Frankenstorm

Okay, I am feeling distinctly uneasy. Why? Because I just checked my Yale mail and in part it read:

"STAFF - ONLY ESSENTIAL STAFF ARE REQUIRED TO COME TO WORK ON MONDAY. We all owe a great debt to the hundreds of essential staff who have already made plans to be on campus starting tonight and/or tomorrow to care for the campus and undertake essential services ranging from dining to health services to utilities, police/security and grounds—and many others. If you have any doubt about whether you are considered an essential service provider, please contact your supervisor immediately.
NOTE: Those staff with clinical responsibilities for patients at Yale Medical Group or the Hospital will receive a special email from the Medical School tonight to outline which staff will be needed to report to work since some patients will be seen tomorrow.
For all staff who do not provide essential services, your work is cancelled for Monday and you should not report to work. Because the University is undertaking the almost unprecedented action of cancelling classes and closing offices on Monday, you will receive your regular pay and not be asked to use vacation/sick time. We will make the decision about Tuesday work requirements by Monday early evening.
YALE HEALTH – Urgent Care will continue to operate throughout the storm. All non-emergency appointments for Monday will need to be rescheduled. Please call to reschedule once the storm has passed.
OFFICES ARE CLOSED for Monday except for essential services. This means that all of the libraries, the Payne Whitney Gym, and regular student support services will not be available. As noted above, the Medical School will be making its own decisions about the clinical practices for patients.
ALL EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES ARE CANCELLED FOR MONDAY. This includes rehearsals, performances, varsity, club, and intramural sports practices and contests, and the like.
TRANSPORTATION - The fixed-route Yale Shuttle System will not be operating after Midnight tonight. The door-to-door Safe Rides will also stop operations at midnight; if you have a true transportation emergency, please call 203-785-5555. We will post when Yale Transportation Services resume on www.emergency.yale.edu"

EEK. They are taking this hurricane business super seriously and now I am slightly regretting moving into a studio that consists of one room with four giant windows (plus bathroom, also with giant window). Hurricane safety 101 says get into a room with no windows. Not gonna work in this place.

I have some bottled water and food in case the power goes out (nothing exciting - Powerbar type stuff and cereal and hummus and almonds) but no flashlight or anything of the sort due to (SIGH) having $9 in cash to last the week and no access to my credit card because I left it at the Rusty Bike in Oxford at my leaving do... Great timing as per usual.

At the moment it's just windy and nothing too crazy going down, but feeling uneasy in that herd mentality kind of way. Tornadoes I know how to do; hurricanes are a new one on this Alberta girl.

Maybe the whole thing will be an anticlimax?...

The Medical Library

Started my new gig on Monday (and the backstory to that is a whole other long story...) We will be looking at data from kids with Tourettes, so I figured I better do some background reading so I know what to expect/what everyone is talking about.

So, I went to the medical library and got my little slip of paper with the Dewey number on it and asked the lady at the desk where the book would be. Her eyes got wide and she said, "Oooh, I'm really not supposed to let you down there, but I suppose you can get your book if you're really careful."

Which was a first for me in terms of conversations with librarians.

So here was the route to the books on Tourettes:

Down the stairs

Past the grinning skeleton

Past the room full of brains in jars

Through the darkened room of empty shelves lit by a ghostly glow

Through the Do Not Enter tape

And into the creepy little room of flickering lights.

That said, the book was exactly where the Dewey number said it would be!

I love living in Oxford

Bank holiday this weekend and Del's friend Ciara was visiting. Went to Oxfork for breakfast, an art exhibit and a food festival on Sunday, and yesterday were supposed to go punting, but it was raining so instead we ate at the Eagle and Child before having a swift pint at the White Horse, dropping Ciara at the train station and then having a lovely huge cream tea at the Grand on the way home.

Man, this is the life.

Got my paper in! Only four-ish days after we were aiming for. Not bad considering. Fingers crossed for kind reviewers! I could use a little CV boost...

In other news my brain is in lockdown mode. I've got this weird hyperfocus on work stuff going on right now (which is quite useful for getting things done) but everything else is falling by the wayside because in true focus-of-attention style, it doesn't exist for me right now. (Also I've been having trouble with time lately, where I keep getting confused about how much time has passed... days seem weeks long but the month is racing by). I assume most of this is a byproduct of the weird situation I find myself in. Hopefully I don't drop too many balls while trying to get through. It's really odd how everything seems out of focus except my immediate work goals though.

In other news, off to Kingston tomorrow to a conference. I hear it's a nice town and the food is great. The postdoc has friends for us to crash with and some sort of master plan involving a beach, so that is exciting. A bit nervous about the talk, but it's a really cool project (an internship project and an Honours thesis that sort of interlock theoretically, both supervised by me) so it will be fun to disseminate it.

Anyway, we are leaving tomorrow morning and I haven't packed... argh, better get on that.

