My Least Favorite Weekend

My current work arrangement has me working two weeks of each month from Atlanta and two weeks of each month from Houston. Despite seemingly splitting each month in half, I effectively spend one weekend a month in Houston and three in Atlanta, not counting traveling in and out. The first weekend in Atlanta (somehow this is "weekend 1" in my mind) is my favorite. We often don't schedule much because we don't quite know when I'll be arriving. Weekend 1 is relaxing and I have two whole weeks of being home to look forward to. Weekend 2 is my second weekend in Atlanta and it's almost always packed with seeing all the friends we want to see and doing all the things we want to do. There's nothing relaxing about it but it's great none-the-less.

This weekend is weekend 3. Regardless of what we have going on (and this weekend's plans are pretty great), it's my least favorite weekend. In my mind, it's not weekend 3, it's leaving weekend. By Friday, I'm looking at what I'll need to pack up, even though it's very minimal. By Saturday, I'm asking myself why I keep dragging myself back and forth between Houston and Atlanta. I know that I'll be bribing myself to get moving on Monday morning (at 5am) with a treat on the way to work.

It's alright though because the next weekend is weekend 4. Weekend 4 is pretty great. I get to catch up with friends in Houston that I feel like I haven't seen in way too long. I sleep in. And, best of all, it's only five days until I get to go home again.

Lent and Loss

Two days before Lent began this year, we lost our precious cat MT to complications from heart disease. He was six years old and we didn't even know he was sick. Instead of giving up soda or going to daily Mass, my Lent became wholly focused on mourning. It was seasonally appropriate and I had no energy for anything else anyway. I thought the whole process would feel productive come Easter- that there would be some peace to be found on Easter morning. I rarely use the word "optimistic" to characterize myself but my hopes for Lent and for Easter were definitely optimistic.

So let's back up two months. I had flown home to Atlanta for the weekend on a whim to attend a friend's birthday party as a surprise. Everything at home was just fine- including our cats MT and Kaylee. I caught an early Sunday morning flight back to Houston for another week of work. Just hours later, my husband was calling to say that MT had collapsed, that he couldn't move his back legs, that they were going to the emergency vet. Hundreds of miles away, I did the only things I could think of- I prayed and I Googled. I was in the middle of Mass, where I had made a special exception from my normal routine and brought my phone in just in case there was news, when I next heard anything. We hadn't known MT had a heart condition, he hadn't shown any signs, but it was pretty advanced. A blood clot was obstructing the arteries to his legs (a saddle thrombus) and he was in congestive heart failure. The vet suggested that I fly back as soon as possible.

As soon as Mass finished, the couple I am currently staying with packed me a dinner and drove me to the airport. All I can say is that caring for people is always among the most meaningful things a person can do but that caring for someone in a bad situation takes on special significance and meaning. I won't drag readers through what the next excruciating hours were like for us. I do owe thanks to a handful of friends who were on hand to offer emergency advice and input, even if it meant getting dragged out of bed to do it. We kept our baby boy as comfortable as possible while trying any avenue open to us and to him. Aside from giving us some small peace of mind that we had tried everything we could, that we had gotten second and third opinions, it was all for naught.

I'd like to say that there was some silver lining in the whole thing. That at least my husband and I were together. That at least our baby boy was not alone. That at least there were not months of suffering. Absolutely none of it makes me feel any better though. Not everyone feels so strongly about their pets but, to us, MT was a child, our child. Not a day goes by that I do not feel like I am walking around missing something essential, like there is a hole in me.

I don't share all of this for extra sympathy and indeed that whole conversation makes me a little uncomfortable. I share it because it is a thing that happened and I'd rather write about it here than talk about it. I also share this because we cannot know what the people we encounter are dealing with at any given point in time. These last two months have been a powerful reminder of that. And yet, without knowing the backstory, we still have to interact with people all day, every day. At a time when I struggle to have patience, to be kind, to not be angry, I also remember why these things are so incredibly important.

Like all loss, time will ameliorate this one but it hasn't happened yet.

Eight years of waiting

My husband has been considering what his next car will be for as long as we've been dating. If you aren't sure, that would be 8 years. He's been saving money for the "next" car for at least the last 4 years. I've lost count of the number of auto shows, showroom visits, and test drives that have gone towards this endeavor. In the beginning, it was fun to think about in a "sometime in the future" way. A few years in, it became a more serious undertaking and I found myself getting invested in each of the cars on the list. A few years after that, I had more or less given up on a new car materializing. I was worn out from the search years before it was over and, by this year, just nodded and (sometimes) smiled when a new option was raised. Mostly I was just hoping it would all get wrapped up soon.

