2008-07-11 - 5:48 p.m.

...things on a friday afternoon...

Still tired. way way tired. Today I went to the coffee shop to hold a meeting with my new Ph.D. student and his other adviser. He's quite nice, and it's also clear that we will need to shape his thinking on a few things. But he seems bright and excited and that is very good.

Susi has chosen a rather strange way of enjoying solids. She likes to chew on the bib or eat the side of the high chair instead of the food. It's a little bit weird. Right concept, wrong items. Right now she is upstairs asleep, which is where I want to be, too.

I've had another difficult run-in on this committee, with the lady-who-will-not-be-friend. It's clear that I horribly offended and frustrated her with my comments. I feel bad about it, and wonder if there were a different way to have gone about doing what I had to do. I wrote an email conveying input from my department. And the hard truth is that my department didn't like her idea. The story is more complicated than this, but it left me feeling horrible for most of yesterday evening. I sent out an email that must have been perceived as an attack. And her immediate response felt aggressive/defensive. I've been running and rerunning the incident in my mind to see if I've somehow missed something and therefore made a huge, tremendous gaff. How could I have done this differently? I see some things that I could have said differently - in retrospect. Too bad "retrospect" wasn't one of my consultants. Anyway, this is a long and involved way of saying that this committee work really sucks. I could go on quite a bit longer about why this is so, and why it was such a bad decision for me to take this on. A conference begins next week, which means that I will be absent all of next week, too. It becomes clearer and clearer that I will not be communicating with anyone while I am away at the end of this month. Screw it all. I feel a little bit cheated out of my leave (through some bad decisions of my own, and through some people asking too much of me during the leave). But I'm not going to feel cheated out of holiday, too.

Susi is awake - it's only been an hour, so I'm going to see if she'll wander back to sleep on her own. ... There. It sounds like she's put herself back out. Good. Gives me a chance to make the carrots for her. Part of our current stress is our absence of nanny / childcare. I went on the waiting list for childcare in June, 2007. And a space has still not come available for September. I'm a little bit screwed, because I have to be working full time, and I cannot do this while watching Susi full time as well.

K and I have started looking for nannies (given that there is only one other day care center in the area that would take an 8 month old and I would have had to apply two years before Susi was born). Okay, nannies cost a minor fortune. Daycare alone is $13,000/yr. Nannies are twice that. I've got to get my head around this, though, and start thinking of some solutions. Maybe I can grow a pliant grandmother in my backyard.

My goodness..can I BE more boring than this? I guess bland days --> bland entries.