Still in Limbo

I was hoping to know definitively whether or not I got a job this round by now, but I do not. Sigh.

But not everything sucks.  Here is a list of good things, partly just to remind myself that not everything sucks:

• My promotion to "Research Scientist" has been officially approved. Even if I don't get a tenure-track job, I am no longer a postdoc.
• I finally finished a paper that has been plaguing me for YEARS. I have grown to loathe this paper. I sent it to my co-authors on Friday. WOO HOO!
• My big 'Omics project is really and truly underway.
• A behavior study that I have been planning for quite awhile is getting underway.
• My work was featured on some science websites recently, as was a little interview with me about being a scientist.
• I am planning a short trip to the field in the western half of the country sometime next month, which should be fun.

I have decided to behave as if I am not getting a job this time around, and am moving on with things. I am trying to re-focus my brain. It's great to have that paper out of the way (although it won't truly be out of the way until it is is submitted) so now I can turn my attention to things like resubmitting my NSF proposal, and writing new and even more exciting papers. I have two papers that have already been published in 2010, and I am aiming to have two more submitted by the end of the year, as well as this grant that I really believe can get funded this time around. Might as well take advantage of the fact that I am here for another year, right?

I don't even recognize my life anymore

It seems like just yesterday that my daily life consisted of a little pipetting, a lot of looking at pictures of cats on the internet, and a dash of getting drunk at lunchtime.

Now? Here's my to-do list:
1. Correct proofs of my latest in-press article - the one that is already in the process of making me famous
2. Write press release about the article
3. Prepare mock lecture for campus interview #3
4. Judge posters at undergraduate research conference
5. Prepare for phone interview with university #5 (yes, another one has jumped into the fray)
6. Write poster for next month's Specialized Conference
7. Finally finish writing Paper That Won't Die (yes, it's really getting there)
8. Analyze two datasets for two more Awesome Papers that need to be submitted soon (before I leave Postdoc U)
9. Give talk next week to 'Omics people
10. Continue answering questions about why I turned down job offer from Interview #1

Yes, you read that last one right.

I used to have trouble falling asleep at night, worrying and anxious. Now? I fall asleep immediately due to sheer exhaustion. I used to worry about getting acknowledged as a Real Scientist. Now, I'm fending off offers and juggling my schedule so I can present data at various places, and answering emails from people looking for advice. I do not know when the switch occurred, or how, but it did. Am I happy about it?

Oh HELL yes.

Good riddance, 2009

I have never been happier to reach the end of a calendar year.

What was so bad about '09, you ask? Let's review.

January: We kicked things off with both of my parents' deaths, 12 hours apart, on January 9th.
March: Then my cat died.
July: Then my husband's grandmother died.
September: Then my husband's friend died.
October: Then a city that was very important to me was devastated by massive earthquakes.

Holy shit. But I suppose some good things happened this year too.

January: I had my first on-campus job interview.
March: I went to Vegas with Repressed Librarian, and spent a week in a lakeside cottage in upstate New York wine country with Arbitrista. Also: with my parents' life insurance money, I paid off nearly $50K in credit card debt. (I also bought a MacBook Air, a couch, and an Hermes scarf.)
 April: We moved out of the apartment and into a house, and got another dog. Also went to Mexico for La Blonde Parisienne's wedding.
June: After 5 years of pain, my book was finally published. Plus I got nominated for a promotion (a process that is quite nearly finished).
July: We plan a trip to Europe (only 3 months away!!). Ended a very successful summer field season which featured many angry bird pictures. Submitted an NSF grant (still waiting to hear the outcome!).
October: A very successful trip to a field site to collect some birds for the aviary.
November: Trip to NYC to celebrate the 20th anniversary of meeting Arbitrista.
December: A paper published, and two phone interviews for jobs. Also am in the midst of a very cool experiment that is going very well so far.

I also started to develop a national reputation for my work, and was asked to review a whopping 16 papers and 7 grants. I co-taught 2 graduate courses. I made progress on some very big-deal projects. I applied to 42 jobs. I watched every single episode of every Real Housewives series. I drank some excellent scotches, acquired some enviable wines, and discovered some amazing cocktails.

It's been a very busy year, with high highs and low lows. I am worn out, and looking forward to a quiet holiday season at home with Arbitrista (and my sister, who is coming to visit) here in BTCT. I am more than ready for the new decade.

Busy and Whiny

I've been simultaneously too busy and too lazy to post anything. So I will do what we bloggers do when one has not blogged in awhile: bullets!

