the wizard of something I suppose

Hello!!!

I'm coming up for air for a brief moment. Here's what's going on. As my faithful readers know, "Wonderboy", who is/was the lead of our small research group, went onward and upward to a temporary (2 year) stint as a science manager up at HQ some time ago.
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brief aside here!!!! During a visit from dear ex-neighbor Brad, recently, we had a big "say hello to Brad and give him lots of hugs (that last part was for me who was missing the brother I never had but ended up in fact having despite his moving halfway across the country)" party at a friend's house and Wonderboy was there. (didja get that last sentence?) Somehow, after several glasses of wine, someone mentioned that I had a blog, which was most interesting to several colleagues, including Wonderboy. In a brief instant of bad-judgement, I TOLD Wonderboy that his pseudonym was, in fact, "Wonderboy." Damned wine. He hasn't mentioned it again, so we're all just pretending it never happened.
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Anyway, as a result of his absence, I've had to take over the position as group "lead" and act as our liason with other groups. We're a very small group (3 people) with a smallish focus, but we're one that does extremely valuable work (in my totally unbiased opinion). As a result of being smallish and in today's climate of drastically dwindling money for atmospheric science research (yes, REALLY, you global warming skeptics!!! News Flash!! There's NO MONEY in this field anymore!), we need to be very careful to keep ourselves visible so we don't get caught in the giant "sucking into the void of no money/no viability" that smallish research groups are often finding is their fate in this science-unfriendly political climate. This, in turn, means that I have found that I must be willing to spend MUCH of my time on doing extra work (on extremely short notice) for other research groups to "prove" how valuable we are. Now these other groups are invariably very nice people, and very polite and kind, and very good scientists. I value and enjoy working with them. I enjoy chatting on the phone with guys from US coast to US coast from universities and government agencies and such. The egotistical side of myself is also loving the fact that they know who I am and know to come to me. BUT.

This ultimately means that my own research has been put on the back burner while I busy myself proving our worth to the research world.


Now I find myself 3 days from leaving for my conference and my talk for said conference is um....not well formed. More accurately, the TOPIC of my talk is not well formed. Yikes. I have officially but politely held off further requests for model runs by saying we really "MUST" talk about it in San Francisco, I have some great ideas about your work, so let's wait until then, yada yada yada. Meanwhile I am breathing into paper bags and banging my head onto each and every desk in the house and office while desperately trying to retain an air of confidence and "can-do" attitude to keep myself from dissolving into tears. I'll get about 1 hour of Wonderboy's time tomorrow while I'm putting in an extra day of work. I'm trying not to think about actually having to stand in front of my colleagues and say "Um....hi! You all are so pretty!" It'll happen. It always does. Right? I wonder what people would do if I got up there and cried? I could show pictures of my kids or talk about our latest PTA fundraiser.

So today as I was busy spending 5 hours doing what I thought would take 30 minutes, I was briefly thinking about how much I love my work. Seriously. This stuff makes me so happy. I *HEART* my work. I wonder if people know how incredibly UN-romantic science can be and if they really understand how it can be so attractive to people (like me) despite its most decidedly unromantic splendor? For example, I spent hours today looking for a bug in my code because I instinctively felt that the results didn't seem exactly right. My instincts ended up being right (*heart heart heart*), but it did result in a long several hours of meticulous and unexciting decoding. I can't explain why it makes me so happy. It's something like the satisfaction of sucking up the balls of doghair that frolick across my hardwood floors into the vacuum. I feel like I'm shaving off the rough edges and slowly but surely revealing what IS. In all seriousness - I do feel like this.

So there you are. You've been wondering why I've not been posting anything and I regale you instead with the wonder of vacuuming hairballs. It's all perfectly clear to you. Right? (Just like my talk will be to the dozens of colleagues who skip the coffee to come hear my fantabulous insights.)

Bang. Bang. Bang. Pay no attention to the individual in the corner who is banging her head against the desk. She is simply a poor pseudo-representation of the wizard of oz. There's lots of fluff. And loads of wannabe power. There's even a little bit of oomph. Be kind to her. Because she really does mean well and her heart is in the right place. Especially, be kind to her if you happen by her talk at AGU next week. Tell her she's amazing and she rocks. She will smile at you and buy you wine if you tell her that.