Temporary Shower

Happy New Year! It has been so nice coming home to family/friends after a vacation away. I have decided nobody should come home from a vacation just to start working right away! Dave and I celebrated Christmas with my family and his. We had several game nights (one more to come tonight) and we ate a lot. In the words of my sister, we have gained a “layer of winter fat”. Here are some pictures from Costa Rica So much eating every day!!! Weirdo and her boyfriend Too fat for a two-piece haha Sad to leave I have slowly started to study again but I really have very little motivation. After getting some rest and reflecting back on the last few weeks, I think I was definitely burned out. I really am not doing too bad overall but I think I could afford the break I talked about in my last post. Haha….the competitive side of me still wants to regain my motivation and try for honors in surgery but I think for my mental health in the long run, I should probably slow ...

I have been thinking about what to write but nothing is coming up. I have a loooonnnng laundry list of things I need to do but I can’t seem to cross even one thing off my list. This is mostly because I am dependent on some other people for most of these things but it is driving me crazy. Amongst the things I need to do are some more research papers. I am trying to collaborate with some ophthalmologists to beef up my resume but one of my experiments fell through this week (because the samples were bad) and the other one is stalled because I have to meet with the PI to go through the data. Blah I guess I am also a bit nervous because there are so many changes ahead. I will no longer be working in a lab, Dave is changing jobs, I will be married soon, and I won’t be able to travel as much. So much change in a short amount of time makes me really nervous. OK...enough compliant.  Some developments: I celebrated my 28th birthday! Eeek I feel old. Dave and I went to Ikea ...

It looks like I am only managing one post per week these days but it is better then nothing so it will have to do. I have been busy…with work, friends, etc. On Saturday, I went to the gym and then went to work for a few hours. I had a meeting with my boss to go over the manuscript I am about to submit. It was actually a very productive meeting. My boss is a strategic thinker and we were able to hash out the weaknesses in my paper and how to better improve it so that it has a chance of being reviewed. For those that don’t know, a good scientific article must stand the rigors of pure review. You usually try to send it to a high impact journal (aka…those with good impact factors), and then you wait to see if it will be reviewed. For journals like Nature and Cell, only about 10% of papers submitted will be reviewed and out of those, only a handful is actually accepted. If you do have the privilege of having a paper reviewed, you wait for 2-3 reviewers to read it and send the edit...

Since I can't sleep (side effect of napping from 7-12pm) I decided to read some of my past posts and I realized I've been kind of depressed. Sorry about that. It's unbelievable to me how hard these past eight months have been! The rewards of science are few and far between and people who survive either feed off of small successes (in hopes of bigger ones of course) or they just have a more stable personality then I. I've never thought about quitting anything more then I have thought about quitting this. Even today, I cried, laughed, made an advance in my project, and still don't feel very accomplished. I think I need to learn not to tie my self esteem to my job. The thing is, I don't have much else right now. My friends/family are busy and they have enough of their own problems to deal with so here I am depressing you every time I blog. In case you think I'm manically depressed, I have found avenues to destress: of late, I've been cooking A LOT. Here ...