• Submitted the NSF grant last Friday - my first major grant proposal as PI. Woo hoo!
• People visited over the weekend. And bought me nice presents.
  
• Finished reading Valley of the Dolls on Sunday night. Wow, THAT was depressing.
• Why can't I remember anything about Monday? Pizza. I made a pizza. With Italian sausage. Yum.
  
• Got old on Tuesday. I guess that wasn't so bad - it involved two bottles of rosé with friends at lunch, and a five-course tasting menu with my husband at dinner. Plus sapphires. And a giant bouquet of flowers. And cake.
  
• Said goodbye to postdoc friend moving away to tenure track job on Wednesday.
• Ran the last of the summer's captive experiments on Thursday. Hooray!

So, I've been able to check a few large things off my list. But the NSF grant really wiped me out and I have not gotten any writing done this week. Next week: on to the revise and resubmit!

I'm afraid this blog's gotten a bit boring lately. I stopped catching birds a few weeks ago (no more torturing birds, PhysioProf... FOR NOW...) so I don't have any new angry bird photos for you. But here's a picture of a catbird for you:
I cannot figure out how the hell I am holding onto this bird, but I like that it is turning around and giving me the evil eye.

Impromptu Writing Retreat

Right now, I am sitting at a little desk in a quaint cabin on top of a mountain. My NSF grant proposal is nearly done. I did not expect this trip to turn into the perfect writing retreat, but sometimes good things happen.

I am here at the field station where I worked last summer and the summer before that, to give tonight's weekly seminar. It's a really, really nice place to be when you're not doing fieldwork! It's pretty, and peaceful, and I have lots of friends here and they feed me. I don't have anything to do all day today, so this morning after breakfast I sat down with my laptop and have managed to get a lot done. Originally I was really stressed out about this trip because I didn't know when I was going to have time to write this grant but it has turned out just fine. I'm slacking off to blog right now because I'm writing the Broader Impacts section and it is SO PAINFUL.

Tomorrow Arbitrista and I drive back home, so we still get a nice weekend to ourselves.

Ok, back to hateful Broader Impacts. And Intellectual Merit. Wheeeeee!

Promotion

My boss has decided to nominate me for a promotion. My current title is Research Associate (not Postdoctoral Fellow) and we are going to pursue the title of Assistant Scientist. Scientist! I like the sound of that! Big Ten University has research ranks - Assistant Scientist, Associate Scientist, and Senior Scientist. No tenure, of course, and as far as I can tell no associated increase in salary. But I'll have a bit more autonomy at the administrative level in these ranks. I'll be able to apply for grants as PI without the sponsored research people giving me any trouble. I'll no longer be referred to as a "postdoctoral student" (I HATE THAT).

I got the memo about the process yesterday. It's surprisingly scary - it seems similar to applying for tenure (though much, much less involved), without the getting tenure part, of course. I have to turn in a dossier, which includes six outside letters of recommendation. I have to give a seminar. People have to vote about whether or not I get it.

I'm not really very nervous though. The criteria are as follows: 1) completed the terminal degree in his or her discipline, 2) at least one year of successful postdoctoral research experience, 3) be fully capable of original, independent research work. I think I can handle that! To get promoted to Associate Scientist, you have to have begun building a "national reputation." The vagueness of this makes me laugh.

Anyway, I'm kind of excited about this. I was also excited about catching an ovenbird the other day, having never actually seen one before:

LOOKIT MY BOOK!

I got my free copies of the book yesterday!!!!! YAAAAAAAAAY!

Here, take a look:
What? You can't read the title? Oh. Sorry, I must have gotten my finger in the way when I was taking the picture. It's called "Dissertation Animals: New Stuff and Big Words About Them," edited by Brazen Hussy's Friend and Brazen J. Hussy. It's fabulous; I highly recommend it.

A list. And a wren.

I am trying to deal with the general sense of overwhelm by prioritizing and reminding myself how much time I have for each of these things. And I am going to post a list, because it's always fun to cross things off a list (and I keep looking back at the list I posted last week and wanting to cross things off it - in fact, I think I will).

BIG THINGS TO GET DONE THIS SUMMER
1. Finish writing/practice/give hour-long research talk
2. Write and submit NSF grant
3. Revise and resubmit paper (due date: August 14)
4. Finish current MS (no due date)

Well that doesn't look SO bad. It's just feels overwhelming because of:
ONGOING PROJECTS
1. Sample collection (now until ?)
2. REU project (now until July 31)
3. Another undergraduate project (July 5-August 14) delegated
4. RNA extraction for massive 'omics project (now until ?) delegated

Most of that stuff I am really just supervising but I am kind of a control freak.

