New times, new digs

Hello friends!

 

The Spud, Miss Pickle and I were out at the park today, it was a lovely day for a game of Sticks.  But if you are Miss Pickle, every day is a lovely day for sticks.

It has been lovely hearing from many of you either in your blogs, comments or by email.  I am glad many of you are doing well.  My heart goes out to those who have been hit close to home, I send well wishes and will keep you close in my thoughts.

I have been thinking about life in our new reality and decided I want to document these days, because it feels like something good should come out of this.  So, I have opened up a new blog, something I have thought about doing for a long time.  And, I have decided to go transparent, no aliases for myself.

If you are interested in reading the real life and times of Janie Jones, drop me an email and I will send you my new address.

janiejones.greatwhitenorth@gmail.com

Hello 2019!

Greetings!

As expected, when the Christmas and New Years holidays arrived they flew past in a blur of happiness and indulgence.  I can hardly tell you where the first two weeks of January has gone, but my house is still stuck in December.  All the holiday decorations are still up.  I had thought to start the de-Christmasification last weekend, but Leif cut his hand up pretty good, he needed six or seven stitches, and spent the weekend at my place and it was too hard to resist sitting like a slug watching movies and YouTube videos all weekend with him.

But despite the sloth, I am feeling inspired to do a lot of things.  I have many plans in the works.  First, but not least, I am scheduled to finally finish wallpapering the upstairs hall starting this weekend.  And, there’s a 15% off sale at my home improvement store of choice to stock up on any supplies I need, so the Universe is giving me the thumbs up to get off my ass and get the ball rolling.  It will get the same treatment I gave the living room last May, however, a new paint color will be applied.  That green-grey never, ever pleased me.

I hope once that is done I will move on to a few other home improvement projects.  I don’t know why it has been such a hurdle to get things moving on some of the stuff I’ve been wanting to do, especially considering I have most of the supplies already on hand.  But, in a way, once the biggest projects wrapped up and the house actually started to feel like home, I have just had this undeniable urge to enjoy and relax and be without always doing.

Anyway.  I am still with the Mouse Lab.  I still don’t like it much.  I still am working on borrowed time.  Meaning, I still don’t know if I will be employed in the Mouse Lab much past May/June, whether I like working in the Mouse Lab or not.  If the bosslady gets a new grant by then, I’m told I will be kept on and given my long over due raise.  If no new grants are awarded by then, I could very well be sent on my merry way.  So, I am trying not to panic while keeping an ear to the ground and an eye on the horizon in hopes I will find a new science-y job that doesn’t require Mouse Work.  As I really don’t want to be in this particular field of science anymore, whether I’m let go or my position is re-funded almost feels irrelevant to me.  In fact, I’d almost be glad if it wasn’t.  Almost.  As one can imagine it would be considerably better to find a new job sooner rather than later in any case.  Unfortunately, good paying science-y jobs seem about as easy to find as a unicorn and about as easy to catch as a greased pig.

In the meanwhile I am still trying to figure out grad school.  That has been a huge disappointment, as trying to figure out how to pay for it without it taking an impossibly long time to complete or going broke returning full time to get my degree “in a hurry” continues to leave me stymied.  Stymied, for sure but not so much as to give up entirely.  I’m thinking of trying some other programs or going in other directions which offer better financial aid packages.  Just to have options.  And, I suppose if I get laid off from Mouse Lab and I have yet to find the illusive Unicorn Lab or my greased pig catching skills fail me, going back to school full time might be better than being unemployed.  After all, it’s one more option….

Finally, the Spud is supposedly going to come home for High School next fall.  We shall see how this plays out.  I am in the midst of negotiations with how to transport her stuff, what stuff to transport (really she has a full bedroom of stuff already so all she really needs is her clothes), and where to enroll her.  The local public school or a charter school.  Which ever the case, I’m afraid she’s going to have to start growing up quickly.  I don’t have a partner to be home to make sure she’s getting off to the bus on time.  If she misses the bus, I can’t just leave work and go home and get her.  I really hope she’s going to be up to the challenge.  We shall see.

So, there’s a lot of balls in the air in these parts, but despite it all I am currently feeling fairly hopeful 2019 will be a good year.

Hope 2019 is treating you all well!

 

An interesting series of thoughts

So yesterday, I suddenly felt like running.  And not just a little trot to look like you are hurrying, but a full out urge to pump those stumpy little legs of mine as hard as I could.

