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April 28, 2005
i was spoiled by my
i was spoiled by my research keeping me so busy and going relatively well in the past couple of months.
I forgot how REAL research involves things not working and a lot of hating of things.
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Posted by christina at 3:26 PM | Comments (0)
and so I heard the song of the big seņorita / the world it is falling by degree
the best part about getting older is the tendency to quite taking everything so personally.
At least, that's what i noticed about this week.
Its been a blah week on the research front. It is a weird type of blah. Things go wrong, i know how to fix them, i do. The problem is with working in vacuum, I have to wait overnight to bake/pump down to the level of cleanest i need. Therefore if something goes wrong, the sample for the day is lost. When i don't make a sample, than I have nothing to analyze the next day and therefore I suddenly have some unexpected free time. sigh, too much this week. With a feedthru broken on my other chamber, I can't work on the project I'm doing on that chamber. I really hope the replacement part come in today or tomorrow as I really don't want to leave the chamber at atmosphere while I'm gone next week.
I fill my time with other things - planning for the regional conference I'm organizing, reading about corrosion, cleaning and organizing, other random projects. It drives me crazy to not be progressing on my oxide project. It was doing so week and then not so well and i think i figured out what was going wrong and then i've run into all these silly problems. Though I must admit that silly problems i know how to fix are much much better than problems i'm not sure how to fix or work around.
For the first time, I'm leaving for a conference glad to be getting away from work (usually i'm annoyed that i'm not going to be productive). The whole slow time at work is also brought to us by me not taing this quarter. I didn't realize that how much time taing took up.
of course, as usual, it is going to be hard being away from the hunk o' man and the cat. I'm not sure how hunk o' man is going to survive seeing as i prepare most of his meals. tee hee hee. i'm sure his week will be filled with chicken nuggets and pizza. and salad...i have gotten him on the salad with dinner mentality. romaine, green and good for you.
i agree with sarah, this is just shady. I read it and didn't believe it because wasn't she engaged to chris klien? Yep, the article confirmed, she was.
i was just saying to hunk o' man the other day that i think it is really hard for people who are in the same careers...if not impossible. It is human nature to compete with those around you. I believe this is why few celebrities stay together. It gets hard if you are being surpassed in your chosen field by the someone you love and need to admired by.
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Posted by christina at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)
April 26, 2005
she said let me go / let me go
I read more than anyone I know. I cannot stay still for more than one second without something to read (or wishing I had something to read). I read while I brush my teeth, while I dry my hair, while I eat. We get time, newsweek, the new yorker, jane, and cooking light. I sometime get behind in the weeklies if i have a good book that i'm reading before bed (instead of the new yorker), but usually I catch up. At work I'm forever reading technical papers, books to brush up on some basic knowledge (this week's subject - corrosion), blogs, the new york times... It is crazy, how much a thirst to read. or is it the my attention span is just very short? I cannot sit in front of the tv unless i have a magazine or crossword puzzle near by.
it amazes me that i can last through a whole baseball game (at the park). last night was much better than saturday. (though i forgot to mention that maddox pitched saturday and it is always interesting to watch him, even if i am freezing my bum off.) the breeze was warm and from the sw, so it wasn't blowing straight on up. it was ben's dad's birthday and the three of us had a great night at the park. it didn't get cold at the end. we figured out that the hot dogs we thought they weren't serving (hebrew nationals) anymore, they in fact are, they just took down the sign. There were only minimal annoying people behind us and no one to the side of us. stupid banger guy was back from saturday. i fear he might have season tickets for that seat. we (meaning ben's dad) made friends with the guy who is part of the spilt of season tickets for the seat in front of us. (who also sold his cubs-white soxs series for $600 for 4 seats - face value ~130. good deal.)
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Posted by christina at 2:47 PM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2005
I know me very well (at least as far as I can tell)/ and I know what I need
though we did not get the 14 inches of snow ohio did, i was still horrified to experience some flurry action as i sat, literally, freezing my feet off at the cubs game saturday. the cubs were up then tied then up and i was quite excited by the propect of getting to go home a half of inning early and then the pirates tied it...ben promised we wouldn't stay for extra innings (as he was beginning to not be able to feel his nose). But the decision didn't need to be put in action as the pirates posted another run and the cub lost.
of course the next day, when it wasn't snowy and the sun was out and it wasn't physically dangerous to be outside for it, and we didn't go (or watch) because of a midterm today, they won. : P i say to that.
hee hee.
hunk o' man and I went to a Sadar (sp?) at our friends Ben and Julie. They have the cutest dog. She's awesome. Made ben and i set a date for our dog getting. anyways, ben's friend tom also was at the dinner. I really enjoyed it. I really enjoy religious traditions in general, and i liked all of the symbolism in the Sadar. There was also a lot of wine drinking as part of the event...and leaning to the left. It was really cool to be with friends and, hmmm, i don't know, recognizing God's existence and grace. I am pretty distasteful of most organized religions and their holier than thou syndrome, so it is nice to experience religion without it.
i want my tio2 to start crystallizing again. i hate when things stop working.
