Quick 1-night visit to Portland for committee meeting

I just got back from a whirlwind visit to Portland, Oregon. I loved flying in on the plane from Burbank, seeing the green trees. There were no leaves, no, the trees were green with moss, lichens and fungus. It was cloudy and drizzly. I love it! Nothing against Southern Cal, which I admit has quite a bit of charm with its snuggly warm sunny days, but I love the Northwest.

I flew in, then helped a visiting prospective graduate student find her way around, then had a meeting with my committee. Those meetings simply scare me for some reason. I don’t seem to be able to express myself well in front of them. They had a lot of helpful comments, though, and were not necessarily antagonistic, just, oh what’s the word, intense. It’s great to have a group of people intensely interested in what you’re doing, but for some reason I always feel like I’m about to do something wrong. Silly me. They agreed with my dissertation plan, which goes something like this:

Chapter 1: Introduction to dispersal and gene flow, from an article I have in press with Elsevier in their upcoming Encyclopedia of Ecology.

Chapter 2: Genetic marker development methods paper for my project, in press with Molecular Ecology Notes

Chapter 3: Oregon-wide dispersal/gene flow patterns for Brachypodium sylvaticum

Chapter 4: A small-scale analysis of a group of populations near Sweet Home (this is the one I’m currently getting ready to publish)

Chapter 5: Outcrossing data. I haven’t looked at this data much in-depth yet, but we have data from field-collected progeny that could be quite interesting. We’ll see.

I’m glad they liked my plan, and they’re not against me continuing to work long-distance, even if it’s from India. They’re very supportive, which is great! I’d like to meet with them again before we leave, maybe on a 1&1 basis. We’ll see if I can pull that off.

We had a fun lab party in the greenhouse and some of the other faculty showed up. I simply love our lab parties! Hot Lips pizza, which is simply scrumptious, some sushi made by a lab member, salad, chocolate, beer (Sprite for me), and wonderful company.

I spent Saturday morning with my former undergraduate, hacking away at some analyses for the paper we're working on. There's so much more to do! But we'll just keep working at it and hope for the best. Flew out in the afternoon after a lovely buffet lunch at House of India or something like that, and got home around 9pm to an ecstatic TM.

TM did great staying with my aunt and uncle. My mom even came to play with her on Saturday, which she really loved. But it was very very difficult for me to be away from her for so long, knowing that neither my husband nor I would be around. For some reason that just made it very difficult. I still have a tic in my right eyelid from the combined stress of everything. Hopefully it’ll go away soon.

Now all I have to do is manage to get our visas so we can ship our stuff to India (I didn’t know we had to have visas before shipping), get our current manuscript submitted to a journal for publication, and finish the 3 native plant garden projects that are jumbling around in my head.