Y'all got the chance to marvel at my home-workspace last week; now you can wince at the sight of my cramped little desk in the lab, make a quick mental comparison, and understand at last why I prefer to work from home as much as I can (if not just for the Couch of Napping Doom). And this is not as bad as it used to be, since I only recently took it upon myself to triple my PC-desktop real estate by getting an add-on widescreen monitor (for cheap on geeks.com) to connect to my trusty ThinkPad (yes, in the Mac-PC wars, I swing both ways).
This, incidentally, is how it looks when I'm working overnight on a manuscript (and running long electrophoresis gels in parallel). Usually there's not quite so much angrily scribbled-on paper hanging all over the place. The rest of the mess, of course, is part of the normal ecology of the desk.
Meh. I was going to post happy stuff -- a funny story about my impromptu field trip to Minneapolis, a picture of my uber-kitsch miniature christmas tree, maybe even Gus' latest adventures (since I know that's all you folks really want to hear about) -- but then I got handed a sheet of paper.
That sheet of paper was a printout of a poster presenting data that prove an idea I've been pursuing on and off for about a year now. A very good idea -- as these other people have just demonstrated.
The cosmic irony is that they came up with the idea after hearing my current boss present some previous work... Just like me. But they worked faster, were more focused, and beat me to the punch.
*sigh* It's not the end of the world since it was only a side project for me, and I do get the intellectual satisfaction of having my idea validated without having to do all the wet work... but it's a disappointment nonetheless.
So, sorry, no happy stuff just now. I'm off to watch some delightfully silly anime (fancy name for Japanese cartoons) to cheer myself up... Yami ni hitotoki nomarete mo yagate mizukara hikari dasu!
Or should I say Follie! Follie! Delirio vano è questo!?
This news just in: my big genome sequencing project has been given the green light by the people in charge of the purse strings. Taxpayers of America, know this: your money will be well spent (for once).
Oh my, I've got so many posts drafted that just need some teeny bit of editing to be done... and on really exciting stuff, I mean, there's whale-watching, bad travel, dinosaurs and of course, back by popular demand, the return of the Almighty Gus!
But something trumps all of that. Something I need to get done before I can think of polishing off those posts.
Tomorrow morning (Aug. 31st) at 8:50 AM (someone up there hates me), mountain time (GMT+7) I'm giving a talk at this year's most important meeting in my field of study. I've been working on streamlining my presentation for a week, cutting it down from the original 40 minute version to the allowed 15 minutes + 5 for questions (argh, the pain, the pain!) and rehearsing out loud to tease out the more difficult tongue-twisting bits.
Could I be more ready? Yes I could. Am I ready enough? I bloody well hope so.
Whatever happens, tomorrow evening I will be drinking margaritas at the hotel bar with some fun people.