Procrastination

I have loads of things to do, samples to be dropped off at the other site, a report to finish and go work in the lab with a coworker at my convenience. Yet none of it sounds appealing right now. So Hi!

My shins are sore today, abs too. Yesterday I got up and took Winny for a run at 6am. I was walking out the door and Leif started wimpering. AB looked at me and told me to go, he would get up with Leif. Wow and yay!

I actually had a really good run for not having run in a few months and only sporadically the last umpteen months. I was thrilled with myself and Winny loved it. However, shins are sore today! I got back and did situps on the big ball, 40 of them. I used to do 120. Hello flabby abs.

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I got an e-mail today from a product line manager. I had approached her, a different one than my normal one, with an idea. She liked it, a lot. It is a fairly novel approach to a complex materials problem. One that, to my knowledge, has not been attempted. I got a coworker to agree to work with me on this... the whole "I would be honored to" one. And then the idea has sat and stewed. I heard nothing from the PLM. My mentor told me to let it rest for a little while, that this PLM has a 3 year old and is busy, but she always follows up. Plus, this call for proposals does not have a close date. Just submit at your convenience at least 6 months before you want to start the work.

This is a new client that no one I know has dealt with before. And the proposal process is a serious p.i.t.a. 5 copies with 8 attachments, etc. It will take some serious time. Time (and money for my time) that I don't have right now.

Anyways, so the e-mail arrived in my box. She gave me money for one week of my time to write and get this proposal out! It sort of made my stomach ache.

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Speaking of PLMs... I met with my regular one last week. I really, really like him. I took him a new idea and he was excited about it. Told me to write up the white paper and submit it. He said it would be a perfect "exploratory" project, BUT the client killed the exploratories this year. So what he expected they will do is simply give me a plus up on my funded project/task and add it as a seperate task.

This bums me out. Yeah, it is funds and would look good on my fact sheet. But the fact that the client tasked my project under a larger one is eating at me right now because I am subject to the PIs recommendations and desires on the task. He is "giving" me a task to manage (how generous). Whoopee. Any thoughts to the fact that I essentially gave you $1.8 million for the next 4 years that your project didn't have before?

Team building is a real big keyword here. We should all build teams, find others strengths, etc. My desire to do this when I continue to have my original ideas funded and pulled away from me and given to someone else to manage because I am "young" is really killing me. My "youthfulness" is routinely cited by the old boys funding network (and some part of me wonders if the old boys network has also noted the fact that I am a woman). The first time this happened was when I was on maternity leave and got a small proposal funded. My team lead told me it was just the roll of the die, I was on maternity leave and the project needed a PI who was there. (apparently interim PI was not considered.) The new PI never took me up on my offer to work on the project and I was too ticked to push it.

Now I see my big project being pulled away. I am not going to let it and I will do my best to push forward on this project and stay involved. But my being just a source of ideas without any real responsibility is starting to irritate. There is a major part of me that is considering not proposing my idea that my PLM loved. Trying to find a different client, something. I just don't know what.

And so goes the politics of science.