In the end, it all happened far quicker than I would have guessed. After (truly) exhaustive research, we are now the proud owners of a Tesla and are learning about the (frequently weird) switch from gas to electric cars. For starters, it's a lot quieter. Though, compared to the 2003 Mustang with the extra-loud, after-market exhaust system, that was pretty much a guarantee for almost any new car. I'm not sure it has fully sunk in that we will not need to be stopping at gas stations any time soon though my husband has already noted the days he would usually be stopping to fill up. (Not to worry, my Subaru will keep making routine gas stops.) In the meantime, neither of us has any intuitive sense of what a "good" Watt-hours per Mile (WhpM) rate is - something that will take a while to get used to after a lifetime of considering MpG.

My husband has also now gained bragging rights to the nominal title of "best environmentalist in the house," leap-frogging any of my efforts to compost, recycle, and reuse. If I was still living in the UP and bike commuting, I could probably maintain the lead in this household not-a-competition-competition but there's no way for me to manage bike commuting in my current circumstances in TX (I checked). I walk to the grocery store... does that count?

All joking (and Tesla shaped keys) aside, from a technological perspective, the car is really cool. For starters, the largely touch screen based interfaces make me constantly re-think the definition of "car." The driving itself is incredibly smooth and my husband has not yet stopped being as excited as a child on Christmas morning about the acceleration. Especially considering my day job, which involves a lot of LiDAR data collection, analysis, and processing as well as other forms of remote sensing, the technology and algorithms that drive the car's autopilot fascinate and excite me like a child on Christmas. The system has definite limitations but seeing all that technology realized in the day to day world is amazing.

Also the key is indeed really cool. Apparently, we're both five years old at heart.

Unexpected and Uplifting

We sold our home in Texas back in August 2017. At the time, I had six months remaining on my contract at University of Houston. Some good friends of ours were nice enough to take me in and give me a place to live for the duration. Back in August, I was optimistically sure that I would find a job long before the end of January. By Christmas, I was beginning to accept that I wouldn't be relocated to Atlanta by the new year.

Fortunately (or unfortunately), I was offered a contract extension for six months and my boss was willing to let me work two weeks of each month remotely. I was genuinely torn between wanting to move to Atlanta and live full time in my own house with my own family and wanting to continue with a job that I really enjoy. I decided to take the contract extension, which left me needing to find a new place to live. I considered getting my own apartment, which sounded really nice in quite a few ways. All of our furniture and kitchen supplies had long been relocated to Atlanta though so I knew that option was possible but impractical.

Another close friend offered me a quick save when they found me a place to live with another woman who was married and living apart from her spouse for a while. The opportunity seemed too good to pass up with one unfortunate downside- the new arrangement would move me across town, over an hour away from the SE Houston area I had lived in since 2015. So, with no small degree of sadness, I let my friends in the area know. I also let the volunteer group I've worked with since 2015 know that I wouldn't be around anymore for routine activities.

By 12 hours after my "last" volunteer meeting, I had received no less than four offers for places to live. I was floored. I was stunned. There was crying involved. Most of all, I was panicked. In true 'me' fashion, I didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings and also wanted to work out what would be best for me. In the end, I took up one of the offers from a fellow volunteer.

At risk of repeating myself, this transition has been really difficult. It's been tough emotionally, mentally, and even physically, especially when I'm bouncing from place to place, getting little sleep and plenty of germ exposure. Being surrounded by so many amazing people in both Houston and Atlanta though has made it easier every step of the way. That was certainly true before my most recent move but it was really driven home for me in the face of so much generosity.

Science Fails

There is a lot of good science out there and often I finish reading a paper feeling proud and impressed by what researchers have done. They can't all be winners though. I am currently involved in writing a review paper. For anyone not familiar with that terminology, a review paper covers a large swath of material within a sub-discipline. It's a little bit like a summary paper- it summarizes the work of a lot of people and (hopefully) puts all the research in perspective. A review paper, then, involves reading a LOT of other papers. My last review paper had a reference list that exceeded 20 typed pages.

For the current review that I am working on, I have already read roughly 40 papers. It can get a little (or a lot) tedious and is a type of work that I prefer breaking up into manageable chunks with time for "real" research activities in between each piece. Anyway, none of that is really important. When you read a lot of papers, you are bound to come up with a few that are not winners. I have been so amused by these that I decided to blog about them so that, hopefully, you can be amused by them too.

