carrots were not bracketed together, as the carrots were roasted with the rutabagas and some of the potatoes. Some of the potatoes were therefore bracketed with the carrots and rutabagas, and some of the potatoes were mashed. While everybody ate potatoes, the potatoes were either mashed, or roasted with sage and bracketed with the carrots and rutabagas. Nobody who ate mashed potatoes and green beans ate rutabagas and carrots. (The green beans only came bracketed with ham, which is not a vegetable.) It is entirely possible that every person had peas. At least 2 peas ended up on the carpet, though the carpet was not given a fork.

I would attempt to diagram this, but then I might not be finished with this post before midnight. Instead, I will show you my plate.

My plate held many vegetables. Also tofurkey and a roll.

thanks accepted here

Speaking of ambiguity…

This was a sign outside a local catering/takeout business I came across a few weeks ago. It made my day. (And I swear I that this was the way I found it. No punctuation marks were stolen in the creation of this image.)