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ther aspects of life plus the pandemic found a better work life balance with no more nursing and then with kids actually out of the house for stretches of the last third of the year i am sure to lose it with schools pivoting virtual not yet announced but nothing else makes any sense at all right now it was nice while it lasted continued to see my counsellor even once things had stabilized with pea and made some progress in managing the expectations i hold myself to and the fears i allow to take up space in my brain having someone who is exclusively invested in my positive progress validate or challenge my thoughts or actions has been an interesting and valuable process i m working on leaving space to enjoy life within the detail oriented planning that i rely on allowing my personal sense of integrity to inform my actions rather than my assumptions of others expectations and on accepting variations to my plans more graciously and openly it was to be perfectly honest a hell of a year it required a lot of personal growth pain grit and endurance i m very tired i m still a work in progress i envision a different but possibly equally difficult year next year and am quailing at the idea of having to muster gumption for it i know i have reserves and supports and if need be the financial resources to buy my way out of problems e g the pile of rapid tests on my counter procured at ridiculous expense that allowed us to see family more safely this holiday i d so dearly love for a tough winter to be followed by a lightened burden across the board fingers crossed this entry was posted in uncategorized on december 30 2021 by labmonkeyftw end of year update professional leave a reply it s been a busy few months at work and a productive few months which often means a lull in my blog i do still want to keep this blog going as a space for chronicling our days so will endeavour to write here more often before spud s birthday and the advent of 2022 hopefully not 2020 too my annual recaps starting with professional this year i published eight articles six of which represent work from my lab five of which are original research and one review this is a deep relief to have some of our older projects finally out in the world and to have newer collaborations coming online quickly and efficiently recruited three grad students and one undergrad and then convinced that undergrad to stay for an msc starting next year so far three of the four are completely fantastic and the fourth has promise but is a work type that i struggle to mentor my lab is now 12 and as big as i can reasonably manage without more permanent staff whom i cannot stably afford yet three are set to graduate in 2022 my first flight of phds as part of an ad hoc committee wrote the terms for a departmental edi committee am now the chair of said edi committee this is probably good i care about edi done right and a lot of innovation u s edi work is performative but has its difficulties as there was some small but vocal opposition to the committee in the first place gave nine talks all online and a nice mix of local and international locations fun to meet with some folks at other spots probably too many talks overall but we had fun stories to share with all the papers coming out and not having to travel for 1 4 days to give a talk means it s much much easier to do wrote a massive grant which i should hear about any day now wrote in 24 hours the internal renewal form 10 pages for my fancy chair i thought it was a simple one page form only to be informed i don t have to start that process until february of this coming year phew wrote no other grants aside from two renewals as i just did not have it in me to define new research directions within the timelines offered nor to scope out work with such an unpredictable backdrop the federal government has an unfortunate new habit of debuting grant programs with three week lead times unstable portals and shifting application formats and requirements these pass precisely zero of my triage points for should i write this grant so i have sat them out ran my course entirely online including an at home lab for the first time it went really well which is good because i learned it would be going back to online for next semester 24 hours before we left to visit grandparents for a week at christmas and 14 days before i have to have the course website set and published counselled all of my students and staff at various points about burn out and doom scrolling and how having a therapist can be a helpful outlet even when the world isn t on fire several have mentioned they have taken this advice my crew is struggling and i anticipate another hard year as their boss and mentor lots of ways to motivate sufficient productivity to get into the positive feedback loop of getting things done and feeling good about getting things done lots of slack to offer when trying to find that loop is doing more harm than good firm fair and clear and constant reminders of the supports available completed all the usual service tasks safety committee inspections ran the seminar series online for the year sat on video calls and voted on various matters plus was on a hiring committee for a new colleague i let one rather large ball drop and so did every other person in a position of leadership and it resulted in the dissolution of a big thing which i also ultimately think was for the best survived it will be on balance an excellent year for bean counting it was a tough one though and asked a lot of me in flexibility and grit and empathy and fatigue my bar was to survive and i ve definitely managed that next year brings two massive renewals my research chair and my foundational funding grant as well as teaching my full load and submitting my tenure brief it s going to be ugly but i see it coming and have a plan we shall see this entry was posted in uncategorized on december 27 2021 by labmonkeyftw funniest thing all week 4 replies today was the sixth day of the last ten working days where at least one kid was home sick or in isolation sprout has lovingly bestowed her cold on me as well so everyone is starting to drag a bit so here is the thing that has been making me chuckle out loud sporadically for the last week pea is playing a new world building game where he is in charge of a family of beavers yes really they have to build dams and engineer water flow and farm food and build up stores for the periodic droughts water is a key resource and can be life or death for your beavers pea kept losing all his beavers they wouldn t even be in a drought and they would all suddenly die upon examination it was lack of water pea was frustrated as he had chosen to build the larger pump option and was prioritizing upgrading them and keeping them manned at all times and still no water plus the pumps were running at 5 14 efficiency which was frustrating pea explained this all to me in detail as he wandered downstairs to try once again to keep his beaver crew alive he was sure there was some game mechanic he was missing but hadn t found it yet he came back up that night with hale and hearty beavers it turns out he had misread something the bigger water pump option was not a pump it was a water dump every time his beavers ran low on water he would marshal them to the dumps and increase the dumps activity he was rigorously upgrading staffing through the nights the dumps were working at so low efficiency because there wasn t any more water to