Plus the everyday annoying stuff like
1. our IACUC protocol is up for renewal in September OH NOES
2. maintaining the lab
3. Yet ANOTHER paper to review in the next couple of weeks
4. I keep forgetting to set up interviews/etc with students who want to work with me... need to get on that emailed one of them...

Ok. I need to go get dressed and go poke at some birds. Like this pretty Carolina wren.

Ah, to be young again

7:45 am, heavy thunderstorm.

The phone rings. It's my trusty mignon, inquiring about today's fieldwork plan since it is pouring down rain. I tell her let's wait until 9:00 and see if it clears up.

I am using this extra hour to review those two manuscripts. What is she doing? Going back to sleep.

Sigh.

TOO MUCH!

I am so busy lately my mind is failing me. I even posted the wrong bird picture yesterday. (I fixed it.) I thought summers were supposed to be nice and easy-going. HA. Here, in no particular order, is a list of things I am supposed to be doing, like, yesterday:

• Catching a lot of birds
• Extracting RNA - DELEGATED!
• Reviewing not one but TWO papers, the first of which had been in review for 52 days already by the time I was requested to review it, the second of which is required to be completed in 10 days
• Revising and resubmitting a paper - I get three months and the first of those months has disappeared already
• Supervising an REU student doing behavioral experiments in the aviary
• Training a research tech on molecular techniques
• Hiring and training a new lab tech
  
• Keeping the lab running (I am particularly failing at this one, as we keep running out of things that we've never run out of before and for some reason the Radioactive Waste people are either not getting my pickup requests or ignoring them)
• Writing an hour-long talk to give in two weeks
• Writing a final report for a grant
• Writing an NSF grant to be submitted next month
• Running microsats for 26 birds that, for some idiotic reason, I left out when I was doing microsats for a gazillion other birds and now I only need those 26 birds - DELEGATED!
• Oh, and writing that paper.

None of this seems to be getting done in a satisfactory period of time, my house is a mess, there's no food in the refrigerator, and I think my laundry from two days ago is still in the washer. And my dog crapped on the floor today but there's TWO dogs now and I don't know which one did it.

I need a drink. And a bath. And a personal assistant.

I feel as whiny as this juvenile downy woodpecker.

Writing: Week 2 Review

The generative writing method is working great. I have produced a lot of writing the last two weeks. The part where I'm balking, however, is taking what I have written already and shaping it into a real draft. That's not something I feel up to doing at 6 in the morning, and in the afternoons I don't feel like it either. Right now my mornings (8-12) are spent doing fieldwork; unfortunately that's the best time for me to do writing & thinking work too. I can't switch fieldwork to the afternoons because I won't catch any birds that way. I've decided to only do fieldwork Monday-Thursday, leaving Friday for other things. Hopefully that will work for me.

In other news, The Paper That Just Won't Die is no longer my problem! No, I didn't finish it. But Co-Author #1 (we were actually doing the asterisks and equal contribution thing; my name was first because I was writing it) suggested combining it with another paper of his. I said HELL YES, TAKE IT AWAY FROM ME. This will switch author order but we will keep the asterisks. I don't care anymore, I just don't want to deal with it. It makes a lot of sense, actually, because the two papers rely on each other so why not put them together and make a stronger paper. And I can finally move on with my life. Woo hoo!

Even the disgruntled grackle thinks it's a good idea.

Limits

Writing at 6 am + 4 hours of fieldwork = I can't really get much done after noon. I'm trying, but I am pretty damn tired and have difficulty concentrating. Today I managed to read a chapter in a new book on my research topic, process this morning's samples, and send a couple of emails. Oh, and I printed out the reviews of my R&R paper. Afternoons are usually low productivity for me but this is ridiculous. Screw it, I'm going home.

Angry Catbird thinks I'm a slacker and is clearly telling me so.

