no energy & totally bored

I worked at home today while I waited for the cable guy to arrive. We upgraded to a package deal that includes cable internet, VOIP phone, and more cable channels than we ever wanted. The cool thing is that our bill will only be about $20 higher than it was before for just cable internet, digital cable with DVR service, HBO and the sports package. Makes me feel like we’re getting the phone for free! This is great, because the primary reason we needed a house phone was because Jan needed a fax machine for work. Now he can fax his vouchers to the home office from our house, instead of having to run to the grocery store and pay to do it. This is particulary great because those pesky vouchers are usually due shortly after he returns home.

Anyway, it was a totally non-productive day, fitting with my week of under-production in general. I reread the manuscript I’m reviewing for a journal, and jotted down some notes about it, but haven’t gotten around to typing up a coherent review yet. I also brought home a 4″ stack of articles I need while I rework a 10-page introduction to a review manuscript. Have I touched these? Just barely. I brought home a half-zip drive full of data files only to find out that my SPSS license has expired (meaning, I can only work in M-Plus until I’ve renewed it, and M-Plus is awful for basic data massage).

Have I accomplished anything? Nope, not really. Did this fact keep me awake and working after the cable guy installed the phone this afternoon? Of course not. I crashed out on the couch around 3.45, manuscript in hand.

I had nice kitty snuggles during my nap (Scary is feeling much better, thank goodness!), and knit 3 rows in the new baby blanket I’ve started for a friend who is trying to get pregnant (at least, I think it’s for her. She keeps coming to mind as I work on it, so it somehow feels like it will go to her in the long run).

I can’t tell if this lethargy is because of my assorted medications or in spite of them. I have a feeling that when I bring this up with med/talky shrink tomorrow, she’ll probably enable this behavior because I’ve been under a lot of stress in the last few months. This doesn’t please me, however, because I need to be working and producing steadily, and I can’t when I’m falling asleep mid-afternoon.

At least some of it is probably because I’m entirely bored with what I’m doing right now. I’m so bored with my postdoc, with research in general, and with my topics, that I can barely keep focused on it all long enough to work on anything. When I’m bored, it’s easier to procrastinate by taking a nap, eating lunch, working on another task that isn’t as pressing, etc. At the same time, I also can’t contemplate anything else that is more interesting than what I already have on my to-do list at work, except perhaps knitting, the weekly episode of Lost, and the possibility of painting our dining room wall light green.

I think this means that I’m going to have to try a different medication. I’m supposed to see my real med shrink next week, so hopefully she’ll have some ideas about what to do. I’m getting to the end of my rope… if taking stimulants will help me get my work done without being lulled to sleep by boredom, than it will be worth it.

yay, we have a cleaning service!

We finally have a cleaning service. Words cannot express how happy this makes me. I really, really hate cleaning, but also hate dirt. I hate how much time cleaning takes, but I also hate how OCD I get about every little last speck of dust. I hate how I end up doing certain tasks twice because there is so much dirt that I didn’t get it all the first time. I put off cleaning until I absolutely have to do it because I hate it so much, and then it takes a lot longer. Even more problematic, my hubby also hates cleaning, yet we both paradoxically like to live in a clean house. So once he was hired in his job, we decided that we could at last afford to have somebody else do the big cleaning so we can focus what little free time we have on picking up, organizing our messy closets, and doing FUN stuff we like to do instead of boring stuff that HAS to be done. So as I write this, two cleaners from “Crazy Cleaning Ladies” are cleaning our bathroom and kitchen. After those rooms, they will proceed to clean the rest of our fairly large 2 bedroom apartment (But who am I kidding? We could have used their services when it was two of us in the small 1 bedroom apartment we lived in together for 5+ years!). The only downside is that the cats are terrified into hiding under the bed. Regardless, I anticipate that this will be entirely worth $80 and a morning of working at home every other week.