dump it is an uncharacteristic gaffe for pea but it s mostly funny to me as an absurdist example of the piling on behind a bad decision that always seems to happen no beavers were harmed in the making of this post only a few beaver shaped pixels this entry was posted in uncategorized on october 5 2021 by labmonkeyftw update update overdue 1 reply three bullet points apiece because life is moving quickly and it s nice to have a record except i cannot make bullet points anymore in wordpress this platform is starting to make me feel creaky and old because they keep updating it to look more swish but keep removing components i enjoyed and use i bet swish isn t even slang any more this update brought to you by late night server installations because there s a lot of dead time in between aggravatedly pushing buttons sprout 1 sprout s stammer has completely evaporated in the past three months so that s that she continues to have a ridiculous vocabulary 2 using that vocabulary sprout has gotten in touch with her emotions and spends the vast majority of her time telling us i m sad whenever anything however minor has happened that is contrary to her world view sprout i am going to get off my chair and sit unner a table me pea no sprout you have to stay on your chair at dinner sprout i m sad i need a snuggle from mama gets off chair 3 sprout tells us daily that she doesn t like daycare when pressed she says she likes the food playground people her little cot naps some of the toys and that there are other kids but none of the other kids in particular when asked what she doesn t like about daycare she says i have beautiful days there pea and i have decided what she means is that daycare is not as much fun as being at home with nanny c and with mama and dada there at lunch and periodically through the day which fair spud 1 spud is liking kindergarten we don t get any information from him aside from claims they are learning the chicken dance every day and that there is excrement on the lunch tables both of which we eventually reluctantly had to ask his teacher about false on both counts he is pleased to go he eats his entire lunch except when he runs out of time and then it is the vegetables he doesn t particularly like that suspiciously had no more time allotted he came home one day with a drawing of a tiger on top of someone s head which was the most elaborate drawing we ve seen from him 2 concurrent with spud liking kindergarten spud s intense violent phase of the past 2 months has evaporated big transitions are hard when you are four but you aren t allowed to take it out on your mother or your smaller sister when that isn t getting results i am much relieved to no longer be a punching bag or goalie preventing lobbed objects from hitting sprout we are working with him to find other ways to express emotions there s a lot of yelling at ceilings at the moment which is vastly preferable but still not particularly enjoyable 3 spud got quite into extreme weather this summer thanks to the endless thunderstorm and tornado warnings i draw him little notes in his lunch boxes on a theme each week last week was weather and after three notes on hurricanes and the like and on a day when he had chosen dinosaur pants t shirt sweatshirt lunchbox and backpack to have a theme day so i can show my teachers he came home with a drawing of a hurricanisaurus and a tornadactyl clearly a collaboration between him and his teacher it was fun spud was selectively mute in daycare for the first 8 months so it s really neat to see him enjoying and interacting with kindergarten pea 1 pea s team at golden company is being reassigned again it s the first time i ve seen him seriously consider recruiter emails for other companies as this is now three straight years of him gearing up to a project only to have it fizzle move or be assigned to others since starting at the office here five years ago he has been forcibly moved off of teams and onto new projects four times it is golden company s way and pea is performing well he s probably going up for promotion next round but it is frustrating to constantly be starting over 2 pea has risen to the spud won t eat dairy and school doesn t allow any nuts or nut substitutes challenge by adapting his previously walnut filled sourdough to fully seedy and filling our pantry with odd seeds spreads and enriched flours to bake things like tahini and coconut bliss balls and date based home baked spelt granola bars mainly we need his afternoon snack to be more than just carbohydrates or at least contain some semblance of complex nutrition spud smells the new offerings with suspicion but has been eating them happily enough 3 pea is still introspecting and examining his relationship with alcohol he read a million tiny pieces last month which is a memoire of addiction rehab and recovery i had read it last year and was surprised he picked it up feeling it was a bit close to home he says most of the depictions of addiction really didn t resonate with him that he feels his actions were more strongly rooted in habit than addiction from everything he s said this feels true to me but does not remove the requirement for caution and vigilance he agrees lab monkey 1 september always catches me off guard and it did so again this year i m perilously behind but am coping by applying my mat leave tactics a laser focus on the important things with occasional dedicated hours for all the other noise as otherwise the admin tasks will subsume all my available time this was made worse by sprout being home for three days this week for a close contact isolation stint which started late day 7 post last exposure before a positive test was reported we re all negative so dodged that bullet i d been working as though the kids might be home any moment and while that was exhausting and nerve wracking as a modus operandi it did mean there was precious little i d procrastinated coming into this week pea and i split the days home with sprout and each got about a 4 5 hour work day thank goodness for naps with some top up time in the evenings 2 i saw a tiktok where a woman was saying she never worries about being a good wife the way she worries about whether she s a good mother she worries about the state of her relationship with her husband so why not do the same with kids i ve been thinking about it all week and thinking of ways to strengthen my relationship with each of the kids at the end of the day that bond that trust and love is so much more important than the myriad little check boxes required for achieving motherhood accomplishment i get mired in the checkboxes that if they have shoes that fit and lunches that are interesting and well balanced and if they spend time outside that i m doing ok and all of those things are important but it was a good reminder to me in my busiest season that the silly songs and the deeper talks and the little moments where i specifically dedicatedly cherish them and the firm but clearly explained boundaries those are the bits that will stick 3 my extroversion goes in waves where i need people and where i m ok to just have check ins with my inner circle i set up the next two weeks as though i need people and i overdid it not because i am in an extroversion trough but because we re trying to keep the kids weekends a bit relaxed as they adjust to busier days at school and daycare and because i m writing a big grant that is due in five days and i ve needed still need extra t...
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