work and play

I head up to Cold Lake, Canada in a few weeks for the second phase of ARCTAS. Generally speaking, government funding for our proposals has been shrinking in duration over the last decade. Used to be that you'd be awarded funding to cover 3 years of work. The norm now is 2, and oftentimes it's only for 1. This is bad, bad, bad. It means that the average researcher has to spend an increasing amount of time writing new proposals (this is a significant amount of time). It has also resulted in our having participated in what is verging on one airborne campaign per year for the last 3 or 4 years. Ultimately, this means that time spent actually looking at and analyzing the data from past campaigns is disappearing. Frustrating. My group should have a break after this one though, for at least a few years. I think our funding is in good shape for the next 2 or 3 years so maybe we can lie low and do some real thinking work for a bit.

On the other side of my life-coin:
Yesterday was the last day of the school year for my kids. E came home with red, watery eyes from crying the whole way home on the bus. I gave her lots of hugs and understood. She had an awesome teacher this year. Only later when we were snuggled on the couch watching TV together did she tell me she was really crying because she hadn't told a certain boy that she loved him and now wouldn't see him until the fall. Great. Here I was getting all mushy over remembering being young enough to love your teacher until it hurt.

We celebrated by going to a Girl Scout bridging ceremony where the highlight was a little girl tossing her cookies during the middle of it (BLEAH!) and then watching a 2nd round playoff baseball game. Q hit ANOTHER triple. That's something like 4 (or 5?) games in a row. It could have been an in-the-park homerun but Q had to slow down so he wouldn't pass the kid running in front of him. I'm not a proud mom or anything. Just sayin'.