As much as I dislike my job, I’m so happy that I’m able to work at home as much as I want. I was reminded of this last night when I talked to my friend Allison, who is a medical intern at a hospital in Las Vegas. She works an insane number of hours, and has very little time off. She sounded exhausted when she called, and mentioned that she’d had two days off in a row from her insane ICU rotation. She spent this time doing yardwork and catching up on sleep. This conversation made me so glad that I wasn’t “called” to be a medical doctor. Although I make substantially less $$$ as a psychologist/researcher, at least I get enough sleep, I can “work” at home as much as I like, and if I need to, I can cut out of the office early to pick up my hubby at the airport! Plus I get paid to think and write, which is not really a bad thing either. This morning, I received an email from Allison, in which she mentioned she’d read my blog and complimented my writing (apparently her writing skills have slipped to the wayside… entirely understandable, given that she’s working 90+ hour weeks!).

long weekend and data

I’m back at work today after spending the holiday weekend with my family. We spent Sunday at home and driving to/from the airport to pick up my brother and/or drop off Jan. Most of Monday and Tuesday were spent driving to and from Washington DC, where we interred my grandfather’s ashes at Arlington National Cemetery. In no particular order, here are some reasons why this was not a particularly enjoyable trip….

• It was for a funeral.
• My grandmother can’t walk well enough to make it more than a block or two, but complains about having to be pushed around in a wheelchair (particularly if it’s cold, and her definitions includes all temperatures under 72 degrees Farenheit).
• It was cold, windy and cloudy outside, and yet multiple family members wanted to tour monuments on the national mall. We walked/wheeled for at least 2 miles. Good thing we had a blanket for Grandma!
• 5 of us slept in one hotel room. 3 of these 5 people snore.

…and it just kept going from there. I wish I could say that the funeral was nice, but it seemed trite and impersonal to me (the funeral director and minister even sounded just like ride operators at Cedar Pointe when they explained the procedures to my family). My grandmother appreciated it, which is probably all that matters. It was the exact Arlington funeral service that’s in all the movies, down the the rifle shots. It was very quick — one reading, a couple of songs, shoot the guns, and that was it. We had lunch afterwards with the other family members and friends in attendance.

I had to take 2 days off from work in order to make this trip, and had to leave my family at my house in order to go to work today. My brother’s college class registration time was noon today, so they had to stick around until he’d registered over the internet. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll return to happy kitties inside a locked house this afternoon.

I’ve played catch-up at work all day. It took me over an hour just to get through email this morning, with minimal replies. I spent most of the morning drawing a map to get myself through the rest of the data task I’ve been putting off for over a year. Now that I have a plan, it doesn’t seem quite as daunting. I might even be able to get through it within a couple of days, provided I don’t run into additional glitches along the way.

I was asked to review a manuscript for Developmental Psychology yesterday. I read the paper today, and unfortunately it’s not so great in its current form… but interestingly, it’s related to a paper I already have under review at another journal! This is the first time I’ve had a “Gotcha!” moment (the reassuring sense that I already have already produced better, similiar work).

why I’m ready to be finished with my postdoc

Sometimes my postdoc is okay and sometimes it’s not. I started this job in July 2005. My predecessor “trained” me for two weeks before hu left for hu’s permanent academic position (FYI… “hu” is a a gender-neutral pronoun intended to replace him/her or his/her). Hu had left some data sitting dormant for 4 years, and it was my responsibility to get it ready for use. It’s over a year and a half later and I’m still trying to figure out how to transform some of this data into a useable form. It’s very confusing and seems unnecessarily complicated. I did quite a bit of it last summer, and then let it slip to the wayside for most of the school year while I waited for an undergrad research assistant to complete a manditory next-step type of task.

I have the hardest parts left to do, and even on good days, it’s hard to wrap my mind around it. In a nutshell, I have to figure out how to get from point A on a questionnaire to point Z in the data file, which most likely involves a series of steps. I have an example to follow (the previous year’s data), but some of the finer details are different from year to year, and at least one new form was added for year #2. Naturally my predecessor’s documentation is incomplete and vague, as well. I’m still in contact with hu, but trying to understand this stuff when it’s explained over the phone is rather frustrating and pointless. I’m not sure what it’s going to take to finish this part of my work.

My boss asked for a certain piece of the data for a former student’s paper, and after looking at all my stuff for about an hour today, I can’t tell if what I have already is what hu wants or not. I can hardly even tell where I left off last summer. Good thing I’d made a checklist and kept track of the tasks I’d completed! I guess I’ll just keep muddling through as best I can, and look forward to the day all of this is behind me!

I picked up my darling hubby late last night. He’d caught a ride into the city from the airport with a coworker. They were supposed to arrive at 10.30, meaning he’d be home about an hour later. Instead, they were delayed at the connecting airport, and arrived close to 90 minutes late! I picked him up from the unfamiliar coworker’s apartment at 1 this morning (despite non-functional GPS). The cats were very happy to see their poppa and held an epic wrestling match in celebration of his return. Our felines are the only non-sleepy members of our household today. We didn’t get to sleep until after 2, because my hubby was feeling very chatty about his experiences on the job site. He is working in a very dirty factory, which is ruining his dress clothes. So while I work (or blog at work, rather), he’s going to shop for some new, cheap dress shirts to wear at the dirty factory. He was paid today for the first time… big woo-hoo!!! Friday night’s fun will be paying the bills!!!