It got me thinking.  Although it might sound scary, I actually do a lot of thinking.  Too much thinking, I’m sure, because it’s always rather fruitless thoughts that leave me worried, vexed or dissatisfied.  Mostly I’m always thinking how to manage on a limited budget, how to get everything done before I’m exhausted, or how to make it through the tedium of a job that makes me very miserable.  These are seldom lines of thought that lead to anything uplifting.

But in the past few days I’ve started applying for new jobs and ways to make it work to go back to school for my graduate degree.  I think, perhaps, all those annoying applications are making me feel a little better about myself and all the things I have done, have learned and can do.  Perhaps it’s good therapy.  Because for the last year and a half I’ve been trying to convince myself to be grateful for a job that is respectable but yet is contrary to every fiber of my being.

I like to make people happy, I like to nurture things and make everything feel good.  But my professional life revolves around seeing how much pain innocent little mice can withstand and then eventually putting them down and harvesting their organs for molecular assays.  It’s ghoulish, soul crushing work for me.  And, the longer I am here the less respect I have for myself and the work our lab does because, I think, it goes against my basic instincts.

Don’t get me wrong, I logically know that the sacrifice is going to help better understand how to treat people with chronic pain and diabetes.  But, as valuable as it is, it is really, really hard for me to do and not think about how it must feel to be a lab mouse.

Anyway, I also have begun to have some other thoughts about my boss, which I am getting more concerned about.  Normally I read people really well within a short period of time, but there are a few personality types that trick me.  I think hers is a passive aggressive type that has been messing with my brain, and causing me to lose confidence in myself and my perceptions.  Today was the light bulb day, when I finally accepted the suspicions which have been nagging at me.  A little thing happened which caused the doubt to dissipate.

I could still be losing my mind, but at least I once again am trusting myself.  I haven’t trusted myself in about 4 months.  I don’t know why I lost it initially, but, I do suddenly feel a sense of clarity I haven’t known in all that time.

So, while I still don’t know exactly how I’m going to effect a change in my circumstances, I now feel totally at peace with myself and confident that forging ahead in a new direction is the right thing and the necessary thing to do.

 

Bit on the ass by the cold, dark side of practicality

First the apology.  This is where I bitch about my life.  I figure I haven’t’ done that much lately, so you might have forgotten who the real Janie Jones is.

I really don’t want to go to work today.  I’d much rather stay home and make cheesecake or paint my living room.

Instead I have to go give diabetic drugs to mice and take photos of their nests.  Which, I admit, is better than the days when I have to overdose them on morphine and poke them in their feet, or harvest their organs.  But, in any event, it’s not at all the kind of thing one gets a spring in their step over.

I knew there was a reason I spent 5 years of my life and an obscene amount of money on going to college to get a science degree: to still not like to get up and go to work while only barely make enough to live on.

The other day I was watching Flea Market Flip on Hulu.  I watched someone spend $825 on an old wrought iron sewing machine stand painted orange and turned into a table with 4 rickety-ass looking orange chairs.  Who makes this kind of money where they can buy over-priced shit like this and not bat an eye?  What do they do for a living?  Seriously, I need to know what kind of soul crushing job I need to get so I can have that kind of disposable cash.  I mean, I already have a soul crushing job, I at least could get paid stupid amounts of money if I’m going to feel miserable every day anyway.

Let’s just say this.  I do understand that animal models are the most significant and accurate way to test some stuff that will truly better our medical knowledge and I do like having drugs and medical procedures that are vastly improved this past few decades.  However, as hypocritical as it may sound, I personally did not want to be the person in the trenches.  So while logically I accept the dark necessity, I am not handling it well emotionally.

Add to that the frustration of poor health and getting up every day to go to work is a challenge.

Add to that the challenge of knowing that I can’t just quit because decent paying jobs are very hard to come by, and as morally and emotionally wearing as my job is, I have no where else to go that will be enough to pay my bills.  One wants to be grateful for what one has, but damn, sometimes it’s tough.

I have been thinking a lot about getting my master’s degree so hopefully I can get out of the mouse lab.  But, my original plan hit a financial snag.  If I don’t come up with a new way to fund my degree I don’t know if I will be able to make a go of it.  What ever I do, I have to be very careful not to sink more money I don’t have into another degree that might end me up no better than I am now.