Balancing work and... more work

Today is the beginning of my field season. For this project, I'm sampling whatever species I can catch, so my fieldwork is awesome - run some mistnets, catch some birds, try to identify them. It's so much more fun than targeting a particular species. But it's also fairly low-key, and I only catch in the mornings, and I can't really justify just doing fieldwork for the next few weeks. And I don't want to - I'm very excited about the momentum of my writing. So I have decided to start my field days at 8 am, rather than at sunrise, and keep 6 am for my writing time. It worked for today, although this afternoon is kind of a loss because I'm more tired than I expected. I imagine I'll get used to this in a few days and be able to some work in the afternoons, though I don't expect to do a whole lot. As long as I'm able to keep up writing for 30 minutes in the morning I will feel very good about it.

A bonus feature of my fieldwork: I'm not great at identifying birds, so I take a picture of every bird so that I can check it against field guides and my expert friends. This means that occasionally I can share photos of pissed-off birds with you! Today's angry bird: the yellow-breasted chat.

Writing: Week 1 Review

I have successfully written every morning for five days now. It's going really well. After Wednesday I switched to just 5 minutes of prewriting (the spontaneous writing in a journal) and the remaining half hour is spent doing generative writing on my next paper. I have about five typed pages of text already. Some of that will be translated into actual journal article writing, some of it is notes and ideas to myself that have been surprisingly inspiring and motivating. (Some of it is just crap: "Hey, I've written 500 words already!") Doing this writing has pushed me to move further on the statistical analyses - which is a very strong argument for writing before you're ready!

In other writing news, my collaborators sent me some new data for my next next paper: another hypothesis of mine is totally correct. I must really be on to something here! It is VERY exciting.

Also? Yesterday I got a revise and resubmit decision for a manuscript that is on its third journal. Hooray! They want some major points addressed, but fortunately I already have data that I can insert into the paper that will overcome many of the reviewers' concerns. Also one of my mignons is currently in the field, very interested in the topic, and willing to do a little bit extra data collection for me. It will be a much stronger paper and should finally get published this time.

Of course, nagging away at the back of my mind is The Paper that Just Won't Die. It is not one of the three above-mentioned papers. I really, really need to get that one done so I can stop feeling guilty about it. Of course, if my co-authors would just stop disagreeing, that would be much easier. Maybe I will get back to work on that next week.

The main thing I am worried about is losing momentum. I have enjoyed the writing this week but it has that New Year's Resolution feel to it. Will I be able to keep it up? I really hope so.

Writing update: hey, this shit works!

The writing has been going quite well. The fifteen minutes of "spontaneous writing" have been surprisingly easy. I find myself writing a lot about my work. That, combined with some PRETTY AWESOME statistical results yesterday, led me to start the "generative writing" this morning, a few days ahead of schedule.

The awesome stats: I've been poking at some data for a couple of months now, trying to make the dots cluster in the way they should. Finally, I had a brilliant inspiration yesterday about how I needed to transform the data, and VOILA! The dots, they cluster! They are beautiful! Lookie! (Also beautiful? Graphs made in R. Suck it, SPSS!)

The generative writing: basically, you are supposed to write on your topic rather spontaneously, no looking up notes or cutting and pasting from other files, no agonizing over the right way to say something. I didn't really think I'd be able to do that but I did just fine. Later, you are supposed to take your writing, look it over, and find patterns in it, which helps you to clean it up. Write first, outline later. I haven't gotten to the second step yet, obviously, but I'm interested in seeing how it works. It was kind of fun writing in this fashion - I alternated between 1) describing the results as I would describe them to someone in an email, 2) describing the methods nearly exactly as I would in a finished manuscript, and 3) notes to myself - how should I approach this aspect of the data, what does this difference mean? I did this for 15 minutes and produced a page and a half of single-spaced text. Not too shabby!!

Proofs!

I just got the page proofs for our edited volume! SO EXCITING. 526 pages of goodness. And five days (WTF??) to correct and return them.

Just now I was re-reading the introductory chapter that I wrote, and I started to absorb the fact that soon, this book will be on shelves in bookstores and online and in libraries, available for anyone to read. DUDE I MADE A BOOK. The very thought is making me all tingly, and a little nervous.

Book! Done! OMG!

I was going to write today about this bizarre funk I’ve been in for the last two weeks.

But as it turns out, I have discovered the cure for said funk: send your 4-years-in-the-making edited volume to the publisher!

Yes, friends, the book is finally finished. I have sent the manuscript.

HOLY SHIT.

The good thing about taking so long to finish is that the publisher has changed their requirements in the meantime – they no longer require you to send a hard copy, just a digital copy. Which is a good thing (Figure 1). (By the way, those pages are DOUBLE-SIDED.)

When my friend and I started this book, we solicited advice from books and friends about editing a book like this. The unanimous advice was: DON’T.