Things are busy busy. This month is going to be insane.

I am going to write another list: everything has changed since last post, and anyway I find it sort of calming.

1. Get paper submitted (tomorrow)
2. Kingston for 4 days to give a talk at a conference (June 7-11)
3. Kinda sorta triple booked (Stag and Doe {weird Ontario thing to make your friends pay for your wedding}, gig in Toronto, beach with Sandeep and Christine... not sure how that will all pan out) (June 16)
4. Defend :/ (June 22) (Date got changed due to committee availability)
5. Post-defense party! (ditto)
6. Immediately leave for portaging trip (June 24-28)
7. somehow get moved out (stuff shipped or stored) (June 30)
8. Melissa's birthday party in TO (June 30)
9. Canada Day Hip/New Pornographers gig (July 1)
10. Interview (July 2)
11. Leave for UK (July 7)

I also have to get everything sorted for leaving, get a few more manuscripts on their way, get a bit more data collected, make sure my projects are finished or someone else can keep them going.... it will probably all work out fine but right now it is looking pretty scary.

That said, my supervisor suddenly has nothing but time for me and is prioritizing submitting all my stuff that's been languishing forever (!) so I will take it! It would be great to have a couple more things on my CV for postdoc application purposes. Extra effort now will hopefully pay big dividends.

HOWEVER, I did get to go to Alberta for a week after a very burnout-inducing few months and it was awesome!! Lovely Lana and Paul wedding, saw lots of people I haven't seen for ages (even if half of them didn't recognize me until I started laughing), hung out with Steph and the Remkes Family and spent a couple of days in Rocky. It was extremely hard to drag myself away. Good thing dad drove me to the airport or I might have "accidentally" missed the bus.

BUT, for the first time ever, I had someone to pick me up from the airport at the other end! Sandeep not only came to pick me up but then brought me back to their place for dinner and booze. It is the first time I have ever returned to Guelph and not been 100% depressed for at least a week. Having a friend or two makes a huge difference. I don't know why it was practically nothing but toads for the first three years (with a few notable exceptions) but now the awesome people are coming out of the woodwork, but I will certainly take it.

Oooh, also - got my knee MRI. It was at 9pm at night and was kinda weird. A). I had to stick the wrong end in the scanner! Never had a scan that didn't involve my brain. B). They made me undress! Had to wear an open-backed hospital gown. WEIRD. But anyway, I guess the results take about a week so hopefully I will soon have some idea what the problem is. Unfortunately the outcome will likely be that nothing much will help, but I just want to know what is going on.

WELL! Exciting news all around.

First: my supervisor tracked down my prodigal committee member after I mentioned it had been about six weeks since I sent the stupid thesis out (he eventually called her department chair to ensure she was still alive). Once back in touch, she turned around my thesis in a week and gave me excellent comments. To be honest, neither committee member had much bad to say and there were just a few major comments to address. This is a huge relief - when people don't give me feedback, I tend to assume it's because they're ignoring me again/didn't actually read the thing. But no, she clearly read it (lots of minor nitpicks of typos) - she just thought it was good!

HUGE RELIEF.

So, got the comments back Tuesday, been working like crazy since then, will have draft to supervisor tonight, getting Steph and Del to nitpick stupid details for me (spelling, grammar, format) over the weekend, and - hopefully off to the external by next Tuesday.

So second: just got this email from supervisor:

Hi all,

Just a quick note to let you know that we have a tentative date/time for Anne's final examination:
- June 20, 1-4:30pm.

The grad secretary will likely be in touch again before long with official confirmation, but thought you might like some advance warning in case it's helpful for managing schedules.

DEFENSE DATE!!!!!!

Summer solstice!

This HAS to be a good omen, right?

So this is my next two months:

May 15- thesis sent to external and whoever the heck else
May 23 - Edmonton, woo hoo!
May 25 - wedding fun-ness
May 30 - back to Guelph, back to work, get some freaking papers submitted (there are two right now basically lying on peoples' desks waiting for feedback)
June 7-10 - CSBBCS conference, Kingston (giving a talk)
Sometime in June probably: MRI of knee to figure out what is going on once and for all (physio says what we are doing is not helping and she needs to know what is going on via imaging).
June 20, 1pm - let's not think about that
June 20, 6pm - PARTYYYYYYYYY
June 25-29 - Escape from Guelph, portaging trip in Algonquin!
end of June: pack stuff, move stuff, give stuff away, dispose of six tons of paper from work desk, etc etc
July ? - off to the unknown....

So I finally went to the doctor...

He thinks I have a torn meniscus (cartilage) in my knee. Awesome. However, that explains the pain, popping noises, stiffness etc. He says it's not a bad case (no swelling or locking) but I have to go to physio anyway. Annoying because you have to pay up front, although at least it will be reimbursed 80%...

Other than that, just bemoaning my lack of a social life/social support in Guelph and waiting for something good to maybe eventually happen.