#but I've been researching it on and off for weeks

[eponymous-rose]

Monday!

It's been a while since I've done one of these week-in-the-life posts (and I LOVE reading them from others), and it's a particularly stressful week where I'm trying to stay off social media for Reasons, so hey, let's do this again!

It's a busy day, but it starts relatively late - I don't have to leave for the office until 10AM. So, you may ask, why on earth do I set my alarm for 8:30? Is it because I have an elaborate morning routine? Is it so I can hit the gym and go for a jog? No, no, no, it's because I have a little cat who takes the alarm as her cue to cuddle and I don't want to disappoint her, so I inevitably spend half an hour hugging her like a purring teddy bear first thing in the morning before I get up.

I respond to some e-mails as I get ready and on the bus ride over - mostly prep for our department's holiday party (I'm in the band and we're trying to get as much practice in as possible), but also a little work getting supercomputer access restored for an undergrad research assistant, offering to write a letter of recommendation so my colleague doesn't have to (we both know the student well and said colleague is traveling across the country for a funeral on a redeye flight tonight...), reworking some elements of the rubric for the faculty search committee I'm on, and confirming a meeting with my grad student.

10:45 - I get to the office and go to make my usual mug of tea... and realize in the moment I close my office door that the keys are still inside. I get the hot water from the lounge and meander by the office, but nobody's there. Just as I'm about to work up the nerve to go interrupt a more senior professor's meeting to borrow his keys, one of the office staff walks by and is happy to open the door for me, phew.

11:00 - My most senior grad student is doing an internship in Colorado this quarter (it's the location he most wants to do a postdoc at as well!), and we've set up a call to catch up after a few weeks without chatting. It's a bit of an awkward chat because he wants to go to his second conference in two months, and I had to bring out the "well, um, this is a side project you're doing with someone else's research group and you may want to check with them about where the $2000+ for conference costs is coming from". I possibly have an avenue - I might ask him to just attend for a couple of days instead of the whole time, so I can use some funding from a different grant, but I'm hoping we can get some cost-sharing going here, or possibly the other professor he's working with can present his poster for him if need be. Still, his work's going great and I'm hoping we can get him to this conference! He finishes his PhD this year, and I can attest to how helpful conferences are for landing postdocs.

12:00 - Speaking of grants, I had a successful grant come through late last summer to study wildfire smoke dynamics with novel instrumentation (something new to me!), and the whole team is meeting up for the first time to talk logistics! I also have to teach real soon, so I'm only on for the first chunk of the call, but we get some of the plan set up. Looks like we'll be meeting at a NASA facility early next year to do some siting stuff prior to the first controlled burn. I genuinely have no idea what I'm doing on this project, apart from being willing to write a big chunk of the proposal, but it's a good time!

12:30 - Class time! This is my domain-specific intro-to-python class that I developed 5 years ago and have been iterating on ever since. It's going a lot smoother this week than last, and the students are pretty responsive to my jokes (priority #1, lbr) and seem to be following along quite well, judging by the handful of questions I get after class. Not a ton of technical issues today, either, which is a HUGE win over last week.

1:30 - Forecasting time! I'm once again part of our university team in a giant forecasting contest. While I'm decidedly average at it (usually around 250th out of 1000 participants), my grad student was #1 for a while there. We chat in broad terms about the next week of weather in our targeted forecasting region.

2:30 - Meeting with another graduate student! We talk about some of the researchers he reached out to after his first conference a couple weeks ago, and we're starting to narrow down a possible author list for his first paper. He's working on writing up the methods and data for that paper while he incorporates a few new datasets into his preestablished workflow. He's been doing really well! Being a dual-major in CS means his code is a heckuva lot more organized than most second-year grad students I've had.

3:30 - ...nothing??? I've decided to skip my usual seminar and postpone one undergraduate student research meeting this afternoon (the one currently locked out of the supercomputer he needs for his project) since I have a couple of grant proposals due very shortly. I head out to grab some teriyaki to bring back to my office for lunch/dinner, but the restaurant just has a big sign out front saying "closed for FIRE" so I opt to go across the street for some chicken katsu and boba tea instead. I approve the final budget (coming up on a million dollars, no pressure) and keep plugging away at the statement of work (which is basically "what are you going to do, in detail, with one million dollars over the next three years? please tell us in exactly 15 pages, not counting your 3-page bibliography and 6 appendices"). I even find a perfect paper to reference to discuss one of our theories! We've made it through one round of reviews with our pre-proposal, and man, we'd love to do this project - it would be myself, a colleague, and a postdoc looking at some really novel stuff in severe storm predictability over the next three years. I also get a little work done on the invited talk I'm giving to a student journal club tomorrow, and work on some more e-mails (trying to set up a meeting with a friend's graduate student to help her out with some methods she's using from an older paper of mine).

5:15 - One of my colleagues has retired this year and has a farewell song he wants to sing at our holiday party, which happens to be mostly voice & piano, so we agree to meet up before the main practice and go over it a couple times before the rest of the band shows up and he has to head out to dinner. I'm really sorry to see him leaving (although I know he's delighted to get to spend more time with his kids and grandkids) - he and his wife were extremely welcoming when I started here, and were so kind and supportive when Mom died. Just very touched that he reached out to me to play piano on this one. Tragically, though, whoever was supposed to bring in the keyboard hasn't left it in the practice room, so we'll have to wait and run through it with the rest of the band on Thursday. Instead, it's back to the office to get caught up on e-mail and try to slog through more of the grant application (all today's research and work has netted me... 1 page of writing, blah).

