My Morning Ride.

WhoCaresAboutTheLostBoysOfSummer
WhenYou'veGotThisWeatherVille


I rode in to work late this morning.

But I have a kinda/sorta almost decent excuse.

Because, as you might suspect (and as my family most certainly knows all too well), it's grant writing season again.

And this time I'm writing two of them.

One project involves a really interesting new approach for my group that borders on immunology, so the learning curve has been steep. Luckily, we're working with an excellent group of collaborators that I have pretty much driving crazy for the last couple of weeks.

How crazy, you might be asking?

Well, if you've noticed how obsessive I can get about particular subjects around here occasionally, just take that obsessiveness and multiply it by, say, a million and you'll have an idea.

Anyway, yesterday was D-Day for getting the science parts of the grants done which meant that there was much caterwauling, figure making, reference checking, and hair pulling as we worked ourselves into a frenzy trying to make the things make at least some sense and get it all down to the character count on the text (go one space over the 25,000 and the bloody software rejects things; there is no room for artistic license here).

All of which led to a longer than usual day (and previous weekend) that involved little more than black coffee and flat food by way of sustenance.

Which is why I, as littler e. would say, pretended it was an 'IPP day' and took my time getting up this morning.

Which meant I didn't get down into the valley, post-Shaughnessy hump, until almost nine.

And by the time I got up onto the top of Lotusland's farthest-most Western plateau fifteen minutes later I could have sworn it was the middle of summer.

Strange days, indeed, for the beginning of fall.


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Image at the top of the post is a sunflower in our backyard...It had blown down in the big storm a few weeks ago, but it survived the propping-up and produced this!
The theory of flat food' is something the then boy genius Mr. Coupland came up with a while back when writing about nerds and coding and all that.
IPP days?....I really have no idea...But they happen once every few weeks (seem to alternate with Pro-D days) and they mean e. gets to go to school about an hour later than usual...I hear about it if I inadvertently wake her up on one of those mornings..
And, no, the grants aren't finished....Now that the actual science is done it will be another couple of days of dealing with all the peripheral 'stuff' that includes: up-to-date CV's; budgets; budget justifications; relevance statements; abstracts, lay summaries; funding comparisons; training expectations, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...The absolute worst (and I mean worst) in these the days of all things digital is getting institutional signatures...In the old days of paper, if you were having problems you would just go the offices of those involved and force them to sign if they were tardy....Now?....It's nothing but ether because getting to the person who actually pushes the buttons on online forms is not necessarily (not ever?) the person whose name you actually type into said form, if you get my bureaucratic driftiness....


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