Yard Work

Yesterday, I did a helluva lot of yard work. It was a good feeling, actually, for it gave me a chance to spend more time out doors, which is a rare commodity this time of year at the U. I cut the lawn, raked leaves, sketched out and planned for what I will need to paint later this spring/summer (it is unfortunately too cold to paint outside here still), and picked up all sorts of yard debris.

For the last few weeks, I have been tremendously busy... sometimes with b*llsh*t work that is dull and aggravating here at the U (political and administrative crap that is not work writing about), but sometimes with some interesting things as well. I will get to the one especially interesting thing in a moment.

But first, I want to say how I am beginning to see some personal payoff in regards to my purposefully working to extract myself from administrative b*llsh*t and being everyone's "go-to" person to try to solve their problems.  I am seeing a bit of a reshaping of my day and even more important, a reshaping of my time for the things I *DO* relish and appreciate about work.... teaching and research.  I have to keep reminding myself of these benefits so I do not slide back into the old habits of trying to help and fix all the crap.

I am in the beginning stage of what I think *may be*  a truly "revolutionary" undertaking in endocrinology research.  The work I am developing at the moment is not using rats or rodents of any kind, but this time I am working with fruit flies.  The work is highly speculative and a bit out of the normal realm of thoughts on this type of research, but that is part of why it is actually feeling very invigorating to me.  I shall try to develop a post about it with more details in the next few days.

The new Blogger interface is still feeling rather clumsy and uncomfortable for me, but I am slowly making progress in getting used to their new "improvements".

PipeTobacco