6:00 - The rest of the band shows up! We run three songs of our eight-song setlist, and I'm somehow now playing on 4/8 of them, despite there being five people signed up for keys. It's a good time, though!

8:00 - I make it home and give Clara a bunch of new toys that have arrived with her prescription food (one of which she licks for 15 minutes straight). Luckily, tomorrow's work schedule is much more chill!

[getvalentined]

Thinking about finally throwing all my FF7 meta analysis and lore deep dive stuff onto a sideblog. It'd be reblogged from here, but I'd be able to organize it a little better, have a directory so people could find things more easily, and maybe it'd stop people from regurgitating things I say word-for-word for brownie points when they can just find and reblog the fucking original post(s).

[moonchild-in-blue]

Not forgiving yall for making me believe Price was a proper Tired Old Man™. What do you MEAN he is canonically 38/39 💀

and what do you mean Soap is like? 27? sir you are but wee boy. where are your parents.

[squeakadeeks]

moodboard for this past week ❤️

[aeolianblues]

I'm not an extrovert. At all. In everyday life, I'm a yapper, sure, but I need someone to first assure me I am okay to yap, so I don't start conversations, even when I really want to join in sometimes! It's just the social anxiety acting up. God knows where from and why I lose a lot of my inhibitions when it comes to talking to people about music. I don't know where the confidence has suddenly sprung from. I've made a crazy amount of friends in musical circles, either just talking to people about common music or (since it is after all in music circles) talking to bands about their own music. I let out a sigh of relief any time an interaction goes well, because in truth it's going against my every instinct. I wish I could do that in everyday life

[juicedbeetle]

I just love when he does creacher shit like this so much

[whentherewerebicycles]

i really and truly believe that there are only two genuine human superpowers, both of which can be actively cultivated:

the ability to find anything interesting, ie the ability to reframe and reflect on any situation or encounter, even/especially negative or boring ones, so as to make what is happening to you interesting, engaging, and personally meaningful to your human experience. this habit of mind is mostly curiosity but it's also woven through with psychological flexibility, especially the ability to regulate your own emotional reactions so that you can respond to challenging or tedious situations in more thoughtful and values-aligned ways that develop your sense of self instead of making you feel trapped or bored or fragmented

the ability to teach yourself new things. idk maybe as a teacher i am biased but i really believe that the single most transformative gift you can give any human being is a deep understanding of how people learn and improve at things. what is more hopeful, more inspiring, or more life-affirming than the realization that you can learn new things at any age, and that the new things you learn (plus the joyful process of learning itself!) can utterly transform the way you experience the world and understand yourself? what is more amazing or incredible than the realization that learning things is not a mysterious & passive process that happens to you but a reasonably consistent set of steps and tools that you can learn how to master and apply to virtually any skill or domain of human knowledge? the superpower of being able to learn/improve at anything you set your mind to… but also the superpower inherent in that quiet unwavering certainty that even if you feel stuck at various points in your life, you have within yourself the capacity to get unstuck through learning and changing and growing and experiencing new things. wowowowowowowow!!!!! what an extraordinary gift!!!!

[snazum]

this is just me theorizing and I haven't actually read any theories yet AND this is gonna be half baked cause I just want to put my surface thought so far into the world.

Wayne did say there was a deeper meaning behind HLAGE. And that it meant a lot to him (If i'm remembering correctly.)

And I think they said that gnome chompski representing chat was close and/or correct. Could the series sort of be a representation towards how he feels about streaming and creation? Having the gnome AKA "chat" take over and play HL2 sort of like a representation of having this giant shadow of what people want for HLVRAI2 sort of thing.

And also having this sort of love hate relationship. And growing fond of the gnome anyways, to the point that he realizes he misses the gnome when it's gone. (Never thought I realized idk the gnomes pronouns).

Uhhh there's more but I can't put word into thought yet. Take this as a demo???? Of my thoughts. I guess.

[the-one-who-lambs]

I just realized that this past month has given me so many people I need to credit in my thesis

[siena-sevenwits]

:-)

[confinesofmy]

me and my cousin i'm barely on speaking terms with (but in a relatively casual way) repotted her deceased grandmother's pothos today. this was our first time actually properly repotting it bc last summer it was in such a fragile state and we were so scared to hurt it that we just lifted it out of its pot and placed it in a bigger one but this go round we basically dismantled it entirely. we got eight discrete plants and placed it into four different pots!! in nine months it went from the edge of death to that many plants and like ninety leaves altogether. so if you're bad with plants but still wanna fool with them, i guess you should get a pothos.

[gammaraydeath]

thursdays are such a good day off for me. one class in the afternoon. i can just take it easy all morning. maybe i'll even work on a sketch later i miss drawing!!

[navramanan]

the more i read the more enraged i feel the more dread and frustration overcomes me

[catinfroghat]

Countless papers about the benefits of using AI in drug discovery and diagnosis but some luddites on here just hear AI and start grabbing their pitchforks regardless of context

[autumnoakes]

how in the hell am i meant to get anything done

[neverendingford]

.