Well, I will say that it was hard work and very frustrating, and I don’t think that I will ever do it again. But I’m really glad we did it, and I think the final product will be something to be very proud of.

It’s really too bad that the bars aren’t open at 9:30 am, because I certainly feel like celebrating.

I'm so efficient and productive, I have time to write about my efficiency and productivity

I mentioned briefly not too long ago that I got interested in GTD (Getting Things Done, the immensely popular productivity system by David Allen that seems to achieved cult status in some sectors of the internet - I actually see people refer to him as The David). I will admit, I gave Repressed Librarian the raised eyebrow (or at least I would have, if I could raise just one eyebrow) when she mentioned it to me a few months ago, but now I'm sold (sorry I doubted you, RL!).

There's one thing he wrote in the first chapter that really resonated with me:

The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can't do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future... Everything you've told yourself you ought to do, it thinks you should be doing right now. Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored in your RAM, you've generated personal failure, because you can't do them both at the same time. This produces an all-pervasive stress factor whose source can't be pinpointed.

Yeah. So, I won't write about how the system works here, because there are more than enough sites describing it, but I will share with you a couple of little things that REALLY work well for me. None of it is rocket surgery, as a European friend used to say, but it's very effective.

(First I just want to say that I don't think it's very hard at all to start implementing the GTD system. Maybe it's just because I was already pretty organized.)

The first thing I did, after alphabetizing all my files and collapsing my email folders into a single archive, was go to Target and buy a pretty inbox. $18 seemed a bit extravagant, but it's PRETTY. And pretty stuff makes working more fun! Also, if you think $18 is too much, you should see what David Allen is selling them for. That is just silly. Do you know what the man charges for attendance at one of his seminars? NINE HUNDRED DOLLARS. Jeez. I think I bought the book for $11.


Anyway, speaking of pretty, lookit my pretty folders! Another lovely birthday gift from Repressed Librarian, who knows that I like to Get Shit Done in style.

I did do more than use this as an excuse to acquire pretty accessories for my office... although I admit I did buy some more stuff. The best thing I've started using is the program OmniFocus, which was specifically designed for managing tasks GTD-style. I was already a huge fan of OmniOutliner (and since I have the professional version of that, I got a big discount on Focus). I think it's only for Mac, though.

The particularly cool thing is that you put all of your "projects" into this system, and you make a little to-do list for each one. You identify, for each project, what is the "next action." And it highlights the next actions for all of your projects. This doesn't sound like much, but it has made it very easy for me to make tons of progress on multiple projects simultaneously. Not multitasking, per se, but when I finish one next action I can just go and pick the next thing I feel like doing. And it's so much easier when I've broken everything down into discrete tasks. Instead of "Write poster for August conference," I had "write methods section" and "add photos" and "write figure captions." When I was feeling cranky and unmotivated (which is just about always) I could look at the list and say, "Well, sure, I can write some figure captions" and next thing I know I've started working and am writing the dreaded Discussion section or something. Here's what I got done this week:

• Finished the analyses for the poster (which I only started last week), and completed the poster
• Wrote an entire talk on a totally different topic I'm giving at another conference
• Wrote a first draft of the conclusion to the edited volume I've been working on forever
• Made progress on my section of another paper on something else entirely
  

This is all right after submitting a journal article last week. I never really felt like I was working very hard, but it feels like I got an awful lot done in a short period of time. And I never felt like I couldn't get it all done, or that there was an overwhelming amount of stuff that needed doing (which I certainly would have felt not that long ago). It's very nice.

There's one more thing I have that has made a big difference - I recently bought this entire set of CDs. Last year, Chaser posted about the software ChatterBlocker, and I tried it. I liked it a lot. But I usually only used the music track, "Music for Concentration," maybe with some bird or ocean sounds mixed in. Unfortunately the music track wasn't all that long, so I had it in my head a lot and that was irritating. I looked up information about the music and it turns out it was from this Advanced Brain Technologies set of CDs. I bought them all. I have been listening to Music for Productivity today and I will probably go home early because I did so much already.

For awhile, I got caught in the trap of liking to read blogs about getting things done rather than actually getting things done. But that didn't last very long; they got repetitive and I got bored. I did find a couple of nice blogs, though; in particular I like Zen Habits. I've been using one of his big tricks: pick three Most Important Things that you have to do each day, and get them done as early and as quickly as possible. I also try to make myself do the most dreaded of those tasks first. It works very well; I tend to be done with the important stuff before noon. Awesome.

