My irritation knows no bounds!

I find myself particularly out of sorts today. I have fallen behind in my work, due to spending much of the last week at a tree-climbing school in the south, learning how to, well, climb trees. This is so I can investigate tree hollows for bat roosts (a probable limiting factor for many bats, and a resource which most certainly declines with increasing management intensity.) Yeah, so, the thing is that if you spend all day on a physically-exhausting activity like tree climbing, it's damn hard to get the energy to work at night on that publication/powerpoint/correspondence. Bummer. So, now I am frantically working on a powerpoint for a seminar I'm giving on Monday at the university where my husband has just gotten a t-t position. They have made nice cooing noises about finding me a tenure-track position at some point -- not immediately, of course! So they've invited me to give a seminar for their wildlife sciences seminar series. Which my advisors are telling me to treat as a job talk. Even though there's no job description or anything! This is immensely stressful to me, and since I'm leaving Friday morning (to meet my parents out there for the weekend), I now have to finish my talk by tomorrow afternoon in order to give a (semi-mandatory, according to the mentors) practice talk. For some reason this is impossibly depressing and impossible-seeming to me. I found myself in tears this morning over the stress. Oh yeah, so I come back late Tuesday night. And leave for Central American country the following Sunday. I need a fricking vay-cay.

A great story...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/science/04batsw.html?ex=1365048000&en=660fbec7ffad006c&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Ow ow ow ow ow!

I'm on the first day of a 5-day tree climbing class. Spent all damn day throwing lines over branches, lifting ropes, lowering ropes, tying knots, untying them, tying them again, hoisting myself up, lowering myself down, etc. My fingers hurt. Fingernails hurt. Legs? They hurt. Lower back? Oh mais oui, it hurts. Brain full. Stomach empty. I start to understand how one can eat a lot of grits, out of sheer desperation. Oy oy oy... I'd better find bucketloads of bats in tree roosts this summer...

Post-partum

Sorry no blogging for a while (not that anyone aside from a couple of people even looks at this blog) but I was finishing a manuscript. Even though it was not the most complicated or important thing to come out of my current postdoc research, it was a fucking bitch to write and finish. IT WAS LIKE GIVING BIRTH. After 36 hours of labor, with no painkillers. And while simultaneously passing a kidney stone.

I think I have become much more exacting in my writing. Man, publishing sucks. Does it get easier with time? After seeing Brazen Hussy's recommendation of How to Write a Lot, I got meselfs a copy and found it very helpful. I started a writing group of my own with 3 Ph.D. students in the lab who are doing some hard-core dissertating. We are called the A-Team; I'm Murdoch. He says in that book not to reward good writing with no writing, but I couldn't help myself -- my brain and body just had to shut down today. At least I don't have to take famous science professor who's visiting and giving a departmental seminar to breakfast at 8am tomorrow. Dude, I got into bats so I would never, ever feel like I had to get up early in the morning. (Of course, I had to do just that for my exclosure experiments, but after 45 minutes of running around, I would just go back to bed. Hee hee!)

The new narcolepsy medicine that my doctor has been giving me on a provisional basis is working wonders for the extreme fatigue related to my thyroid problems. Hopefully it will work out as a solution to at least get me back to where I was a year ago, before said lump o gland decided to go on vacay.

The proofs are in the pudding

Being lazy, I just tried to copy from my official academic site the exciting news -- I got my page proofs today from Science.  OK, well page proof -- it's a brevium, so only one page, but still, it's pretty damn good.  Anyway, after a lot of problems getting published, it's really great to have some vindication of being a "real" scientist.  I still have papers to revisit that were rejected before, but I'm retooling before resubmitting.  Hopefully I can get past my overwhelming fear of criticism.  Still, it's weird to have a publication record of grey literature and a couple crappy articles in crappy journals, and then, oh yeah, Science.  WTF?

Ennui of manuscripts

Well, I (mostly) finished a rough draft of a paper for impending submission to Conservation Biology.  All that remains to write are the last couple discussion paragraphs and the acknowledgements.  It kind of annoys me that I will have to officially thank the two field assistants who made my life a living *hell* in May and June, but I can take some pleasure in the maturity of doing so.  I'm bumming right now because a fellow scientist with whom I was going to collaborate over the summer (doing some feeding trials of bats, to see which ones will glean insects directly from foliage) now cannot make it.  He was going to Panama this month to do some work, and the airline "lost" (or an employee stole?) $60,000 worth of high-sensitivity sound recording equipment!

Oh yeah, and the airline isn't going to reimburse him, and has basically told him not to hold his breath.  So now they have to write a big grant to get a shitload of money to buy the shitload of equipment again, which isn't going to happen by May.  Waaaah.  I may go ahead with some aspects of the research on my own, but it won't be as fun.  (Oh yeah, and also now I have to find someone else to help wrangle the bats -- yikes!!!)

But it aint all bad.  Here's a preview of the figure in my little article coming out in Science, yaaaayyy!

Also

I wish I could figure out how to make the bat picture smaller.  Oh well.