I am partially consumed by the issue of wal-mart. I heard on npr this morning about this new alliance against wal-mart - including the Sierra club, who takes issue with storm water drainage problems precipitated by wal-mart parking lots.
I shop at wal-mart, well, not actually, but i would if there was one convenient. i shop there when i am in hot springs. i shop there because things are cheap and i am a poor graduate student. Wal-mart is the perfect application of capitalism. By living in a capitalist society, we have to accept that anyone's gain is at the expense of other. I know there are people that don't believe that, but wal-mart is the perfect example. cheap goods come because (1) wal-mart doesn't allow unions, therefore they pay their employees near, if not at, minimum wage. (2) they cajole product makers by volume discount and (3) they buy from china.
Here's the thing i don't understand about all these group protesting wal-mart, they aren't the cause of any of this. They are in existence because much of the united states lives on very little money (less than me per person, and i have no idea how they do it). Why don't these people work on changes that will truly change people's lives like a minimum wage increase, real environmental regulations, nationalize health care? Say they take down wal-mart, something else will replace it. But if we increase people's wages, fix the health care system, protect our environment, these are lasting changes.
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Posted by christina at 1:38 PM | Comments (0)
April 22, 2005
from the inside out, to the open wide? / I know the feeling.
so, i'm about to submit my first paper.
currently i am waiting for it to upload all of the files. I'm a tad confused by how it wants the figures, but at this stage the fact that they are in the manuscript and attached separately covers all by bases for the reviewers. Something something currently waiting on pdf conversion. interesting.
we were submitting to a pretty high impact journal (though not one of the high impact journals). the work is important and interesting and i hope it gets accepted...but i am not hedging any bets. We have a "safety" journal that is more geared to our specific work, that we know it will get accepted to, so i'm not worried about getting it published (as i have learned getting published is not hard). it is where you get published that can be hard.
you might be surprised to learn that it will take 9-12 months from this date of first submission before the paper actually gets published.
as i wait for my files to be converted in to pdf by their system, i shall write you a small update about these past weeks.
- i wrote a whole rant about trying to have children and being fair to them and being in the world of science and engineering. it got eaten by blogger. I didn't feel like rewritten it. suffice it to say, i have been told that it would be impossible for me to take a couple years off and then rejoin the world of tenure track positions at competitive universities. Not that that was something I wanted, i just bothers the hell out of me that this profession has no respect for trying to balance children and a career while being fair to both. how does taking 2 years off decrease my abilities as a scientist or to run a successful research program. What it is just call it a sabbatical? What if i had cancer and had to take a couple of years off. the whole subject angers me.
- people in chicago are disrespectful drivers. They enter intersections when they can't pull through, which then screws up traffic going the other way when the light changes. It is illegal to. And I bet they wonder why i beep at them, can't I see that they can't go. i beep becuase you should be there anyways! this other driver totally tried to run over a little old lady in the crosswalk so she could make sure she could make her left turn before I made my right turn (which i have the right away for).
After many close calls, one of these stupid drivers rear ended me last friday. Though the impact made a loud whap and whip me foreward and back, my bumpers was amazingly not damage. she just rolled into me, under 5 mph, which is the rating for my bumper, one of the best out there, i found out from my subsequent research. Because I was okay, and our cars were unhurt, we went along with out lives. One person (thomas) has questioned my lack of information retrieval. I say, her insurance isn't going to pay without a police report and there was no way in hell i was going to wait for the police, as it takes them 20 years in chicago to respond to minor traffic accidents. all seems fine though.
-baseball season has started. and the bull have made it to the playoffs. only people who truly know me will understand the hell I am right now. it always takes me a couple of weeks to ease into baseball season as the neighborhood fills up with people and traffic is permanently bad. i have enjoyed the game i went to. though with ben's current funk about todd walker and nomar seriously injuring themselves in the first couple of weeks of the season, i don't think this is going to be an easy one.
tomorrow's game is going to be chilly. though there are scratch off cards, and scratch off cards makes everything worth is...well..if it snows, then maybe not.
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Posted by christina at 1:19 PM | Comments (0)
April 14, 2005
it's not so much that
it's not so much that i'm a slacker or that i don't have anything to say...more that i am so freaking busy.
i have lots to say. i'm just tried of writing.
in case you are interested in what i do ... or did...this is what the first half of my time here has been spent on.
i've been spending lots of time trying to figure out why my films behave the way they do...ah, the science of materials science and engineering. a pure engineering would say yay, met the goal of low friction in ambient humidity, next.
also a tad depressed that i live in a society that does not value family...as i found out that currently it is virtually impossible to take a couple years off and then try to get a tenture track job at a competitive university. it doesn't make sense. isn't it more logical to take the time off to have kids first than to do it in the middle...and one THEIR DIME?
i just don't understand. not that i wanted to go down that path, but i don't like that it has been deemed impossible. though i am so the person that says, oh, really, i'm going to try anyways. tell me that i can't do something, it just makes me want to do it more...probably why i'm an women engineer more than anything else.
ouch. my pinkie hurts. stupid sidewalk..
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Posted by christina at 6:02 PM | Comments (0)