The downside: apparently I feel justified in spending MORE time screwing around on the internet. I cannot seem to make myself unplug. I still compulsively check my email all the time - I just deal with it faster. I love reading about Undine's time away from the internets. Of course, hypothetically I could do that anytime, but I really don't think I could unless I was in a place that looks like this. So far I have been unable to convince Arbitrista. Sigh.

Scheduling writing

I read Paul Silvia’s How to Write a Lot yesterday, and I have to say that I liked it a lot. I’m not in Psychology, but there’s a lot of overlap between our fields so I didn’t have the same objections to it that someone in, say, the humanities might.

His main piece of advice is one that I already knew and already knew works for me, and yet had somehow managed to forget: schedule regular writing time. (I know this doesn’t necessarily work for everyone, but it does work for me.) This is how I wrote my dissertation: four days a week (Tues-Fri: I taught on Mondays and used that day for all class prep) I had to sit at my desk from 10am – noon whether I liked it or not. If I wanted to keep working past 12 I could, but I was under no circumstances allowed to stop before that. I turned off internet access, put on my trusty 500-song dissertation playlist on the iTunes, and I worked. I did my analyses for my dissertation in that time too. None of this prancing around whining about how I can’t write yet because my analyses aren’t finished yet.

So what happened? Why don’t I do this anymore? I think perhaps I felt a bit cocky since I had, after all, written a dissertation and published several papers. Also it seemed harder to schedule time like this when I have managing responsibilities and do a lot of lab work. And I liked to think that I could schedule myself to spend a whole day on a writing task, which of course doesn’t work because I can’t possibly work on the same thing that many hours in a row. I’ve been able to get grants written, but that’s about it – I am having trouble with things that don’t have deadlines.

So this week I am going to go back to my previously successful ways. From 9-11 am, I will turn off the email and the internet and sit at my desk (or somewhere else if I need to get away) and I will write. As Silvia points out, and as I knew when I wrote my dissertation, “writing” here means “anything necessary to get an article written,” which includes data analysis or reading relevant journal articles. I think this is going to work for me.

However, my favorite part of the book comes at the very end. If one schedules writing during the normal workday, then one does not need to work evenings and weekends. He writes:

A writing schedule brings balance to your life – not balance in the pseudoscientific, New Age, self-help sense of wondrous fulfillment, but balance in the sense of separating work and play. Binge writers foolishly search for big chunks of time, and they “find” this time during the evenings and weekends. Bing writing thus consumes time that should be spent on normal living. Is academic writing more important than spending time with your family and friends, petting the dog, and drinking coffee? A dog unpetted is a sad dog; a cup of coffee forsaken is caffeine lost forever. Protect your real-world time just as you protect your scheduled writing time. Spend your evenings and weekends hanging out with your family and friends, building canoes, bidding on vintage Alvar Aalto furniture that you don’t need, watching Law & Order reruns, repainting the shutters, or teaching your cat to use the toilet. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you don’t spend your free time writing – there’s time during the work week for that. (132)

I’m not sure why I needed permission to work the way I want to work (that is, 40 hours a week during normal work hours and no more, damn it!) but I have to say that it feels wonderful to be told that one can be a successful academic this way.

Office space blogging

A looong time ago, this meme went around and I posted a picture of my primary workspace, which was at home. That was back in NYC when I was adjuncting all over the city.

Now I have a job and my very own office! And Geeka posted a picture of her office (and so did Kelly), inspiring me to do it again.

So, I do have an actual office, but it doesn't have a door or a window, and really it's kind of a hole in our basement lab. Here's the entrance (yes, that's data I have up on the wall):

The heater is because my office is absolutely freezing in the winter. There's lots of shelf space, though, which is nice. And a nice big L-shaped desk.

Over in the corner you can see my betta fish, Wallace. He's an essential part of my office - he greets me enthusiastically every morning, and he's an incentive on those days I would rather stay in bed (because I feel guilty for not feeding him).

The little ledge around the desk is filled with postcards, most of which I bought at museums or places I've traveled, but also postcards mailed to me by friends (you can just see the parrot postcard from StyleyGeek peeking out behind the laptop!). They almost (but not really) make up for not having a window.

It ain't perfect, but it's all mine. I didn't have a desk in grad school (one of the pitfalls of being co-advised by people at two different universities, I guess) and when adjuncting, I had to share. It makes a big difference to have your own space.