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Hello, vast blogging audience! How have you been?

Things have been interesting over here. I have been busy, busy, busy. I'm sorry I was so busy that I neglected you. But if I look over at my sidebar, I see that I have already posted more this year than I posted all of last year, and it's only July. So I don't feel so bad.

Last year, I was still adjusting to my new job, and balance that with being pregnant and then being a brand-new mother. So the blogging kind of took a back seat for a while. Then, I somehow got it all figured out in February, and went on a blogging rampage. I still have dry spells when I get really busy with other things, but hopefully I'll be back for the long term now.

I think it's safe to tell you now, after the fact, that yesterday's deadline was actually a job interview for a staff position here at the lab. At a supercomputing workshop in March, I caught the eye of the group leader of one of the groups in the supercomputing center, who told me to let him know when my postdoc was up. Well, my postdoc can actually extend for a third year, through next August, but he didn't want to wait that long, so he asked me back in May if I'd be interested in interviewing this month. I said sure, so yesterday, I managed to fit myself into one of my suits (despite being ~30 lbs heavier than the last time I wore it) and gave a seminar and talked to a lot of different people.

Last week, I had to concentrate on getting some meaningful results, which was non-trivial to do. I worked all weekend the weekend before last, and into the evenings after I got home from work all week. I had to balance this with taking care of Jeff and Vinny, because Jeff had come down with a really bad cold. Then, on Wednesday, Jeff's generous nature finally topped my iron constitution, and I fell victim to this cold. I still had to keep working, though, because I didn't have any meaningful results. That night, I couldn't sleep because I was unable to breathe, so I got up at 3:30 a.m. and kept working. I got my last results on Thursday, and incorporated them into my talk then. I think I really felt the worst on Friday and Saturday, but by Sunday I was feeling human again, and yesterday I was at about 80% power.

I blame my sister Rachel for this cold. She made some passing comment about getting a travel cold while she was here. My hypothesis is that she gave it to Vinny, who expressed it with a 103º late-night fever, who then gave it to Jeff who gave it to me. The purpose of said illness: to ruin my life.¹ But she wasn't counting on my constitution of 20 (D&D, anyone?), so I managed to fight it off. And the residual cough and raspy voice just made people impressed by my working through my illness. Sorry Rach, you're going to have to try harder next time!

I think that I would really enjoy this job, because it involves doing science and working with people. One thing I miss in my current position is human interaction. I really like talking to people, so it gets kind of lonely to go into work, disappear into my office, and come back out maybe for lunch, but otherwise basically spend the day alone, at my keyboard. The degree of isolation is actually kind of sad, because my boss's boss didn't know what I am working on, until he came to my seminar yesterday. If he'd known, he might have put me on a proposal that he'd just submitted, because my work is actually very relevant to what he was proposing to do.

Anyhow, I think my chances are very high, because the group leader had already done a lot of background checking (talking to my boss and the people I work with) before he even approached me. The group had to approve of me joining them, and I think overall they liked me. But I should know for sure in about two weeks. And, in the event that it falls through, I can still be a postdoc for another year. But I really hope it doesn't fall through. I think this is a job that I would enjoy and do really well at.


1 For reasons still unknown (except, perhaps, that he was batshit insane?), one of my teachers in high school declared that the reason I was so stressed was that my sister Rachel was ruining my life. Taking four AP classes (Calculus, Chemistry, French, and U.S. History)? Naah. Not Stressful. Functioning on six hours of sleep per night? All teenagers can do that. A complete lack of free time to relax or do anything fun? Of course not! No, it was Rachel, and her incessant drive to assert her superiority over me, that was ruining my life. Who knew? Ever since then, I've become acutely aware of the ways in which she attempts to ruin my life. In return, I foil her plans and ruin her life. (Occasionally, I even take steps to actively ruin her life.)