Sunday, October 5, 2008

Another draft, pets, and vacation time

Things are settling in. I sent off yet another draft of my paper, and now I’m starting to attack the data for the next paper. I hate it. This part is very tedious. I have about 70 folders with 20-100 files each, and all have to be compared and “cleaned.” Check for possible mis-labelings, discrepancies in data, possible errors in sample naming, stuff like that. It takes a long time. Hopefully this time won’t be as bad as for the last paper, since I’ve done it already. And I hope the analysis goes quicker, too. I don’t think it’ll be worth sending it to Molecular Ecology, though, since at the moment it looks to me to be simply a cut-and-dry description of genetic patterns in a recent invasion, comparing central to peripheral pops. Hmm. Well, we’ll see how it pans out. And I’ll just have to nail myself down to the computer during TM’s naptimes.

It’s vacation time in India, so TM’s at home, and the only worktime I have is during nap. Normal routine should kick in after another week, and then there’s another vacation sometime that I don’t remember when or how long it is… ahh well. I just hope I can pull off this PhD thing. It’s really irritating to have to keep plugging away at things that seem to show very very very slow progress. At least soon we’ll have a paper submitted. I just hope we don’t have to resubmit it… it’d be lovely if they accept it with only minor revisions. We’ll keep the ol’ fingers crossed.

My older sister even read my manuscript and made comments. I’ll take a look at it tomorrow. So nice to have people who can read things like this and critique! My other critics are too busy to really hack it apart, so I’m glad to have someone who’s willing to whack away at it.

Q is on his way to Delhi, again. His company’s having a big shindig up there, and off he goes. He comes back in a couple days, though, and then we’re going off to Coorg for a few days for a holiday! Only the 2nd holiday we’ve had since we were married 8 yrs ago! I’m so excited! We’ll see elephants, eat good food, play in the forest, whatever. Yay! And he needs the break – his body is really starting to wear down under the stress. His company is even cracking down on him, making him stop work for awhile, they’re so worried about him. I’m glad they’re willing to back down a little, ‘cause we’d all like to keep him in good condition for awhile longer…

We still have 2 fish alive, out of 8. I gave 4 away, of which 2 had babies. I’m so glad I gave those away! Yay! The tank’s not “cycling” yet, but I’m hoping it will in a month or two, sigh. Daily water changes ‘till then.

We narrowly escaped buying a puppy this week. I’ve been so lonely, since our neighbor’s been gone for a month, and Vivek was gone, and I’m left alone at home with a sick and/or on vacation 2-yr-old… very very trying. For some reason I thought a pet would help. But here it seems you can only get puppies or kittens, and Q helped me realize that it would really absolutely not help at all. So we’ll all try to be a little more cuddly when we can, and weather the weather. Ride out the storm. Yuppers.


I feel kinda boring today, but figured it was time for another post. So there you have it!

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