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