I also spoke to my dad this morning, or rather we chatted via instant messenger. No mention about the misrepresentation of the truth surrounding mediation and our wedding. No apology for or acknowledgement of increasing my pre-wedding stressload to the breaking point, although he did ask if I was still feeling stressed and if I was still taking the medication. He was more interested in talking about ways to eat the citrus fruits he sent from Florida!

 

rescheduled again!

Medshrink’s office called before 9 am to reschedule AGAIN. This is at least the 4th time one or the other of us couldn’t make the appointment. Good thing I won’t run out of happy pills by our new appointment, scheduled for April 25. I see Talkyshrink tomorrow morning. I won’t have too much to say, because thanks to lexapro I’m feeling pretty good.

I learned today that it will be smart for me to take my blog offline or to make it private for the year that I’m on the job market. Apparently job search committees have been known to drop otherwise-ideal candidates from their lists based on their blog content! Given that nearly all of my entries have been about my private life, it’s just better to keep this out of view for a few months.

I don’t know who, if anyone, actually reads this. I don’t think my own hubby even looks at my blog. But, if you want to continue reading after August 2007, let me know so I’ll put you on the “private” list (sounds so much naughtier than it REALLY is!). You will probably need to register for wordpress in order for this to be possible.

This is an aside, but I really wish that there were an easier way to connect blog sites so I could keep reading and sharing my blog with friends. They have blogs on all different sites. Maybe I just need to generally get smarter about RSS feeds and such? But alas, that won’t help with myspace-hosted blogs. Maybe my myspace-hosted friends could move over here to wordpress?

<hint, hint…>

back from a conference

I was absent from my blog last week because I was out of town. I’m now back from our annual academic conference, which as usual was 5 “fun-filled” days of staying in an overpriced conference hotel, eating unhealthy restaurant food, and talking about research. The buzz on my presentation has been quite positive, and there’s already some talk about putting together at least one symposium for next year’s conference. It was particularly great to see colleagues from our years in the Cornhusker State (pictured above in my new header), despite the fact that everybody seemed to have bad news (e.g., sick parents, miscarriages, etc.). I’m now keenly aware how much I miss my friends and the faculty from my grad school days, and how socially disconnected I feel in my new position.

I returned home Sunday night after spending a bare 30 minutes having coffee with Jan at the airport (my hubby was on his way to the job site for work), and could do nothing but flop on the couch after munching on the remaining 4 morningstar farms chik’n nuggets left in our freezer. I went to bed at 9, much to the disappointment of the lonely cats who were probably looking forward to some playtime. Unfortunately there hasn’t been much time for me to play with them since coming home. I took one outside on her leash last night for a half hour befoe it became too windy for us to stay outside. She was SO happy to go out and SO mad when it was time to come back in. I will try to take her out with me tonight while I plant the pansies I picked up at Lowe’s last night.

I see the med shrink tomorrow for the first time in about two months. She was out of town for a while because of a family emergency, and it was really hard to get an appointment in her schedule at all! I am not out of either med, but still don’t think that my strattera dose is quite right. We’ll see what she thinks tomorrow morning. My lexapro seems to be working great, because for the first time in a long time, I haven’t felt insane for half the month. I might end up taking it full-time, because I don’t want to repeat the side effects again next month if I can help it.

My dad sent us a box of citrus fruits while we were both out of town last week…but still hasn’t acknowledged the message I sent him about misrepresenting the truth re: mediation (see below).

I just got off the phone with a potential cleaning lady. I can’t keep up with all the cleaning by myself… it’s just too boring, too overwhelming. I hate cleaning and would much rather just pay somebody to do it for me. I’ve printed cleaning schedules and questions to ask cleaning services off marthastewart.com and realsimple.com and will also spend tonight preparing to interview Cindy the part-time maid tomorrow night. The house will probably stay cleaner with Jan gone 5+ days each week… but I’d rather still get help and enjoy my free time with the kitties!

Readers who browse in from myspace.com and other sites… to my knowledge, you can leave comments without being required to register with wordpress.com. Please try — my blog feels a little lonely without any comments!