I'll leave any identifying information off of the blog. The works referenced below are not bad works. Sometimes in science, you have to prove something very obvious so that you can take that information and use it in a more in-depth study later on. I myself have had to write some obvious statements in papers because sometimes it is what is called for to prove your point. So, these are not bad works. The authors are not bad scientists. The science in their papers did move their respective fields forward. But WOW were there a few noteworthy, less-than-brilliant, conclusions in the bunch. So, without further ado, I present you the most winning science I've encountered recently.

More snow takes longer to melt.

Inter-tree distances increase following wildfires.

Just remember, you read these breaking, newsworthy assertions here first (probably, unless you've also read these remarkable pieces of human ingenuity).

Well Meant, Poorly Executed

Let's categorize my current situation as special. I am in a position where it is far easier to get a job if I have a job to begin with. That statement could easily apply to people in any number of careers but tends to be especially true in an academic setting where much of my suitability in the job market stems from having published papers and submitted proposals recently. So, after much conversation and debate, both I and my husband have agreed that, while living apart is difficult, it is the best choice for the long run. We reevaluate our decision frequently.

Last month, at a conference for work, it came up a few times in conversation that I am looking for a new position in a different city to accommodate my spouse's career. While horror was not the universal response, it was the predominant one. At one point, I was discussing my situation with another female scientist who immediately asked why I was "throwing away my career to live with my husband" with a look on her face that I will never forget. She, I was informed, had lived in a different state from her husband for years. I am sure that she was trying to be supportive. Somehow. The whole encounter made me feel awful and gave me plenty of food for thought.

Plenty of research groups, advocacy groups, and individuals are busily trying to assess why women are getting PhD's at the same rate as men (in many, though certainly not all, fields) but there are still far fewer female faculty than there are male faculty. It is certainly a complex issue and I have no intention to even try to fully address it here. However, the attitude that the female scientist embodied, that I have been faced with more times than I have bothered to count, probably doesn't help. I would like to believe that she thought she was encouraging me, a young scientist, to pursue my own career. Her attitude though was dismissive of my relationship, my spouse, and my feelings. It did more to discourage me than it did to encourage me. Her immediate, uninformed, assumption that both I and my husband value his career more highly than mine (we don't) was infuriating and embarrassing.

There is a flip side to this coin (story) though. Last week, I was sent a series of emails from a well meaning friend asking why I hadn't just quit my job yet so that I could go live with my husband. I was informed that it would be the better decision for us regardless of what I or my husband thought. They were, again, probably well meant. I struggled to not reply sarcastically or in anger. I was, in fact, somewhat boggled as to how to reply. It took me a whole 24 hours. While it was the most aggressive instance of this I have encountered, it was far from the first.

I remain thankful for all of our friends who understand that we are currently doing our best in a less than ideal situation. I am especially thankful that most of my actual colleagues understand that I'd like to have a good, challenging job and also be able to live with my spouse. I am always open to talking with people about their opinions and, especially, their similar experiences. My family's decisions might not be someone else's though and that's okay.

Goodbye to 2017

I can't say that I'm sorry to see 2017 go. In so many ways, it's been a great year. It's certainly been an exciting one. We hit the ground running last January (figuratively, not literally) with my knee surgery and my husband's new job. It seems like one thing after another since then. A year ago today, my outlook for 2017 was that it would be a quiet year. I expected we'd settle more into a routine in our still new home in Houston and maybe tackle a renovation project. We had exciting plans to re-finish our garage. Obviously, that all went out the window with our relocation back to Atlanta. Suddenly we were putting our house back on the market and living long distance yet again. 2017 hasn't been quiet or peaceful. It's been exciting and distressing and a lot of things in between.

We're roughly eleven months into our relocation and there is no clear end in sight. At times the process has made me feel incredibly isolated and alone. I've been unable to find a new job that will allow me to move and have been unwilling to give up a job and a career I love. We are making it work to the best of our abilities. On the flip side, I have been incredibly supported by close friends and family who have been doing everything in their power to make this transition easier on me, on my husband, and on us and our cats as a family. So it's safe to say that 2017 was difficult and stressful but that we were also incredibly blessed.

As we say goodbye to the year and I hope for a smoother 2018, two quotes rattle around in my head, giving me hope for the year ahead.

"Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: You don't give up." Anne Lamott

Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten." G.K. Chesterton (This quote is paraphrased but it is a popular paraphrasing of the original and it is my favorite variant.)

I hope, if you're reading this (or even if you're not), that your 2018 has had more ups than downs, more triumphs than failures. Regardless of what 2017 looked like, I hope your 2018 is even better yet.