Tiring week

I have spent much of this week in both a 2 day workshop and a one day review. Phew. I am tired.

This morning just about killed me. The review started at 7:30am, meaning I had to leave home by precisely 7:05am. Which also meant that it was up to Hans to get Leif to daycare. Leif was still sleeping when I left his morning and I am such a sap. It just about killed me knowing that he would wake up and I wouldn't be there. And he would go to the new school (daycare) on his second day without mommy. What in the world am I going to do when I return to the world of business travel that I have so successfully ducked out of for the last year and a half?

Today was excessively boring really, and to be honest I went to the entire review to have my face there. The chairs were uncomfortable, the room was too small, and listening to the repetitive talks was misery. But on my way out with Cari, we were leaving for lunch. Our division director asked if he could join us.

This was quite a privelege and completely unexpected. So Division Director is above my manager who is above my team lead, who is above me. He does know who I am, he was once my manager and was the person who hired me on permanently. But getting face time is difficult.

We had a nice, long lunch. We asked a lot of naive, Scientist 2 level questions, like why does our ALD ask for money and what is that money used for... and what is your role within the management structure really... it was nice. He talked so much that we didn't give him time to eat. We also talked about my background, how I ended up in Reno in grad school, what my research was... etc. I left happy.

This afternoon was nice. I finished up some SDR inputs for fellow staff members. All got glowing reviews for the most part with the token "this could be worked on". I also wrapped up an experiment for my counterpart on my 1831 project. He does the full scale system and I do the bench scale. We commiserated over the fact that our runs are successes. We were both being a little of the paranoid pessimistic type (I am usually just paranoid and not pessimistic) and were concerned that our results were positive because we did something wrong, not because our method actually worked. I was sure I must be dipping my samples in pure water that does nothing, as opposed to HF. So I got smart (gee, I am a chemist afterall) and tested the pH of my HF solution. It was very, very, very acidic. I can now sleep tonight.

Leif's second day at school is today and I am really anxious to go pick him up. Hans is working late tonight again. I am just excited to see Leif awake. I have a bunch of things to take care of tomorrow. I need to go through the final draft of my patent, the lawyer has scheduled the application to take place on Monday. I truly don't know what that means to me other than a date I can put on my contribution report. I have a meeting with a statistician to do some work for me. And I really need to review the proposal I was assigned to review.