Return of the blog...

...At least temporarily. A lot of things have happened:

I have a Ph.D. now.
I got a job at Harvard.

Well, I guess those are the biggest things.

How do I feel about leaving Boulder? Well, not that bad. It's not a bad place to spend five and a half years. But it always felt like a temporary stop for me.

I'm going to miss the friends that I made there. I'm sad that I won't get to see them graduate. But I hope that I'll see them again soon.

Once again, I'm completely unprepared for Christmas. But this year I have an excuse, since I've spent the past few weeks finishing my work, attending graduation ceremonies, packing, and moving. Ugh.

Merry Christmas and all that.

Potential energy

I've been hesitant to write in here for a while, since what has been on my mind most lately has been the future. I have a number of potential job options for next year, but nothing has been decided yet (I still have a few interviews), and I don't want to talk about what I'm going to do until I know what it is I'm going to do.

So I guess you could say I'm in a position of high potential energy, and I'm just waiting for the opportunity to convert that into kinetic energy and move on with my life.

Which isn't to say that I haven't been doing anything. I've been working on my thesis since the beginning of summer, and am a little more than halfway done. I can't finish it until I do some more lab work, but I can't do that lab work until I hear back from some collaborators, so in the meantime, I'm trying to write as much as I can. One of my professors told me that your thesis work shouldn't depend on someone else's productivity, and I think he was right. I really don't like not having control of this situation.

I also don't have complete control over my second paper, since I am waiting for M and M to finish their part of the work. I'm sure that will get done, though, and it doesn't necessarily have to be finished before I defend my thesis. Come to think of it, neither does the other work, so I should probably just stop worrying. If these people don't deliver soon, I can probably just cut my losses and write up what I've done already.

I'm thinking about defending at the end of October. Halloween, maybe? People can wear costumes. Maybe I'll wear bunny ears or something.

So, lots of traveling next month. Even if I don't get the jobs, I'll have had free plane rides.

There are a few weddings coming up, too. So, good things. I should try to cheer up; I've been kind of bummed lately about writing this fellowship application (which is regarding a new project that I don't know much about, and therefore feel like an idiot) and the fact that I don't have control over my work. But overall my life is good, and I should be happy.

Not dead

No, I'm not dead. Nor is the blog completely dead. It was just in a period of stasis.

So, about the paper: it was actually kind of a big deal there for a few days after it came out. Thanks to a press release by the school (which included some generous comments from the institute which has funded us, as well as the chair of my department), the story showed up in a number of science blogs, etc. all over the Internet. Also, the school TV people came to my lab and talked to me, filmed me doing some science-y stuff, and put that on the local station. So all in all, it was a pretty exciting time. When I get bored, I still like to google myself and see if the story has shown up anywhere else. We also made it onto the Wikipedia definition of "ribozyme," which is pretty awesome.

But maybe you already knew some of this, since I was pretty shameless about posting all this stuff on Facebook.

In other news: Paper #2 is almost underway. And after Paper #2 goes out, I'll just have to try to crank out Paper #3 (of which most of the work has already been done), and then my committee will let me write my thesis. I need to get my butt moving. My graduation date is still tentative, but I am really really hoping it will be this year.

And in other news...there is no other news. I've been taking a couple dance classes here and there, and have an orchestra concert next week, but other than that, I haven't been doing much. I haven't really felt like socializing much lately. Maybe it's just a phase.

For real, this time

So, my paper was finally accepted. I should be bouncing off the walls, but really the whole thing was kind of anticlimactic.

Now I'm spending most of my time trying to move forward with the project and figure out when the heck I might graduate.

That's kind of the story of my life, isn't it? Even when I accomplish something, I'm already thinking of the next thing I need to do. I guess it sort of makes sense in this situation, though, since I'd like to graduate as soon as possible and move on to Phase 3(?) of life. Or maybe this will be Phase 4.

Sometimes (okay, usually) I feel like I am living in every possible time of my life except for the present. Maybe I should learn to meditate or something.

Happy New Year

I got the best Christmas present ever, which was comments back from the reviewers. It looks like we just have to make a few revisions, and then the paper will be accepted!

There really should be some more exclamation points there, but at this point I am just kind of tired and impatient about the whole thing.

My brother got me Guitar Hero for Christmas, and now that's all I want to do. I made a band with me, J, and two of my friends from back home and it is AWESOME. I'm really impressed by the way you can change the characters' appearances and also the way they synched up the character movements to every single song. Well done, Guitar Hero people.

I'm a little concerned that I may physically hurt myself by playing too much. It's probably a good thing that I'm leaving for a conference tomorrow.

I am, however, determined to make it through that Peter Frampton song where he makes the guitar talk before I leave.