Today was another one of those days. Started off with a severe cramp in one leg, which got worse through the day, and is only now easing off. Still, I doubt I will hit the gym tomorrow.
Next, I hear from my landlady about extending my lease. These days, I am trying to buy a condo, but haven't had much success. Figured I'd try to get a month-to-month lease. But my landlady's position was that she couldn't let me stay beyond my current lease, which ends June 30, for two reasons: (a) it's hard to rent the apartment in the middle of the school year (fair enough); and (b) she wants to refurbish the apartment in between my departure and arrival of the new tenant. I managed to talk her into letting me stay till July 10. This means I have to find a condo by the first week of June, close on July 1 or 2, and move in the week after that. Do-able...
Except - I might be in North Carolina the end of June/beginning of July for experiments at the EPA! So that's going to be an especially joyous time... Might have to live at an extended-stay hotel for a couple weeks while I find another place, unless things fall into place in June.
Things then got even better. A new policy at work - everybody's documents will be moved to the server, ostensibly for easier back-ups both on- and off-site. This might be OK for most people who just work with M$ Office and kb-sized documents. But I work with data - and GOBS of it. Even with Gigabit Ethernet, I am not sure I trust running my >500 MB Igor experiments, which access GB-sized data files, off the server over the network. [This is not like running experiments on a supercomputer/mainframe - my local CPU will still be running the processes, just transferring *data*, not commands, to-and-from the server.] In addition, if automated, regular back-up was the purpose of this move, I haven't seen anything implemented yet for the TBs of data I have on my desktop and numerous external hard-drives (more like a few hundred GBs, backed up on different hard-drives - I know my s***!) Ended up copying My Documents back to my local computer. Given the slow network speeds, that was a frustrating 3 hours I didn't want to spend today.
Things can't get worse, right? D-oh! I finally get a review on my recent submission, and it seems a nasty one. Though the paper was reviewed internally by 4 other PhDs (including 3 senior scientists/faculty members) before submission, apparently the paper lacks clarity and organization. The reviewer stopped short of rejecting the paper, but at the end of this day, s/he might as well have.
Got back home, tried to watch TV... Can't get my mind off the review. Ended up working on it, taking notes of what I need to do, and found most comments relatively easy to address, even though more data analysis is required. Oh well. At least I feel better now. 12yo Glenfiddich helps.
Maybe I will indeed get a pet soon - a King Charles spaniel, maybe, who loves me unconditionally (except for the food part, of course), irrespective of whether my submissions suck, and will always let me know I am a great guy, with no "but..."