I kinda hate to be that person that says I told you so, but this is exactly the reason why I didn’t do traditional college when I was a traditional college age person.  High risk and low reward.  At least for people like me, college doesn’t pay.  I’m smart enough to aspire but not cleverly genius or curiously driven enough to really excel.

And you know what really sucks?  I finally am in a home I like and living in a town I like and have good friends.  But 5/7ths of my week is becoming so miserable I can’t enjoy the fruits of my labor.

Dammit.  I better get my ass moving or I’ll be late.

 

 

 

 

Do you ever wonder?

So I have a class this spring where I have to read some historical fiction novels about epidemics. To hopefully ease into the spring semester, I read one of the books already. It is “Nemesis” by Philip Roth.

As literature goes, it was okay. Not great, but okay. I liked the first half pretty well, but then the author does something with the main character I did not particularly like. Whatever. It was a short book and read quickly.

What did stand out though was that throughout the novel, which is set in during WWII, the characters refer to Frigidaires. Not refrigerators, but Frigidaires. Now, where I come from we pronounce Frigidaire as fridge-id-air. However, though I am familiar with the brand, I don’t recall ever actually seeing a Frigidaire brand refrigerator in anyone’s home before. Weird? Yeah, probably.

I have often wondered why where I grew up people called refrigerators “fridges” despite the fact that it’s not really short for refrigerator. For as long as I can remember I would try to phonetically spell refrigerator as refridgerator even though there’s no “d” in refrigerator. Although I know this now, I still sometimes try to spell it that way. But, since reading this book I wonder if the slang “fridge” didn’t come from a bastardization of Frigidaire instead of refrigerator.

So, are you all wondering why the H-E double hockey sticks I am babbling on about this?

Good question.

I have no good answer. I’ve just been thinking about it.

You’re a Wonder, Wonder Woman

 

 

Just call me Dr. Jones. Some day. Maybe.

So, today was a hallmark date.

I officially began my graduate school application process.  It took the better part of the day.  I had to dig up unofficial transcripts from high school and 4 different colleges I’ve attended over the years.  I had to fill out a ton of forms, write an essay about why I want to get my PhD, another about what qualities I would bring to the graduate school, and I had to send letters to people asking for recommendations.  Before I can complete my application I need to get my GRE scores and I need to get confirmation that the people who I ask for recommendations are willing to give them.  Then, I send $75.  If the graduate school thinks I am worthy, then I have to get all official transcripts from my high school and all the 4 colleges I’ve attended sent in.  After that, if my official transcripts confirm I’m still worthy, by April I should know if I will be allowed to torture myself for another 3-5 years in pursuit of my PhD.

It is sort of daunting.  I have to admit, there have been a lot of days in the past year or so when I have doubted whether I want to commit to more time in school.  I don’t really know what I’m getting myself into.  Most people say it’s tough.  Then again, calculus was tough.  Physics was tough.  I’ve been on the tough circuit this past couple of years.  I haven’t always performed as brilliantly as I’d have hoped, and I am quite tired.  As Forrest Gump would say, “I’m kinda tired.  I think I’ll go home now.”  But I have no home to go to, so I guess I might as well keep on running this race and, in just a few more years I could hold the ultimate academic title.  Knowing I am this close, I don’t think I could be satisfied with not going the full distance if the powers that be in the admissions office will let me in.

And I think they will.  I mean, I just have this feeling.  I hope it’s not bullshit, but I do think I could do well in graduate school.  I don’t know why I feel this way exactly.  I just really think this is what I’m supposed to do.  Sure, I don’t know everything.  I certainly haven’t maintained that A average.  But I have yet to give up, and science is 90% being too stubborn to quit even when you have no clue what you’re doing- yet.  That’s the beauty of being a scientific researcher.  You don’t have to know everything.  If you did, you wouldn’t have a job anymore.  Research in science is all about not letting what you don’t know stop you.  You learn along the way, and the more you learn, the more you realize there’s a ton you don’t know, and so you do more research.

And “we” don’t know a lot of things yet about Lyme disease and the bacteria responsible for it.  I can do a lot toward a doctoral dissertation studying them little bugs.

So, cross your fingers for me.  Pray I don’t have to blog 5 months from now that I’m a washed out, has been, PhD wannabe.

It would be way cooler if some day you could be telling all your friends you read the blog of the famous Dr. Jones who discovered a way to prevent Lyme Disease and cure chronic Lyme Disease back when she was a strung out, neurotic undergrad.

Heh.  Paging Dr. Jones….