Two more chapters to go

It’s early Sunday morning and I’m not supposed to work today. But that’s really hard when I didn’t work yesterday. I admit that I had a few hours of potential work time, but I used them to clean the house, organize TM’s toys, and read some of HP Order of the Phoenix again. So now I’m wishing I had written something. Oh well.

The writing was going well until I decided the chapter was simply boring. Then I wanted to include some phenotypic data. But…after much analyses, it appears that the phenotypic data will stand very well on its own. So now it’s back to genotypic data on its own. I think I’ll build it around bottlenecks, admixture, and dispersal patterns. I forget what the last incarnation was, but hopefully I can hit it again hard tomorrow. It gets frustrating when it takes so long to write a paper! I don’t want this one to take so long. I remember one of my MS advisors could write a paper in a weekend. Well, she has a lot more practice than I do, I guess. Still, it’s frustrating. I just want to finish this dumb thing!

TM grabbed the stove burner a couple weeks ago… her thumb was one big blister and she cried for about 8hrs straight, despite the constant ice bath. Now you can’t even tell it was there! Kids sure heal fast.

I’m waiting to hear back from reviewers about my last manuscript. Fingers are crossed. I really don’t want to do major revisions again, but with my luck, that’s what it’ll be. No, no, positive thinking! It’ll be fine! Sometimes I’m a bit of a depressionist.

The last two nights I gave up putting TM to sleep and just went to sleep myself. I don’t know when she finally went to bed…but now she has a cough and is complaining of being sick, which probably means she’s sick. Do I brave the Bangalore traffic today for church? Do I just go for the first hour? What are the chances she’ll throw up in church? I guess I’ll have to wait ‘till she gets up to know. At least she’s still sleeping (6:40am), ‘cause she certainly needs it, especially if she’s sick. Not the best time for me to give up on getting her in bed, but I thought it was better to give up than to let my blood pressure keep rising, which is what happens…Hey, she probably got to sleep at the same time she would’ve if I were fighting with her the whole time, yesno?

We’re having some people over for dinner today. I hope we have enough food for them. And I hope they don’t expect wine or anything, ‘cause that’s probably a let-down for most people when they come here (we don’t ever have any). And the coffee/tea is a problem for most people, too, since we don’t know how to make it, though I keep a stock for my mother-in-law when she comes to visit. Ouch. Well, we’ll figure it out.

The house is a mess, of course, which is what happens after a day of being at home with a 3-yr old. But today’s Sunday and it’s our cleaning lady’s day off, so hopefully Q will step in and help out. If not, hey, I don’t mind having people see the house in its natural state. No major skin off my back. I hope.

I tried running SAS and after about 20 minutes, gave up. I’m used to SPSS, and SAS is rather different. Luckily, my advisor picked up the pieces and ran the analyses for me. Yay! He’s great. It was his fault that now, I’m considering writing 2 pprs instead of 1. But I stink at writing, and it takes me forever, so I’m not really happy about that. Oh well. What can ya do.

Hope everyone has a great day!

Manuscript drama, TM's hair, Mormon friends leaving

I haven’t updated in SO long!

Summarizing my paper timeline: in Nov 2008, I submitted to Molecular Ecology. In Feb 2009 they told me they didn’t want to see it again, thank you very much. I spend the next 4 months playing with TM during summer school and occasionally working on rewriting the paper, while also working on analyses for my current paper. TM’s been in school since June 1st, and I finally got another draft finished. It really looked like it should still go to Molecular Ecology, so after talking to my committee and advisor, I begged the editor to reconsider our manuscript. The editor said okay! So I just resubmitted the whole shebang again. It’s quite a bit different than the original, so I don’t mind calling it a new manuscript. Here’s hoping!

There are problems with me graduating – they want me to sign up for a credit every single term, which is impossible, and I haven’t done it. I don’t think it was a requirement before. And it seems I never turned in my form for my prospectus defense. And I didn’t take any 603 credits, only 601 (they’re the same in practice, but not on paper). My amazing advisor is trying to fix it. It would be SO sad not to finish after ALLLLLLLL this work!!! And it’s not just physical work, it’s the mental constantly-thinking-of-school that wears you down! What analysis to do next, what writing needs to be done, etc etc etc. I sure hope he can pull enough strings to get me finished.

After looking and looking and looking at the data I have left, I think it should go into 2 more papers. I thought I could squish them into one, but it won’t work. So I’ll just do the genetic analyses right now, get it written up ASAP (Dec would be a good target), then write up the outcrossing/ greenhouse experiment as another paper. Sigh. My advisor wants me to defend in June. I could do that. I was hoping for December, but I can go with what he says, that’s not a problem. He’s one of those people who’s generally right, anyway.

I need to update my website, too – it’s been years and years since I did that. Sigh. How embarrassing. I don’t like it when people’s websites are out of date, and here I am, doing the same thing!

TM’s hair was long enough to go into nice cute ponytails, but she asked me to cut it off and I acquiesced. It gets so hot in the sun, and she sweats so easily, and she’s always pulling out her ponytails, that I figured she might as well go short-haired like the other girls in her class. She sure looks cute with short hair!

My Mormon friends are leaving! Sigh! There was one other Mormon family in our complex (WOW), and they’re moving back to the US. Such a nice family! The mom is half Panjabi and the dad is from Belgium. The 3 kids are 10+, and they’re the nicest people you’ll ever meet. I don’t often really miss people when they leave or when I leave, since I do it all the time, but I think I’ll actually miss them. Aside from the fact that they’ve been giving TM and me rides to church every Sunday, I actually like them LOL. The dad is a plant geneticist, and the mom did her MS with my same advisor at BYU! She also did a summer at Yellowstone, just like me (only she was playing clarinet in a chamber group), and does editing work sometimes. Such fun people!

I’m trying to fix my back, getting daily (!) massages. It costs me 250NRP for ½ hr, which is about $5/day at the current exchange rate (thank you, Mac widgets). I think my back’s getting better, but it would get better faster if I didn’t have so much sitting on the floor. Oh well. My masseuse also helps me with my Hindi, which is great! I try to practice with my English-speaking friends, but I think they tire of having to puzzle out what I’m saying in Hindi when we can speak quite well enough in English. Oh well, perseverance! I’d love to be able to speak nice Hindi.

Q works constantly. When he’s in town, we get to see him maybe 20min/day. His mom complains that she never sees him. Well, join the club! At least he enjoys his job, for the first time ever! Hooray! But oh, our taxes. We’re late, we’ll be paying penalties, I have to find out what the max amt was in our India bank accounts (not easy)… oh well.