2008-01-09 - 10:14 a.m.

...surviving a campus admin tour...

Yesterday was exhausting. In the end, K drove me to work, thankfully. I don't think I would have survived, otherwise. I had to walk up and down the hill twice in order to visit all the administrative offices - they were spread across the campus. It was odd to have to sit down and rest halfway through the trip!

By the time I got back to the lab, my back was aching, my feet were huge, my abdomen was contracting into little knots, and I was out of breath. Amazing how much your mobility can decrease just after a few days!

It didn't help that the offices were spread even further afield than I suspected, and that some of the offices didn't want to accept the paperwork that I had been told to bring to them. This happens regularly in human resources offices. In fact, I've often wondered at the name 'human resources' - this office exists in every company. But who are they actually a resource for?? My favorite memory was going to an HR webpage, clicking the link and getting a "FILE NOT FOUND" error. Poetic. I don't think that I've ever gotten an easy answer from an HR office. Yesterday I went there to give them new paperwork, and they wouldn't take it. They said it wasn't their job to take it. Ummm, but this is the office that handles all of my benefits, right? So they sent me to another office, which sent me back to HR. There was nothing "human" or "resourceful" about this process.

After getting everything in order at the office, (and apart from not being allowed to deliver paperwork to HR, I did get everything done), we took a stop by our friendly neighborhood S3ars in search of some supplies. Turns out that the supplies we wanted are ONLY available in the catalog, not in the store. Okey dokey. That was a quick stop then, and home we went.

But not before a stop at the golden arches. When K drives me to work, I always feel compelled to indulge his passion for junk food. We've found the best mickey d's I've ever visited in my entire life - and so it's become a secret passion of mine as well... I can only guess that it is related to pregnancy hormones, because I've never liked this food before. And of course, now I'm not supposed to indulge because of the salt thing. Still, there's something magical about discovering the best McD's in the world - and it's so cute to watch K get so excited about using a drive-thru.

**

Well, I put together an outline for one proposal idea last night, and I am putting together a second outline for the second idea today. But you know, I think that I may really have come up against a rock and a hard place. I'm going to keep pushing it forward, though, because working through ideas and writing them down has never hurt me in the long run...